She closes the distance, her hand going to the graze before I've said anything, her eyes doing the quick assessment of someone who has kept pressure on a wound in the dark.
"It's a graze," I say.
"I can see that." She holds my arm for a moment. "Stitch needs to look at this."
"After."
"After what?"
I take her face in my hands and kiss her in front of my brothers, in the parking lot of the Chalmette facility sun shining. Pawn is leaning on his bike, Boomer's nose is packed with gauze, and Sisco is still on the phone. I don't look around first. I haven't cared who sees for a while now and this is not the morning to start.
She kisses me back with both hands on my wrists, holding them where they are, her mouth warm and deliberate, complete attention the way she does everything she decides is worth her attention.
When I pull back enough to look at her she's looking at me with those clear eyes and in them I can see the morning. All of it, processed and stored.
"Two got away," I say.
"I know."
"This isn't over."
"I know." Her hands are still on my wrists. "But Grudge has his sister."
He does. That's real. That's the realest thing I've got right now and I intend to hold it.
Sisco appears at my shoulder. "Pawn needs Stitch."
"Tell Pawn he should have stayed down."
"I did. He said something impolite about your opinion." Sisco glances at Jesslyn. "You got everything you need?"
"Everything she needs," Jesslyn says. "And nothing that goes anywhere it shouldn't."
He nods and walks away. I look at Jesslyn in the morning light, and I think about a bayou at sunrise and a woman who walked into a café knowing exactly who was across from her and gave him nothing.
"Come on," I say.
I take her hand, and we go back to our people.
Chapter 15
Jesslyn
Six weeks after the Chalmette facility, I sign a lease.
It's a one-page document, handwritten, the kind of agreement that wouldn't hold up in any court in Mississippi, but means everything it needs to mean in this particular context.
Templar witnesses it. The outbuilding behind the main compound, the one I've been working out of since I arrived, becomes mine in the way that things become yours when you decide they are and the people around you decide the same thing.
I've been thinking about what staying means since the morning in the parking lot when Judge took my face in his hands in front of his brothers and kissed me. I've been thinking about it since the night on the porch steps when I put my head on his shoulder and he didn't move. I've been thinking about it since the day I found the Morata Brothers sticker in the bayou frame and understood that the work wasn't finished, that the work was going to keep going, that the work was always going to keep going and I was choosing whether to keep going with it.
I'm choosing.
The outbuilding has good north light. I noticed that the first week, which is the kind of thing you notice when you've spent years finding rooms that work for photography. I've been setting it up slowly, the way you set up a space you intend to use for a long time. Shelves along the west wall, a worktable for the laptop and the drives, the second monitor that Judge pulled from the main building that first morning in the gun room.
Pawn helped me build the shelves on a Saturday morning. He showed up with a drill and lumber and no particular explanation, and we built them in two hours. Then he left without making anything of it, which is how a lot of things happen in this compound: without ceremony, without anyone naming what they are.
The shelves hold my equipment cases, my backup drives, the notebooks I've filled since the morning I drove out of the bayou with mud on my boots and my hand shaking on the wheel.
