Page 72 of Open Road

Roam has a card.

This detail almost undid me when I found out. It’s Winchester’s doing. He printed it out and handed it over, explaining that some men need the words in front of them so they don’t have to construct them in real time. Roam had looked at the card for a long moment, said nothing, and put it in his pocket.

He doesn’t read from it now, doesn’t need to, because he looks at me the whole time, the declaration traditional, the language smoothed by decades of use the way all club language is, each word landing with the particular weight of something that is simply true and is being stated because truth deserves to be stated plainly.

“I claim this woman, Janie. Under my protection, under club law, under the Royal Bastards’ code. What’s mine is hers. What threatens her answers to me. She rides under my colors and stands under my name for as long as she’ll have me, which I intend to make a very long time.”

The yard is quiet in the way yards go quiet when something real has just been said in them.

When he finishes, Creed speaks, “This woman is under your protection?”

Roam’s eyes don’t leave my face. “Mine,” he says. “Both of them.”

The yard shifts.

Not loud, not the way I’d expected it. It’s quiet, the shift, the quality of attention changing. Men who have watched this man spend years living as if leaving were easier. Men who watched him go still when Rose speaks and have seen what happens to his face in an unguarded moment when he thinks nobody is looking.

They’ve been watching.

They all know what ‘both of them’means.

Rose, who has been standing between Devil and Lucy with Mr. Rabbit and the solemn focus of a child attending something important she hasn’t been fully briefed on, assesses the situation and determines her next move.

She walks across to Roam, and reaches up.

He lifts her without looking down, the automatic ease of a man for whom the motion has become instinct-deep. She settles against his shoulder and looks out at the yard with the regal composure of a three-year-old who has been waiting for the part where she’s included.

“There she is,” Scout says.

The laughter that moves through the yard is warm, genuine, and a little ragged at the edges. It’s the laughter of people who need the release.

“Hi,” Rose says to the yard, generally.

Creed allows the full smile. The one even he can’t contain.

Devil’s hand finds mine and squeezes once.

I don’t trust my voice to do anything useful, so I don’t ask it to.

***

The evening goes long, the way good evenings do, not dragging, but unwilling to end. The light fades from gold to purple and then to the warm dark of a compound strung with lights and full of people who know how to be together. Memphis sits with Reaper for an hour, the conversation low and occasional, two men taking each other’s measure without making a project of it. Rock stays on the tablet until the two-hour time difference catches up with him, raises a hand, and cuts the feed. Scout refills everyone’s drink at a rate that is not medically advisable and remains cheerful about it.

Rose falls asleep at nine, folded against Roam’s side on the bench at the edge of the yard. Mr. Rabbit is somewhereunderneath her. He doesn’t move. He sits with one hand at her back and talks to whoever comes to talk to him. The dog tags at his neck catch the light when he turns, and the yard goes on around them.

My yard.

My compound.

My family.

The correction comes easier now. The old arithmetic,mineas a word that applied only to Rose, still trying to run sometimes in the background. The new arithmetic is still new enough to register, wide enough to hold all of this, and worth the adjustment.

It’s late when I notice Winchester.

He’s been at the edge of the yard for the last twenty minutes, which is not unusual. Winchester occupies the perimeter of social situations the way he occupies everything, with the air of a man who is present without being absorbed. What’s unusual is the direction he’s facing.

Nova is by the back fence. She came with the other women from the strip club and has been here all evening with the easy sociability of someone comfortable in her own skin and honest about her reasons for being where she is. She’s wearing something green that makes the yard’s string lights warmer when she moves through them.