Page 2 of Rook's Vow
That night, after I'd locked up, someone put a rock through my front window. Clean throw, straight through the glass, the impact so loud in the empty building it stopped my heart for two full beats. I stood behind the counter with shattered glass at my feet, the highway wind coming through the hole, and I understood, with perfect clarity, that I was in trouble I couldn't handle.
I called a glazier. He couldn't come for three days, so I nailed plywood over the gap, swept up the glass, and opened the next morning like nothing had happened. But things had happened. My regulars noticed. Pauline and her husband, who drove through every Sunday on their way to church in Kalispell, started waving as they passed instead of pulling in. The truckerson the long haul who used to linger over pie and bad coffee were timing their stops differently, choosing to push through to the next town. My business was bleeding out, slowly, quietly, like a wound bleeds when you don't realize how deep it goes until your shirt is soaked. It seemed that word was spreading that my truck stop was attracting people you don’t want to be around.
The Jackals kept coming though. Not every day. Just enough to keep the message that they weren’t going anywhere clear. Two bikes in the lot on a Tuesday afternoon. Four on a Friday night, the same booth, the same pickup from out of state. They were careful now. Polite, even. Left cash on the table, didn't cause trouble, didn't threaten me directly. They didn't need to. The plywood over my window said everything they weren't bothering to say, and every regular who stopped coming was a sentence in a letter I was being forced to write myself.
Fear had teeth, and it found me in the hours between three and five in the morning, when the stop was empty, the highway was silent and I sat behind the counter with a baseball bat within reach and listened to every sound the building made. I'd never been scared of a man before. I'd handled drunks, creeps, a trucker who once pulled a knife over a bill dispute, and I'd handled them all with the same steadiness my grandfather had taught me. But these men were different. They weren't drunk, they weren't angry, they weren't reacting to anything. They were deciding. And the thing they were deciding was whether I was an obstacle worth removing or just furniture that came with the building.
The older Jackal, the one with the gray beard, had come back the morning after the window. Alone. Sat at the counter and ordered coffee and waited until the only other customer left, and then he'd looked at me and said, very calmly, that if I talked to anyone about what was happening here, if I called the sheriff or mentioned their name to a single living person, they would burnthe building to the ground with me inside it. He said it like it was nothing. He finished his coffee, left cash on the counter and walked out.
I believed him. Every word. I had no intention of calling the sheriff and signing my own death sentence.
I didn't call anyone at all. Because the truth underneath the fear was simpler and uglier than the fear itself. I didn't know who to call because I had no one. My parents were dead before I could remember them. My grandparents were gone. I had no siblings, no partner, no network of people who owed me favors or would come running. I had a truck stop on a lonely highway, a reputation for being tough, and a plywood window that told anyone paying attention how much that reputation was worth when the trouble was real.
I was handling it. That was what I told myself. I was handling it the way I'd handled everything, alone, with my hands steady, and no crack showing.
The bellover the door rang at ten past two in the morning.
I looked up from the register and he was there. The quiet one. He'd been coming in for months, always early hours of the morning, and always alone. Black coffee, didn’t often order food, and sat on the stool at the far end of the counter where the light was thinnest. He never talked much. A nod when he came in, a word or two if I said something first, cash on the counter when he left. I knew he was one of the bikers from the MC in town, the one that had been in Forsaken for years, the ones people called the Angels. I knew his road name was Rook but I knew almost nothing else about him.
Today he sat down in his usual spot, and I poured his coffee without asking. He wrapped his hands around the mug, settled, and his eyes moved across the room like they always did, slow, thorough, and taking in everything without appearing to look at anything.
His gaze stopped on the plywood.
He studied it. The new wood, pale against the dark frame where the window used to be, the nails I'd hammered in myself. He looked at it for a long time, a look that was closer to reading, and then he looked at me.
"What happened to your window?"
"Truck kicked up a rock." The lie came out smooth. I'd been practicing it for three days.
He held my gaze. Gave nothing away. His face was lean, angular, built for noticing everything and offering nothing in return. Light brown hair cut short, dark eyes that took in the room like he'd already memorized it. He was tall, and muscular with tattoos crawling up his arms. But he was still and contained. A man you'd walk past in a crowd and never notice unless you took another look, which made the fact that I always noticed him a problem I hadn't examined yet.
"Must have been a big rock," he said.
"Montana rocks. They grow them different out here don’t they?”
His eyes shifted. Not a smile, nothing that obvious. Just a flicker, there and gone, that told me he knew I was lying and had decided not to push it.
He drank his coffee and I absentmindedly wiped the counter. The highway was empty, the lot dark except for his bike and the light from the sign. He stayed for an hour, like he always did, settled at his end of the counter while I did the things that needed doing in the dead stretch between two and four.Restocked the sugar dispensers. Ran a rag over the pie case. Counted the register for something to do with my hands.
When he left, he put a ten on the counter for a two-dollar coffee. He always overpaid. I'd stopped trying to give him change months ago.
"Night, Lexie."
"Night."
The door closed behind him. His bike engine turned over in the lot, a low rumble, and the sound of it faded down the highway until the silence came back.
I picked up his mug. Rinsed it and set it in the rack with the others.
The stop was quiet again. Just me, the plywood, the baseball bat, and the hours until morning. I poured myself a coffee and stood behind the register, watched the empty highway, and waited for the sun.
TWO
ROOK
I couldn't stop thinking about the plywood.
Three in the morning, flat on my back in my room at the compound, staring at the ceiling. The frame around it was dark from fifty years of weather and the new wood stood out against it like a lie stands out against everything around it.
