Page 44 of Thunder

"There's more," Rogue says, scrolling, flat and grim.

"The kids at the swimming hole. Mama Lou's car outside the school. Waylon in the yard."

He stops on one and doesn't turn it around and I'm glad, because I don't want to see which of ours it is. "They're not watchin' the clubhouse anymore. They're watchin' our families. Buildin' a book on who we love."

"The Firm," Blaze says.

Not a question.

"The Firm."

Rogue takes his phone back.

"Hartley's people don't forget, and they don't forgive a man walkin' away, and now they know exactly where to put the knife if they decide they want to. This isn't surveillance anymore. This is a target package."

Photographs of our kids.

An investigator pulling a thread on a grave.

I sit at that table with a busted hip and a stack of other men's cameras pointed at everything I love, and I’ve never in my life felt less like the sword and more like a man standing in a doorway with his arms spread, trying to cover too many people with a body that can't even hang a gate anymore.

Church breaks with no answers, the way it does when the problems are bigger than the night.

The brothers filter out to their bikes and their families and whatever they do to sit with news like this.

I stay behind because my hip's stiffened up from sitting and I'd rather work it loose before I try to look normal walking out.

So I'm still in the clubhouse when Shiver comes through the door.

I forgot he was coming.

Word was he'd ride over from the Reapers Rejects to see his sisters—Grace and Dakota both here for church day, and Shiver doesn't get down this way as often as he'd like, and blood's blood even when the family's cracked down the middle.

He's Phantom's oldest, though you'd never make them for father and son unless you knew.

Where Phantom's gone soft and heavy with the years, Shiver's all lean hard angles, road-worn, that Reapers Rejects MC cut on his back, and he moves through the clubhouse like a man who grew up in it, because he did.

Grace and Dakota are at a table in the corner.

He goes to them.

And I should leave.

I know I should leave.

But my hip's got me pinned to my chair another minute, and the clubhouse is quiet, and I can't help but hear.

"—not blaming Marlena or Presley," Shiver's saying, low, his big hands wrapped around a bottle he isn't drinking. "I need you both to hear me on that. Whatever she did, she did with a knife comin' at her. That's not on her. That's never been on her."

"Then who?" Dakota asks, and her voice is raw in a way I've never heard from her. Dakota who's all sharp edges and quick mouth.

"Who do I get to be mad at, Shiver, because I gotta be mad at somebody or I'm gonna come apart⁠—"

"Dad." Simple. Flat. "You get to be mad at Dad. For the cover-up. For lettin' us all think she abandoned us when he knew, when he could've—" His jaw flexes. "That's the part I can't forgive. Not the killin'. The lie. The years of the lie."

Grace says something too low for me to catch, and Shiver's face does something complicated.

"You want to know the part that eats me?" he says. "She was textin' me. Those last few weeks. Middle of the night, stuff that didn't track, gettin' more and more—wound up. Paranoid. Sayin' things about Dad and Marlena that didn't make sense. I told her she needed to see somebody. Get on somethin' to level out. I told her—" His voice cracks, just slightly, and he covers it with the bottle.