"You need to come to the Super 8. Room 214." I look at Angelica. She's curled in on herself on the bed, small and shaking and destroyed by the thing she's done. "Angelica has something to tell you. And Coin—you need to hear it tonight. Because I think she just told the loan sharks everything they need to get to the girls."
The silence on the other end of the line is the worst sound I've ever heard. Worse than a flatline.
Worse than the parking garage.
The silence of a father hearing that the threat to his children just multiplied, and that the person responsible is their own mother.
"I'm on my way," he says. His voice is ice.
I hang up and look at Angelica.
"When he gets here," I say, "you tell him everything. And then you pray that the club can fix what you just broke. Because if they can't, if anything happens to those girls because of what you did?—"
I don't finish that sentence either.
I don't have to.
She knows.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Coin
I'm at the clubhouse when the world ends.
I've been here for two hours.
Since the Super 8, since Angelica sat on that motel bed and told me everything she'd done.
My schedule. The house layout. When I'm home, when I'm not. The woman who stays with the girls.
She handed them all of it on a platter and said she was negotiating a better deal.
Fucking idiot.
I brought it straight to the club.
Called Ruger from the parking lot of the Super 8 while Leah drove Angelica to the clubhouse and Bloodhound kept watch.
We spent two hours in Church, figuring out how to adjust—new schedules, new rotations, new contingencies for a threat that just got closer because the mother of my children opened the door for it.
Two hours. That's how long I was at the clubhouse while Leah was home with the girls.
That's the part I'll carry for the rest of my life—not the violence, not the aftermath, not the blood on Leah's face, or even the bruises on my daughter's arm.
The part I'll carry is that I wasn't there.
I was sitting in a chair in the main room, running comms and reviewing intel and doing my job, while three men were breaking into my home.
I was doing my job while my girls were screaming.
It starts with a phone call.
Not from Leah. Not from the girls.
From Wrenleigh's phone, but it's not Wrenleigh's voice I hear when I answer.
It's noise—a confusion of sounds that takes my brain three seconds to decode and when it does, the floor drops out from under me.
