Page 97 of Nash
Nash looks at me across the room. His eyes find mine, and he waits.
I look at the photographs on the coffee table. The image of me at nineteen, walking to class, and the image of me last week, walking beside Nash, smiling. The note in block letters between them.
I look at my father. His red eyes. His shaking hands. Three years of fear folded into a manila folder.
I think about the headband on Nash's wrist. About Naya reaching for it to check if it was still there. About a girl named Sera who disappeared into a pipeline that should have been dismantled before she ever got near it.
I squeeze my mother's hand. Let go. Stand.
"Someone has to fix this." My voice shakes, but the words hold. "Someone has to finish what you started. You sealed those cases to protect me. I'm not going to stand here and pretend I wish you hadn't, because that would be a lie." I swallow. "But a girl is missing. The people who threatened me are still out there taking people. And the evidence you buried can still bring them down."
I look at Nash. "Together?"
He crosses the room and takes my hand. "Together," he says.
My father stands. He looks at me, at Nash, at our hands. His chin lifts, the same angle mine does when I'm about to face something head-on.
My mother stands beside him and takes his arm. She's steady the way she's been steady for thirty years.
"What do you need from us?" my father asks.
Nash's thumb traces my knuckle.
"Everything," I say. "The files, Webb's contacts, all of it."
"And you need protection," Nash says. "If they're watching Ruby, they're watching you. I'll have Kyle and Rider rotating onyour house by tonight. Two prospects on the perimeter until this is resolved."
My father opens his mouth. Closes it. A federal judge being told he needs a motorcycle club guarding his home, and the fact that he doesn't argue tells me everything about how scared he actually is.
"Okay," my father says.
"Raine." Nash turns to my mother. "You don't go anywhere alone. Not the store, not church, not the driveway. Someone is with you at all times."
My mother straightens beside my father, her hand tightening on his arm. She nods once.
"Thank you," my father says.
Nash nods. He pulls his phone from his pocket, scrolls, and presses call. His hand finds my lower back while he waits for the line to connect.
"Malachi."
Chapter 23
Nash
Thewarroomisfull.
Malachi sits at the head of the scarred oak table. Knox is to his left with the laptop open. I take my spot to his right. East sits across from me with his knee bouncing and his phone face-up on the table showing a live feed of the main room where Darla is on the couch with a pillow behind her back. James sits in his chair with coffee. Rider and Kyle stand at the door. Arden stands against the back wall, arms crossed, still as stone. He's not a patched member, but he runs security for Vesper and Malachi stopped pretending Arden isn't part of the operation months ago. Lawrence sits at the far end in a chair Knox pulled from thekitchen, his folder of photographs open in front of him and his hands flat on the table.
A federal judge sitting at a motorcycle club's war table. The room absorbs it without comment.
"Start from the beginning," Malachi says.
Lawrence talks. The cases and the pipeline. The threat against Ruby. Webb handling the paperwork. The sealed files. Three years of silence. He lays it out the way he'd lay out a case in court, methodical, precise, except his voice catches twice and his hands grip the table edge when he describes the photograph of Ruby at nineteen.
Knox has the laptop running, cross-referencing Lawrence's information against the data he's already decrypted. Every few minutes he types something, his eyes moving between Lawrence and the screen.
"The protection order," Knox says. "You filed it yourself?"
