Leah is behind her. Phone already out, already dialing. "What's your mom's address? I'll go to her."
I give her the address. My voice is mechanical. Leah nods, grabs her jacket, and walks out the front door.
Ellie is in the kitchen doorway. Arms crossed. Watching.
She doesn't move, doesn't speak. She stands there like a wall—solid, immovable, present.
The women don't wait for the men to organize. They move on instinct.
Someone is hurt. Someone needs help. You don't wait to be asked. You go.
Tildie's hip presses against mine. Warm. Steady.
"Breathe." She says it the way she says everything—direct, without pity, like she's handing me a tool and expecting me to use it. "Leah will be there in fifteen minutes. Your mom won't be alone."
I breathe. Because Tildie told me to and because my body won't do it on its own right now.
Rookie’s standing in front of me. The phone is back in his pocket. His expression hasn't changed from that empty, still, calculating version I've never seen.
He reaches out and takes the water glass from my grip because my fingers have gone white around it and sets it on the table.
Then he takes both my wrists—gently, so gently it makes my throat close—and holds them between us.
"He's not going to ever touch her again. You have my word." He says it without volume. Without heat. Without any of the fury I've seen from him before.
It's not a threat. It's not a promise.
It's a fact. Delivered the way you'd say the sun will come up tomorrow.
And the certainty in his voice terrifies me more than Creedy ever did.
Because I'm looking at the man I am now realizing I love and seeing, for the first time, what lives behind every other part of him.
The club isn't a group of men who ride motorcycles and drink at a bar named after a road.
The club is a machine. And when someone threatens its people, the machine starts moving.
It's moving now. I can feel it in the way Rookie holds my wrists, in the way Tildie stands beside me, in the way Ellie watches from the kitchen door and Leah drives through the dark toward my mother's house without being asked.
The machine is moving, and Dale Creedy is standing in its path.
I close my eyes. Press my forehead against Rookie's chest. Feel his heartbeat, steady and slow, the calmest thing in the room.
"Okay." I whisper it into his shirt.
His arms wrap around me, and he holds on.
And somewhere in the dark, between the clubhouse and my mother’s, things are already being set in motion that I'm not allowed to see.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Rookie
Ruger doesn't speak for a long time after I show him the screen.
We're in the kitchen. It’s just past dawn. The same counter, the same coffee, the same two mugs.
Except this morning the laptop between us has Sarah Boyd's name on a utility bill in Clarksburg, West Virginia, next to a man named Cody Skaggs who's been gutting our network for weeks.