"We should probably clean up," Zay says eventually, voice still rough. "And maybe eat actual breakfast."
"In a minute," Xavier murmurs, tightening his arms around me. "Just... give me a minute like this."
So we do. We give him—give ourselves—this moment of peace. This moment of being together without questions or pressure or complications.
Because reality will intrude soon enough.
The secrets I'm carrying will demand to be told.
The truth about Marcus will eventually come out.
But for now, wrapped in Xavier's arms with Zay's hand steady on my back and Asher's eyes on me?—
For now, I let myself believe we might actually survive this.
13
VALENTINA
The call comesat two in the afternoon.
Six weeks after the clubhouse appearance. Six weeks of me pushing Xavier through PT like a drill sergeant, of incremental victories measured in steps instead of toe wiggles, of trading the wheelchair for a cane and then—finally, three days ago—ditching the cane entirely for short distances.
I'm in the kitchen making coffee when Xavier's phone rings—the sharp sound cutting through the quiet hum of the refrigerator, through the rhythmic thud of his footsteps as he paces the length of the counter and back (still unsteady, still careful, but walking), through the ordinary Tuesday afternoon that is about to stop being ordinary. I'm watching the coffee drip dark and slow into the pot, and I don't know yet that this is the last peaceful moment I'll have for a very long time.
"Yeah?" Xavier answers, bracing one hand against the counter for balance—habit more than necessity now, but some instincts die hard.
I'm at the table behind him, and I look up from the magazine I was pretending to read. Something in his posture changes—subtle, but I've learned to read the language of his body over these past weeks.
"When?" Xavier's voice has changed. Flat now, all that gruff warmth scraped out of it like marrow from a bone.
Jackie's voice comes through the phone—I can't hear the words, but I can hear the tone. Tight. Controlled. Wrong.
I set my mug down carefully, quietly, but my hands are already starting to shake.
"We'll be there. Thirty minutes."
He hangs up. The moment stretches between us, heavy and terrible, and I'm already standing even though I don't remember deciding to move.
Xavier turns slowly, still mindful of balance, still adjusting to trusting his legs to hold him.
I'm in the doorway between the kitchen and living room now, watching him. My chest is tight with the particular kind of wariness that comes from living with catastrophe long enough to recognize its shape before it fully arrives.
He's standing there, phone still in his hand, staring at the middle distance. Not at the wall, not at me—at some terrible internal horizon only he can see. His face has done that thing it does when he's processing catastrophic information: all of it shuttered behind a blank, dangerous stillness, like storm water glassed over before a hurricane makes landfall.
"What happened?" I ask. The dread is already spreading through my stomach, warm and wrong like swallowed acid.
"Johnson called an emergency club meeting." His voice is stripped of everything. "Mandatory attendance. Everyone."
"Why? What's going on?"
"He didn't say." Xavier finally looks at me, and the something in his eyes — that particular shade of tension I don't yet have a name for — makes the warm-wrong feeling spread up through my ribs. "But he said you need to be there too. Specifically requested your presence."
Specifically requested.
The dread metastasizes into something sharper. Full-blown panic, bright as a struck match. "Xavier?—"
"Get dressed." He cuts me off cleanly. Not cruel — controlled. The voice of someone keeping themselves extremely together through sheer force of will. "We leave in twenty minutes."
