"I was behind the bar last night when you were all on the run. Raven was in the main room with the other girls, and she didn't know I was close enough to hear." She looks at Prez first, then at me. "She's pregnant. She's telling the other girls it's Austin's."
The workshop, the coffee I had this morning, and the wrench in my hand; all of it goes away.
"She's lying," I say. My voice comes out flat and certain. "I always covered up. Every single time." I don't want to say Savannah's name in this conversation, but I need them to understand the full picture. "Even before, with Savannah. I was never careless. I was never careless with anyone."
Prez is looking at Cam. Not at me. "How?"
Looking at him, he really doesn’t need to ask the question. He already knows there's only one answer.
Cam nods. "She's been putting holes in the condoms. Austin's specifically, from what I heard. She knows he's heading for his patch, and she wants to be his old lady when it happens."
I push off the wall and start moving because I can't stand still with this inside me. Three paces to the window. Three paces back. I think about every time I've been with Raven in the last six weeks: not many, four, maybe five, each one a deliberate attempt to drink Savannah out of my system and each one making it worse. I think about the condoms I keep in my jacket, my room, the same places I've always kept them, and I think about Raven in this building every day with access to all of it.
"She sabotaged them," I say.
"That's what it sounds like," Cam says.
"I need you to know." I stop moving and look at Prez. "I would never be careless. Not with something like this. I need you to know that."
"I know," Prez says. Simple. No qualification. That's what it means to have this man in your corner.
I sit down. I don't mean to, but my legs decide for me. I end up in the chair with my elbows on my knees and my hands over myface. I’m like that for about ten seconds. I let myself feel the full weight of it. Then I put it away, because falling apart isn't going to solve anything.
"If the baby's mine," I say, "I'm not walking away from it. I want that said now so we're all clear."
"Nobody's asking you to," Prez says.
"And I'm not forcing Raven into anything she hasn't chosen. The baby didn't choose any of this."
Cam looks at me with something that might be respect. "I know. That's why I came to you first before she had the chance to use it against you." She leans back. "Here's what I think. We put her in a room on her own, away from the other girls, away from the brothers. She's not fair game anymore; nobody goes near her, and she stays here under our roof until the baby comes. When it does, we do a paternity test. If the baby's yours, it stays. Raven goes."
I look up at her. "You can't just take a woman's baby."
"She sabotaged a man's condoms to trap him into fatherhood," Cam says. "She forfeited a lot of ground when she did that." She holds my eyes. "And that baby, if it's yours, is a Black Saints’ baby. This club will raise it. You won't be doing it alone."
I sit with that. There's something solid in it that I wasn't expecting to feel.
Prez leans forward. "There's a couple in this club who've been trying for a baby and can't. If the paternity test comes back negative, that child still doesn't go without. You understand me? Either way, the club takes care of what's ours."
"And Raven," I say. "When it's done."
"When it's done, she leaves," Prez says. "She doesn't come back. She doesn't have access to the baby, to you, or to this club. She knew what she was doing when she did it, and she'll live with the consequences of it." He stares at me. "The punishment we'd normally give out for something like this is considerably worse. She's getting off lightly because she's carrying a child. The moment that child is born, the leniency stops."
I nod. That's fair. That's more than fair.
Cam gets up and comes over and squeezes my shoulder. "Get your act together, Prospect. If that baby's yours, it needs you patched in and standing straight before it arrives. That's your job now."
"Cam," Prez says, with the tone of a man who runs this club and occasionally needs to remind people of that fact.
She holds her hands up. "I know, I know. But I'm not wrong."
"No," he says. "You're not."
She kisses me on the top of the head like I'm one of hers, which in a way I suppose I am, and then she's gone. The door closes behind her, and it's just Prez and me.
I lean forward with my head in my hands again. He lets me have it. He doesn't try to fill the silence, and I'm grateful for that.
"Say it," he says, after a while.