Page 14 of Knife Volume 2

He looked at Duke, then looked around the table. “She decided it wasn’t working, being apart. We hadn’t spoken in months at that point, but she went to Cora and asked to have her pack bonds severed. She was a mess when she showed up at the restaurant Friday night. Weak, still hurting from it. She’s still weak, but she’s managing okay. Better than I did, when I paid a vampire to sever the bonds.”

He focused on making sure he got the important part out. The reason he’d asked to speak. “Long story short, she took a big hit to be with me, and I’m pissed, but I’m not turning her away. She lost her pack, and I want…” He shook his head. “I need the MC to replace that for her. To show her we have her back. I know ya’ll don’t know her well enough yet to vote for me to give her a vest, but I’d like to request you vote I can order it, so I can give it to her as soon as ya’ll are comfortable with her. It can take a month for it to be made, so please, let me at least get it here.”

The room was quiet, and he worried they might want him to wait. To follow protocol.

It was Gonzo who said, “Maybe we take a vote to let you order it, but it gets delivered to Duke. He’ll hold it until we can vote for you to give it to her.”

“If the vote goes positive,” Duke corrected. “Yes, I can call a vote for that.”

They went around the table, and everyone voted Yea. Duke told Knife to get with Brain on the specifics, since Brain would have to place the order, and then he moved to regular business.

When Knife made it back upstairs, he sat beside Matty on a sofa. Matty was focused on his phone, but he looked up and turned the screen off when he realized Knife wanted to talk to him.

He explained he wanted to build an eight-by-ten closet in his bedroom, shrinking the size of the room, which was fine since it was so big to start with. He showed Matty pics of the room, gave him the dimensions, and Matty asked Brain if he could borrow a laptop. Five minutes later, they were in a conference room, and Matty used a program he accessed online to draw out the closet to show shelves, bars, drawers, and shoe-holders.

“I’ll email you all four walls,” he told him. “But you have to get Tuesday’s input. She might want less shoe storage and more hanging bars, or less bars and more shelves. Every woman is different. Don’t try to surprise her with this.”

Chapter 6

Tuesday followed him to one of the big-box home improvement stores on the way home, because he told her he needed to pick up a few things.

But then he loaded up a huge lumber cart with two-by-fours, nails, sheet rock, joint compound, and plywood.

And he didn’t answer her questions about what he was building. He didn’t refuse to answer, he just changed the subject and talked about something else.

It wasn’t until she was helping him move everything from the cart to the truck that he told her he was building her a closet. “I have a schematic from Matty to show you when we get home, and a website with professional-grade stuff. He showed me the three styles I should show you on the website, and said to let you decide which style you want. We’ll do it once we’re home.”

“And you waited until you’d bought the lumber to tell me this, to keep from telling you to hold off on doing this, right?”

He grinned. “It’s nice to be understood.”

She followed him home, through the gate, and wondered how she’d get into it if she needed to come home when he wasn’t there.

He backed his truck up to the door while she parked where she usually did, and when she tried to help him carry things upstairs, he told her, “I’m just going to carry one load up for now, while we’re headed up anyway. Just bring your suitcase and the small bag, since I’ll need the chalk when we get up there.”

Once upstairs, he marked lines on the hardwood floor, measuring as he went, drawing the two walls he’d build to close in some of the space beside the bathroom.

And then he handed her four sheets of paper and told her, “Matty said you might want less shoe storage and more hanging bars, or less bars and more shelves, maybe more drawers and less shelves.”

“Yeah,” she said, after looking through the pages. “Less shoe storage, more drawers.”

He nodded, motioned for her to sit on the sofa with him, opened his laptop, and went to the site Matty had given him.

She chose the style she wanted, and then she took the laptop from him and used the site planner to create the walls the way she wanted them. When she got to the shopping cart, he took it back from her, and she said, “No, you can’t pay for all of that.”

It was thousands of dollars because it was truly good stuff, and she hadn’t picked the cheapest design because she thought she’d be paying for it.

But the look he gave her told her she wasn’t paying for it.

She was opening her mouth to argue when she realized she was going to have to let him pay for it.

He was still reeling from her leaving the pack for him, still angry, still working through it.

She was going to have to let him win a few rounds until he worked through it. Not forever, but for a little while.

But then five minutes later, she argued when he refused to let her help carry the lumber upstairs.

But he ended the argument by telling her, “If you want to help, get a fire going in the firepit, so we can do hot dogs and then s’mores.”