Page 46 of Rooster's Remorse
"Then rat's the word." It doesn't move me. He wanted it to, and it doesn't.
He sits back, and I watch him decide he'll come back to me later.
Zorro picks it up before the quiet can land.
"Six years." Zorro's never loud. He doesn't get loud now, and that's worse. "Six years on this property. On the gate. In the garage. Eyes on every vehicle through that fence and a key to half the buildings." He turns a bottle cap over on the wood, once, with one finger. "You sat at my Sunday table. You held my son. And the whole time there's an organization in Arizona that'd put this charter in the ground to get to you."
Leo. He's about four. He fell asleep on me at a table in September with his fist in my collar and Ruby took a picture of it.
Something goes tight under my sternum, and I keep my face where it is.
"Yes," I say.
"And you said nothing?"
"No."
"Why not?"
I look at him. His finger's still on the bottle cap.
"I thought I'd lost them." It's the truth and it doesn't help. "I crossed the river and went where they wouldn't look, and for six years nobody came. I let myself believe it was done. That's the answer. It's not a good one and I know it."
"It'snota good one," Zorro says, and takes his finger off the cap.
"No."
Axel comes in from the side. "You werehere. Sally Bernard. The auction. Diego. You were on the extraction in Colombia, you helped plan the Torres rescue, you sat in this building while we bled over this trafficking ring, and every one of those times there's a gun at the back of this club only you could see, and you let us stand in front of it blindly."
"Yes."
"You don't get to just sayyes." Axel's out of his chair and his palms hit the table. "You don't get to sit there and agree with me like you're not the reason?—"
"Axel." Amara doesn't raise her voice.
Axel looks at her, then down at his own hands on the wood, takes them back, and sits.
He's not wrong.
Everybody at this table knows he's not wrong, and I know it better than any of them.
I sit there and take it because taking it is the only thing I can do right now.
It goes on.
They take everything apart.
What I had access to. Whether the Marshals know where I am. Whether they know where the club is. Whether a man they trained and turned and lost has been a federal thread through the middle of the charter for six years.
Razor asks it and it's the worst question in the room because it isn't about how I feel.
"Are you still theirs?" Razor looks directly in my eyes.
"No."
"You walked out of the program."
"I haven't spoken to a Marshal in ten years." I look at him. "My father's still in it. I'm the reason they'd have a way to find him, so I've spent ten years making sure they can't find me to get to him. I'm not theirs. I'm nobody's."
