Page 91 of Ghost’s Awakening

You hid them well. But not well enough.

I'd read it so many times I heard it in his voice now, that low rumble that came up through a floor, standing naked in front of my own mirror. My hands had closed on the edge of the sink without me telling them to. The knuckles had gone white. My stomach turned over, slow, and the skin at the back of my neck drew up tight and stayed there. I made myself keep looking.

I turned the shower on.

It came out cold first, hard on the tile, and I stood outside the water while it warmed and watched the steam start to lift off the floor. Then I stepped in and put my shoulders under it.

It scalded. Hot enough to hurt but not burn, which was where I kept it, and it hit the tops of my shoulders and ran down my back and down my arms. I put my head down and let it beat on the back of my skull. I wanted it to take the weight with it. Down my back and into the drain with the sweat.

It took the sweat off me and nothing else.

I'd bled for this club. Years of it, my blood on concrete and on the floor of a garage bay, and I'd watched my brothers bleed beside me, and in the last few years my sisters too, women who'd come out of a truck in Montana and chosen a patch. They stood where I put them. I'd watched Kai stitch men shut on that table. Rosa had run out of tape in front of me. I'd stood at the head of a table a month ago with half the room bandaged and told them to go lick their wounds, and every face in that room had been ready to get up and bleed again if I'd asked.

And if they knew what was in that drawer, I wouldn't have to ask. They'd go end him for me. For Maria. For two little girls most of them had only ever seen running between the prep stations in a kitchen that used to smell like her cooking.

That was exactly why I couldn't tell them.

Maria had left on a morning with no wind. The SUV had sat in the yard with the doors open and the girls already buckled into their car seats in the back, their dark heads through the rear glass, and she'd walked between the building and the SUV with the bags, one trip after another, her hair loose down her back with the silver through it, not looking at me once.

I'd followed her. I'd talked the whole way, low, saying things I'd never said in front of my club and wouldn't again, and she'd loaded the last bag and closed the trunk and gone for the driver's door, and my hand had come out and taken her arm. Warm through her sleeve. She'd looked at my hand. Then she'd looked up at me.

"I need life to feel normal again." Her voice hadn't shaken at all. "Our girls do too."

That was the whole argument. There'd been no room in it. She'd gotten in, and the engine had caught, and Elena had turned around in her seat and put her hand flat on the rear glass. Elena always reached for me. Then the SUV had rolled out through the gate.

I'd stood in the yard with my hand still out after the gate closed.

Later, when I'd offered her men, Cruz and a couple of the others to sit on her street and walk the girls to school, she'd said no on the phone with the same voice. She'd have put a pan into the back of a Phoenix's skull herself the first time one of them followed her daughters into a schoolyard. So there were no men on her street. There was a house I paid for, and a phone that rang when she wanted it to.

Away from me, they were out of the line of fire.

Away from me, I couldn't stop a bullet for them. Then a man had written her name in blue ink.

The water kept coming.

It drummed on my scalp. The steam had filled the whole room by now, thick enough that the light through it had gone soft and the tile had disappeared past the end of my arm, and the soap on the shelf sat there unused. My shoulders were red under the heat and not one ounce lighter.

Two roads.

If I left him be, my people would quit bleeding. My girls would go to their school. Maria would sleep. Nothing happened, for as long as I did nothing.

If I went at him, all of it opened back up. Every patch in this building would ride, and this time there'd be no pit to find him in. We'd hunt. He'd know it, and he wouldn't be alone when we found him. I'd said it at Church before any of us had a plan. The pit was a filter. A year of it. Every man who'd made it through to him was as good as Caleb. Trained.

The men we'd left on their knees on that floor had all taken his offer, and he'd gone out through his roof and left every one of them behind without a look. A man didn't walk away from his whole crew. Only from the part he could spare.

And leaving him be would cost something too. Men like him didn't stop building. He'd told me that himself in Sandra Whitfield's office with her blood still spreading across the floor, smiling at me while he said it. When I build something new, and I will, I'd prefer not to have your people in my way. Next time we meet, the conversation might go differently.

I stood under the water and I had no answer, and there was nobody in this building I could put the question to.

Reaper would have one. So would Tank, and Irish, and Blade, and Ghost, all of them the same way, with a hand going to a gun. I'd built them that way. And then each of them would go back to a room where somebody was waiting who'd ask how they were before they asked what happened.

I'd watched that.

Kai's hand on Axel's shoulder at the end of a long table, one press of the thumb, and the vice president of this club sitting back in his chair. Tyler leaning his weight against Tank's side on a bench in the yard and neither of them saying a word for an hour. Irish at full volume and Declan and Nolan on either side of him, one of them steering him and the other one straightening his collar, and Irish letting them. Logan tooling a piece of leather at Blade's elbow through a whole dinner while Blade sat there with his knife on the table and his knee against Logan's.

And today, at noon, out my office window, Ghost's bike going through the gate with the cook riding behind him in a jacket with his name on it, the one he'd stood in my doorway three weeks ago and asked me about, red to the ears, and I'd said yes before he'd finished asking.

They had found somebody to fight beside. Somebody who listened to them after Church, when the vote was done and a man still had to live with it. Somebody, I had to guess, who kept them still long enough to find an answer to a question like mine. I'd never asked any of them what that was like. I'd watched, and I'd told myself I was watching because I hadn't seen much of men with men before this club.