Head on my chest, her hand over my heart, the coin on the nightstand where it always is.
I pull the blanket over us and hold her and listen to the house settle.
The creak of the floorboards, the hum of the heater kicking on, Maddox's steady presence on the porch.
"One down," I say.
She lifts her head. "One down?"
"The pipeline. It's done. At least the operation that was running through here. It's burned. Gone."
"And the other thing?"
The debt. Solis. The photographs. The men who put their hands on her in a parking garage.
All of it still out there, circling, patient, waiting.
"Still working on it."
She puts her head back down. Her finger traces circles on my chest. "We'll figure it out."
There it is again.We.
The word that changed everything.
The word I didn't know I needed to hear until she said it on the back porch with my coin in her hand.
"Yeah," I say. "We will."
She falls asleep before I do.
Her breathing slows, her body goes heavy against mine, and I hold her and I stare at the ceiling and I think.
The pipeline is ash.
That's one victory.
The club did what the club does—we took care of our town, we burned the poison, we sent a message.
But the debt is still there.
Solis is still there.
Angelica is at the Super 8 being checked on by the club, and the quiet in my head that should be relief is whispering something I can't quite hear.
Something about Angelica.
Something about the way she looked at me in my kitchen. Not just sorry, not just scared.
Desperate. Calculating.
The look of a woman who's run out of options and is about to make one up.
I've seen that look before. I saw it the night before she left.
I push the thought down. File it away.
There's nothing I can do about it at two in the morning with Leah asleep on my chest and my girls down the hall.
