She lifts two fingers off her knee where nobody else can see them, the way I did to her down in the creek bed, and puts them back down.
We drive south.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Chapter Twenty
Mila
The gate opens before we're close enough to see who's on it.
Somebody's been watching that road. They saw the trucks and had it rolling before Amara's bumper was in the drive.
Zorro's standing in the middle of the yard with a rifle across his chest and Ruby beside him with a dish towel still in her hand.
And behind them, the whole club.
Not the ones who went. The ones who stayed.
Axel and Rosa, Compass with grease to his elbows, Kelsey with both girls beside her, Astra, Marco and his men off the gate, Marie on the porch step with both hands pressed over her mouth.
They've been out here waiting. God knows how long.
I get out of the truck on legs that have forgotten how to work, and Marie is across that gravel before my boots hit the ground.
She goes past me.
Straight past me to the second vehicle, to the door Finn's climbing out of, and she takes her son's face in both hands and doesn't say one word.
I stand in a yard in Mexico and watch a woman check her boy for holes.
Then she turns around and finds me and puts both arms around my neck.
"You brought him home." She says it into my hair.
"He brought himself home."
"Youbrought him home." Her hands tighten at the back of my neck. "And you brought yourself back too, so don't argue with me. I'm too old and I've been awake for two days."
The women come out of the vehicles slowly.
That's what opens the yard up. Not us. Them.
Women in borrowed clothes stepping into daylight in a country most of them have never set foot in, in front of forty strangers, and the whole club goes so still I can hear the dogs at the house across the street.
Nobody rushes them.
Amara must have called ahead, because not one person moves toward those trucks.
The men fall back on their own, all the way to the fence, without a word from anybody.
Every woman in the club steps up.
Ruby's got the towel over her shoulder and her hands out where they can be seen.
"There's food," she says, in Spanish, to no one and to all of them at once. "A ridiculous amount of food. There's a room for every one of you with a lock on the inside of the door, and nobody comes down that hall who isn't a woman. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not until you say so."
Lucia's got a fistful of the back of my shirt.
