Saber takes in Trapper on the table, the peas, my arm under Eden’s care, the bruise on her forearm.
His face shutters. “Doc get you all fixed up?”
“She did,” Doc says from the end of the table, pointing at Eden. “Wasn’t much left for me.”
Saber looks at Eden a beat longer than he needs to. He gives her a respectful nod. Then he pulls a chair around backward and sits, forearms on the rail of it, and gets to the thing he came in carrying.
“Phone’s been going all afternoon. It’s on the news, on the internet—broad daylight, a college campus, civilians filming.” He scrubs a hand across his jaw. “I talked to National an hour ago. Our lawyer is already on it. Footage shows four armed men jumping a man off his bike. Nobody's pressing charges, the Warriors sure as hell aren't filing anything, and Viper's face never shows up on a single video. A detective came by the bar asking questions. He left with nothing.”
The room holds still.
“Are we retaliating?” Joker asks.
“National has been tracking the Warriors’ movements.” Saber’s eyes come around the room, man by man, and land on me last. “Word is this: we can’t keep letting this slide. Not after today. What comes next gets decided above us, and it’s coming.”
Nobody cheers. This isn’t that kind of news, and every man in this room has buried brothers over less.
Eden heard every word of it.
Saber didn’t send her out, and that means something. She’s not a stranger who’s seen too much anymore.
She’s family.
Her hand settles flat over my fresh bandage. She doesn’t say anything, and neither do I.
The war doesn’t scare me.
But the thought that Eden might decide she wants no part of this—that scares me.
CHAPTER 10
EDEN
Viper doesn’t sayten words for the rest of the night. He eats nothing. He stands at the window by the bar with his arms folded over his cut while Joker and Crash argue about the news footage.
And when I tell him I’m tired, he takes my hand and walks me up the stairs without asking.
Our room is dark except for the lamp on the dresser. The bed is made. It’s always made. My textbooks sit stacked on the dresser beside his knife. The sight of them together does what it always does to me—proof that I live here, in the middle of this chaos, on purpose.
He shuts the door and stands against it.
“We need to talk,” he says.
I stop breathing. “Okay.”
“You need to know what you’re getting into.” Those words shouldn’t be comforting, but they are. When he told me we needed to talk, I thought he was breaking up with me.
He’s just preparing me. Being honest with me.
“It gets worse before it gets better,” he says. “National is coming in. That means lockdowns. Escorts. Men with guns at the gate. Could be months. Men might die.” I love that he’s notsugarcoating it. “I can protect you. The club can protect you. There’s not a man downstairs who wouldn’t stand between you and a bullet.”
“I know you’ll protect me. I trust you.”
That gets through to him. “But protected isn’t free.” His whole body clenches. “If you want out—school in another city or money to leave—I’ll give you anything you need. Nobody will stop you. I won’t stop you.”
The lamp puts half his face in the dark.
“You told me once not to come back,” I say.