Make sure you know what you're looking at before you decide it's beautiful.
I'm looking at the ceiling of a room in a motorcycle club compound in Magnolia Bend, Mississippi, with a DEA agent's face on a memory card four feet away and nowhere safe to go back to.
I'm going to need to be more careful than this.
Chapter 6
Judge
Two days.
Two days of knowing exactly where she is at every moment without trying to know it, which is the part that's keeping me up at 2 a.m. staring at the ceiling of my room while the compound sleeps around me.
It's not surveillance. I want to be clear about that, at least to myself, because I've spent enough years being precise about my own motives that I'm not going to start lying about them now. It's not surveillance. It's the specific, inconvenient awareness of a man whose attention has attached itself to something without his permission and won't let go.
She came down to breakfast both mornings. Sat at the end of the table with her coffee and her laptop and her photographer's eye moving over the room in that way she has: peripheral, patient, cataloguing everything without appearing to look at anything.
She talked to Kourtney. She was careful around the brothers, not unfriendly, just measured, giving nothing she didn't mean to give. She asked Templar good questions when he sat down with her the first morning, the kind of questions that tell you someone has been thinking rather than waiting, and Templar'sface did the thing it does when he reassesses something. Just a fraction, just enough for me to catch it.
She ate Kourtney's food both mornings without being asked twice. That shouldn't mean anything, but it means something.
Yesterday afternoon she was in the outbuilding behind the main building, the one we use for storage and overflow, and I know this because I walked past the window and saw her through the glass. Just sitting on an upturned crate with her laptop and her cards, working through frames, a cup of coffee balanced beside her. She didn't see me. I kept walking.
This is not who I am. I'm a man who runs on information and discipline and the understanding that sentiment is a liability in the kind of life I've chosen. I don't track women through compound windows. I don't lie awake at two in the morning thinking about the way someone's hair smelled in the cab of my truck.
I get up and go to the gun room.
She's already there.
Sitting on the floor against the far wall, back straight, laptop open on her crossed legs, the screen throwing blue light across her face in the dark. She hasn't turned on the overhead light. It’s just the laptop, just that one cold rectangle of light, and she's so focused on whatever she's looking at that she doesn't hear me come in.
I stand in the doorway for a moment.
I should send her back to her room. It's two in the morning, this is the gun room, and she's a guest under the club's protection, not someone with access to every part of this compound. Those are all correct thoughts. I have them clearly.
I pull up the stool at the bench and sit down.
She looks up then, registering the movement, and for a second her whole body goes still like she's assessing something.Then she sees it's me and the stillness changes quality from threat-assessment to something else, something I don't name.
"Couldn't sleep," she says. It’s not a question.
"No."
She looks at me for a moment, then back at her screen. I reach for the Glock on the bench and start breaking it down, and the familiar sequence of it — the click and slide of the mechanism, the weight of each piece as I set it down — does what it always does. Quiets the top layer of my head and lets me think underneath it.
We work in the same silence for an hour.
It's the same silence as the truck, the same quality. Not empty, not requiring anything. She's on her floor, I'm at my bench, and the gun room is dark except for her laptop and the small work light I've clipped to the bench. The only sounds are the occasional click of her keyboard and the mechanical work of my hands.
I finish the Glock and move to the next weapon. She scrolls through frames and occasionally zooms in on something, and I'm not watching her but I'm aware of her the way you're aware of a fire in a room.
"Judge."
I look over. She's turned the laptop toward me, extended it slightly, leaning forward with it like she wants me to see the screen without having to describe what's on it.
"Come look at this," she says.
I stand, cross the room, and crouch beside her. She tilts the screen toward me. It's a frame from the bayou. Not Delacroix, a different figure, standing further back in the cargo light, his face partially turned.
