Page 6

I understand, standing here in the middle of a room I have never seen and a world I have only ever heard about at a distance, exactly why he kept me from it.

Hansen comes through the stairwell door behind us.

I do not look at him directly, but I feel the room shift around his arrival the way a room shifts around a change in pressure. He moves to the far table and leans over the map spread across it, speaking quietly to a man I do not know, and whatever he says is brief enough to take ten seconds and heavy enough that the man nods and moves toward the door immediately after.

I stay near the edge of the room and watch him work.

He has a stillness when he is in command that is entirely different from the stillness he had at the bar. At the bar it was contained, almost private, like he had stepped outside of responsibility for twenty minutes and was choosing to be somewhere smaller. Here he is fully occupying everything the room expects of him, and the combination of those two versions is doing something to my attention that I cannot fully redirect.

He looks up.

Our eyes meet across the length of the room, and it lasts about a second and a half before he looks back down at the map.

My stomach registers the second and a half.

Grave settles beside me and tips his head toward a back corridor. "There's a room you can use. Get some rest."

"I'm not resting."

"Leah..."

"I'm a nurse, Grave. I can be useful right now and you know it." I nod toward the prospect with the reopening eyebrow cut. "At minimum I can handle basic triage so your people don't waste time on something that takes two minutes if someone knows what they're doing."

He looks at me for a moment, working through the argument he wants to make against the practical one I have already made, and then he exhales and gestures toward the supply area near the far wall. "There's a kit in the cabinet."

I spend the next half-hour moving through the room with complete focus.

One of the members’ eyebrows needs four butterfly closures, he tries to pretend it does not hurt. Another one, who I learn has been shot through the fleshy upper arm in a way that is genuinely lucky, needs real cleaning and compression and a conversation about infection signs to watch for over the next forty-eight hours.

I am pulling the kit closed when Hansen appears at the edge of my peripheral vision, closer than I expected.

He stops at the narrow end of the supply cabinet, just past the edge of the table, and the corridor of space between us contracts to something I am too aware of. He is looking at the man that’s been shot.

"Good?" he asks, and I realize after a beat that he is asking me, not him.

"He'll need a doctor to look at it properly within the next day or two. The wound is clean but it needs more than I have here."

"I know someone." He says it quietly. Then he does not leave immediately, which is what I expect him to do.

He stays for a moment in the narrow space, and from this close the warmth of him is a physical thing, and the bar and everything that was building in it between us exists in the air between us right now like something that has not been resolved.

"You should eat something," he says. His voice has dropped back into that lower register.

"I'm fine."

"I know you're fine." He meets my eyes briefly. "Eat something anyway."

He moves away before I can respond, which is probably deliberate.

The war council begins about thirty minutes later.

Men cluster around the main table. Hansen stands at one end, Grave at his right, and others filling in around them.

I am off to the side, no one asks me to leave.

Deadwood's attack on the bar was not random or impulsive. That becomes clear quickly from the conversation, which is direct and unsentimental. The trafficking bust disrupted supply lines. The Wolves have been moving to fill gaps in the resulting territory vacuum. Deadwood knows this and has chosen to respond with escalation rather than retreat, which means they are not yet finished and they are not going to go quietly.

The disagreement around the table is about timing. Two men want retaliation tonight, immediate and definitive. Miller argues that federal surveillance is still active enough to create risk.