“And Blackjack saw,” I confirmed. “He was at the table. Not playing. Just watching. Afterward, when the mess was cleaned up, he pulled us aside. Asked if we liked doing one-off jobs forever or if we wanted something with more…structure.”
“The same word the judge used,” she noted.
“Yeah,” I said. “Funny how that keeps coming up.”
“What’d you say?” she asked.
“We said we’d think about it,” I said. “We didn’t. We showed up at the clubhouse three days later.”
“And?”
“And they made us prospects,” I said. “Put us through hell. Broke us down. Tested us. Tried to make us walk away. We didn’t. We earned our cuts. Our rockers. Our patches. Our places at the table. Miami was always the loud one. The mouth. The joker. I was the one who made sure he didn’t drown himself in his own bullshit.”
“You love him,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
The words felt like stones dropping into water. True all the way down.
She sat with that for a moment.
“I get it,” she said quietly. “Having one person like that. The one who makes the stupid stuff feel less heavy.”
“You?” I asked. “Who’s that for you?”
Her jaw worked. She looked at her hands for a second.
“Liberty,” she said. “But not the way you and Miami are. Not… exactly.”
“Tell me,” I said.
She took a breath.
“I was nineteen when I met him,” she said. “The man I was with. Thought I was grown. Thought I was hard.Thought no one could tell me what to do.”
“That didn’t last,” I said gently.
“No,” she said. “It didn’t.”
Her eyes went distant, flicking somewhere way beyond the walls.
“He was older,” she said. “Good-looking in that way that makes you feel chosen when he looks at you. Charming. Said all the right things. ‘You’re not like other girls.’ ‘You’re tougher than they are.’ ‘You could runwithme, not behind me.’”
“Classic,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “He loved that I had teeth. Loved that I’d fight. Until I fought him.”
Her fingers tightened in her lap.
“It didn’t start with fists,” she said. “It started with little cuts. ‘Don’t wear that, men will stare.’ ‘Don’t talk to her, she’s a bad influence.’ ‘I worry when you go out alone; you know how dangerous it is.’ Controlling dressed up as concern. By the time the first slap landed, I had nowhere left to go. No friends he hadn’t chased off. No money he hadn’t already put his hands on. No family who wanted to hear from me.”
I felt something crawl cold under my skin.
“One night,” she said, “he got drunk. Drunker than usual. Came home from work angry about something I wasn’t even there for. He wanted to go out, drink his anger away. I obliged. But then he put his hands on me in public for the first time. Not in a backroom. Not behind a door. Just there, in the middle of a bar.Fingers around my throat. Pinned against a wall because some guy looked at me too long like it was my fault.”
My hands curled into fists.
“And Liberty was there,” she said.
