Page 9 of Roulette

Then he was gone, the door pulling shut behind him with a solid click. Roulette crossed to the door and locked it.

I wrapped both hands around the mug. The coffee was black and too hot, and I didn’t drink it. I just held it, feeling the heat seep into my palms, and stared at the steam rising in that thin, unwavering line. My reflection wavered in the surface of the liquid -- distorted, broken into ripples, a face I barely recognized.

Roulette lowered himself onto the opposite end of the couch. Not close -- the leather cushion dipped beneath him about two feet from where I sat, leaving a careful buffer of space between us. He didn’t speak. Didn’t reach for the remote, didn’t pick up his phone, didn’t make any move to fill the silence or leave me alone in it. He just sat there, one arm resting on the back of the couch, his body turned slightly toward the door, and waited.

Beyond the blinds, the compound moved on without needing me to watch it -- men coming home, doors closing, boots crossing gravel somewhere in the dark. For once, the sounds simply existed, proof that life kept going around the edges of fear.

I took a sip of the coffee. It burned all the way down, bitter and necessary. I held the mug against my chest and didn’t put it down.

Chapter Five

Lark

I woke with the blanket pulled up to my chin and no idea where I was for three full seconds.

The ceiling was wrong. Not my popcorn texture, not the water stain in the corner of my rental. This ceiling was smooth and white and unfamiliar. The light coming through the window was the wrong shade of pale. I lay still beneath the blanket, taking in the shape of the room by degrees -- the dresser against the wall, the empty nightstand, the narrow bar of morning light cutting across the floorboards. None of it belonged to me yet, but none of it felt like a threat either. That difference mattered more than I wanted to admit.

I sat up. The blanket slid to my waist, and I pulled it back up around my shoulders without thinking. The yarn was soft against my collarbone. I’d slept in my T-shirt and underwear, same as always, and the morning air coming through the window had a bite to it that my rental’s paper-thin walls never managed to keep out -- or in, depending on the season. Missouri in late spring, humidity already building outside, but this room stayed noticeably cooler than my apartment ever had. Better insulation, maybe, or just a house built solid enough to keep the heat honest.

My duffel was propped against the wall where I’d left it. I’d unpacked nothing except the toothbrush I’d set on the bathroom sink and the paperback I’d placed on the nightstand. My few toiletries were still buried in the bag -- face wash, deodorant, the lip balm I kept in my pocket at work -- exactly where I’d shoved them the night before. No one had touched them. That should have made me feel better. Instead it just underlined the obvious: everything I owned that mattered fit in one bag, and even that bag looked out of place sitting against someone else’s wall.

The door was closed. I stared at it for a long moment, then swung my legs over the edge of the bed and crossed to it. The handle turned easily in my hand. Not locked. I hadn’t locked it last night -- had stood in the doorway looking at the lock and decided, in the exhausted hollow of my brain, that if I needed to lock a door inside this man’s house, I was in the wrong place to begin with. The door opened onto the hallway, and beyond it, nothing stirred.

I moved to the window and looked out.

The compound spread beyond the window like something from another life. Houses spaced at intervals, each with its own porch and driveway, gravel lots between them catching the early light. The clubhouse sat near the main gate, its double doors closed, the Hades Abyss logo burned dark into the wood. The row of bikes along the far edge of the lot was missing two -- gaps in the lineup where chrome should have been.

My shoulders dropped. I hadn’t realized they were up around my ears until they weren’t.

I let the slat fall back into place and turned to the duffel. The pair of jeans with the frayed hems I saved for days off. A flannel shirt that had been my grandfather’s, too big in the shoulders, the cuffs rolled twice. I pulled them on and wrapped the blanket around myself like a shield, tucking the edges under my arms. My feet were bare on the hardwood floor, and the cool of it traveled up through my soles and into my ankles. I hadn’t brought slippers. Hadn’t thought that far ahead.

The hallway was still, Roulette’s bedroom door shut. The living room was exactly as it had been last night -- the leather couch, the coffee table with the half-empty water glass, the club memorabilia on the wall catching the light from the front windows. I moved through it toward the kitchen archway, and the smell reached me before I crossed the threshold.

The kitchen smelled faintly of toast and clean soap. On the counter beside the sink sat a folded dish towel, a glass of water, and a sticky note written in block letters: HELP YOURSELF. Nothing elaborate. Nothing sentimental. Just evidence that someone had thought ahead before leaving.

I stood in the doorway and looked at it. His boots were gone from the mat by the back door. The saddlebag was missing from the hook beside the refrigerator. The specificity of it -- not a gesture, not an offer, just a thing done because it needed doing -- closed my throat for a second.

I drank the water in small swallows. It was cold enough to make my teeth ache, and I kept both hands around the glass while I stood at the kitchen window and looked out.

The compound was waking up. A group of men crossed the gravel lot toward the clubhouse, their voices carrying in indistinct fragments -- someone laughing, the sound sharp and then gone. A woman on the porch of the house across the way was hanging something on a clothesline strung between two posts, quick and sure with each clothespin. A dog -- some kind of shepherd mix, black and tan -- trotted between the houses with its nose to the ground, following a scent beyond human capability. The morning light caught the chrome on the bikes still parked along the edge of the lot and threw it back in bright, fractured glints.

The water cut through the stale taste in my mouth. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was until the glass was half-empty, and then I kept drinking, letting the cold settle me from the inside out.

The blanket was warm around my shoulders. My bare feet were cold on the flooring, but the glass grounded me -- cool, solid, real -- and I stood at the window watching the world beyond it.

When the glass was empty, I set it in the sink. I pulled the blanket tighter around me and turned back to the window.

The men had disappeared into the clubhouse. The woman was gone from the porch, but the clothesline she’d been working still swayed with a row of shirts and towels pinned along its length. The dog had vanished between two houses. The gravel lot lay undisturbed, the bikes standing in their patient rows, and beyond them the tree line at the edge of the property caught the light and held it, green and still and impossibly far from the cracked sidewalk I walked every morning to Patsy’s.

I stood there until my feet went numb from the cold, and then I turned toward the rest of the day.

* * *

I’d put on socks eventually, found my sneakers by the front door, and stepped off the porch into the gravel without any particular destination in mind. The clubhouse drew me -- the largest structure on the property, yellow light spilling from its windows, the sound of voices carrying through the walls even at this distance.

I crossed the lot with my hands in my pockets. The gravel shifted under my sneakers, each step a small announcement. A man on a porch two houses down raised his chin in a nod as I passed. I nodded back because it seemed like the thing to do and kept walking.

The clubhouse doors were propped open with cinder blocks. Inside, the main room was half-empty, the jukebox dead. The noise was coming from the back, through a doorway I hadn’t noticed. Kitchen sounds. The hiss of something in a pan, the clatter of a lid being set down, a woman’s voice saying something I couldn’t make out followed by another woman’s laugh.