For the first time in years, the silence belongs to us.
Chapter 50
Sloane
Threedaysofaftermath,and the clubhouse smells of coffee and ink.
The war room table is covered in laptops, phones, legal pads. Phoenix's people have been cycling in and out since we got back from Chicago, working in shifts, talking in low voices. McKenzie runs point from the bar, phone at her ear more often than it's in her pocket. Malachi sits at the head of the table with his hands flat on the surface, listening, directing, making decisions with a voice that stays low and final.
The televisions are muted, but the anchors' faces carry that rehearsed composure that only appears when something has detonated. Names scroll across the bottom of the screen.Politicians, judges, CEOs. The data Ruby uploaded from the Blackwell has spread to every news desk in the country, and the fallout is landing in waves. Prosecutors are opening cases based on the evidence. Judges are stepping down. Accounts are being frozen by banks reacting to the public exposure.
The Outsiders stayed out of it. The law came to the evidence on its own.
I sit at the far end of the bar with a cup of coffee I've been nursing for an hour. Knox is beside me, his knee against mine under the counter. His eyes track the room. Doors, windows, who's moving. His jaw is tight. He hasn't stopped scanning. I push my knee into his and he exhales, a fraction of the tension releasing.
Candace drops onto the stool on my other side. "You eat today?"
"Does coffee count?"
"Coffee doesn't count." She slides a plate toward me. Toast, scrambled eggs, a slice of what looks to be Maggie's banana bread. "Eat."
I eat. The bread is Maggie's. It's warm.
Across the room, Nash is on his phone in the corner, shoulders tight, voice barely audible. He's been that way since we landed. Ruby sits at the bar a few stools down from me, tablet open, logging the latest round of names surfacing in the coverage. She hasn't looked at Nash all morning. He's looked at her four times. I've counted.
East and Darla are at the far table. He's got his hand on her belly, thumb tracing circles, talking to her in a voice too low to hear. She swats his hand, and he puts it right back.
Kyle walks past, and East points at him without looking. "Don't."
"I didn't do anything."
"You were about to."
Frankie sits near the back door with a mug, Arden beside her. They're quiet in the way they're always quiet. Shoulders close. Words unnecessary.
Anna and Tobias left yesterday. Phoenix's jet took them back. Before she boarded, Anna found me in the hallway outside the war room. She hugged me until my ribs cracked, whispered a thank you against my shoulder, and walked out without looking back. Tobias nodded at Knox on the way past. Knox nodded back. That was enough.
I think about my father.
I've been thinking about him since the basement. Since the sound of the gun in that concrete room. Since the way his body slumped and his hands went slack on the armrests and the echo took a long time to die.
I stood against the wall and watched Knox put a bullet in his head. I felt the recoil in my chest even though I wasn't the one holding the gun.
I've checked for guilt the way I sit with patients, methodical, thorough, looking for the symptom that tells me what's underneath. It's not there.
What's there is the weight of a door closing. A door I've been pushing against my whole life, and now it's shut. The hallway behind it is dark and empty and I will never walk it again.
He sold women. Sold girls. He was going to sell me. Grabbed my wrist in a hospital and sent flowers to my porch and sat in a parking lot watching my husband drive me home. He tracked me. Surveilled me. He wanted me back. I was property he'd lost.
He's dead. Knox killed him. I asked for it. I'd ask for it again.
The grief isn't for him. It's for the father I should have had. The one who existed in some parallel life where he taught me to ride a bike, checked under my bed for monsters, and walked me down an aisle. That man was a fiction. But I grieved him anyway,somewhere between the basement and the jet ride home, leaning into Knox's shoulder while the country shrank below us.
Knox's hand finds mine on the bar. He laces our fingers. His thumb runs across my knuckles once.
"You're quiet," he says.
"Thinking."