"No patch. No timeline. You don't ask me about it, and you don't ask anybody at this table about it. You want back the trust you burned, you earn it, starting now, and it takes longer than you want, and you don't complain about that one single time." She puts her hands flat on the table. "There's an organization in Arizona that killed two civilians to find you, and multiple women in a hole in the ground this club is about to have a conversation about. You're going to be useful to both, because you know more about Ironwood than any man alive who isn't in a cell or the program. You don't get to run from your past anymore. You're going to fight against it."
She looks around the table.
"Anybody's got a problem with that, say it now."
Nobody says anything.
Python's jaw is still going.
Axel's still got his arms crossed.
Boulder's still somewhere out on that road with the dog.
And not one of them opens his mouth, because Doom stood up, and the room turned when he did, and every man in it felt it go.
"Then we're done," Amara says. "Rooster. Get out. Go find your girl."
I get up. My legs don't want to hold me, and I make them.
I'm at the door when Amara says my name again and I stop.
"She's not down the hall," she says. "She's at the fire pit. Been out there the whole time we've been in here, in the cold, where she can see the chapel door." One corner of her mouth pulls and it isn't a smile. "I don't think she trusts us with you yet."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mila
The chapel door's been shut for two hours, and I've been watching it the entire time.
I'm on the bench by the dead fire pit where I can see it across the courtyard, and there's a blanket on my shoulders somebody put there that I didn't ask for and haven't taken off.
There are two women out here, and they won't leave me alone. I didn't ask them to stay either.
The one with the baby is Lashes.
The other one showed up an hour ago with a thermos and a leather folio and sat down across from me like we'd been doing this for years, said her name was Imani, and then didn't say much of anything after, which is how I knew I could stand her.
"They can't throw him out," Lashes says. "For the record. I know that's what you're sitting here waiting to find out."
"I'm not." I keep my eyes on the yard.
"You've looked at that door forty times."
"I'm watching the yard." I look at the yard, hard, to prove it, and the door's right there at the edge of it, and I look at that too.
"You're watching the door." She shifts Hope higher on her shoulder. "It's fine. I'd be watching it too."
I've got the blanket bunched in both fists in my lap, and I make myself open my hands.
Imani pours something out of the thermos into a metal cup and slides it across the little table without asking if I want it, the way they all do here.
Nobody's asked me if I wanted a single thing since I got here.
They put it in front of me and let me decide, and my body doesn't know what to do with being handed something it can refuse.
It's coffee with cinnamon in it. Maybepiloncillo.
"My father taught me to read a bad room before I could read words." Imani's looking at the folio, not at me. "Who's about to move. Who's already decided. Who's talking to fill the air because they're scared." She turns a page that has nothing to do with any of this. "That door's going to open and he's going to walk out still wearing that cut, and he's going to look like hell, and none of it will tell you what you actually want to know."
