Razor thinks about it for a second, nods once, and sits back.
Amara's been letting them run it.
She told me in her office she wasn't angry and I believe her, and she's letting Python, Zorro, and Axel take strips off me because they've earned the right and she won't take it from them.
She doesn't step in front of things that belong to her men.
"Anything else?" she asks, looking around the table.
Boulder shifts. He hasn't said a word. Big quiet man, patched last year, and he looks at me down the length of the table.
"Kelsey's brother walks my dog," Boulder says. "Compass. Every morning. Past your garage."
"Yeah."
"You ever think about what walks up that road behind him?"
My hands press down on my thighs before I can stop them.
I don't have an answer for that.
"Every day," I say, and my voice isn't as level as it was. "I think about it every day."
Boulder holds my eyes for a second, then nods slowly and looks back at the table.
He's not done thinking about it. I can see that. He's just done saying it out loud.
"Is that everything?" Amara asks.
I sit here because it's not everything.
There's one more, and it's the one that matters, and I'd give anything not to say it in this room.
"No," I say. "There's more."
The room goes still.
My hands won't stay flat now.
I press them down harder and it doesn't work, so I lace my fingers together on the table in front of me and hold on to my own knuckles.
"The woman who appeared at the gate. Camila Bacani." My knuckles go white and I look at them instead of anybody's face. "I grew up across the street from her. Her parents raised me half the time. I ate at their table more nights than my own. Ten years ago, I ran without telling her, because she was the one person Ironwood would've looked for, and I thought if I disappeared, they'd never have a reason to touch her."
Nobody moves.
"I sent postcards. To her folks. Ten years, no return address, cash when I had it, because I knew they were struggling and there wasn't anything else I could do. I paid the taxes on their house so nobody could take it. That's the only tie I let myself have. IthoughtI was being careful."
My throat's closing and I go through it.
"Ironwood found the mail. I don't know how. She doesn't either. But they worked out that mail was coming to that houseand who it was from. They went there to get my location from her parents."
Somebody breathes out slowly.
"Her mother and father were in that house a week before anybody found them."
My eyes go and I don't do one thing about it.
I let it come down my face in a room full of men who've never seen me anything but emotionless, and I don't wipe it.
