"A baby." The word lands on the counter between us like a stone dropped from a height. "I've been asking for two years. He keeps saying it's not the right time. Club's too hot. Things need to settle."
She picks at the edge of the napkin I set beside her glass, tearing it into strips.
"Things are never going to settle, Saylor. This is a motorcycle club. There's always something. There's always a reason to wait." Her voice cracks. "And I'm running out of years to wait."
I don't speak. I stand there and let her talk because Tildie taught me that an open door is better than a knocked-down wall, and Sarah needs a door right now, not advice.
"I almost died for this club." She looks up at me and her mascara is running fresh. "I took a bullet. I lay in a hospital bed for two weeks and my husband came when he could, between Church and club business and whatever else was more important than his wife with a hole in her."
She swipes under her eye with the heel of her palm, smearing the mascara wider.
"I love him. I love Porter. Donnie." She uses his real name and the tenderness in it makes my ribs ache. "But he loves the table more. And I can't compete with a piece of wood and a room full of men who've known him longer than I have."
The front door opens.
Cold air. Boots on hardwood.
The sound of a man who isn't walking—he's arriving. The way Ruger arrives. The way men in this world enter a room when the room needs to know they're in it.
Porter is standing in the doorway.
He's in his cut, his face carved from something harder than stone.
Red rimmed, jaw locked, the veins in his neck visible from twenty feet away.
He looks like a man who's been handed a grenade and told it's been ticking for months.
His attention sweeps the room until he finds Sarah.
She sees him.
Her spine goes rigid on the barstool. The glass in her grip stops moving.
The air in the bar changes.
The two regulars at the high-top go silent.
Tildie's expression shifts from alert to locked down, her body already angling toward the situation.
Porter crosses the room in six strides. He doesn't sit.
He stands beside Sarah's stool, towering over her, close enough to touch, not touching.
"Ruger told me." His voice is low, controlled. The controlled you hear when screaming would be easier. "About the house in Clarksburg. AboutCody."
Sarah's face drains. Every drop of color, gone. Her skin goes the shade of the napkin she's been shredding.
"Donnie—" She reaches for his arm.
He steps back. One step. Enough space between himself and a detonation.
"You gave him my passwords." Porter's voice hasn't risen. The flatness of it is worse than the volume. "You let a man I've never met into our network. Into our financials. Into theonething I've spent my entire adult life building."
Sarah's hand hovers in the air where his arm was. She pulls it back slowly.
"I didn't mean for it to go this far." Her voice is barely audible. "I didn't know he would?—"
"What did you think he would do, Sarah?" Porter's jaw flexes. "You handed a stranger our keys. What did you think was going to happen?"