Page 20 of Rune’s Solace

Devil looked at him.

“She don’t wake up to a face she don’t know. She don’t get handed off shift to shift like somethin’ in a lockbox.” That mismatched stare didn’t come off Devil, one eye blue and one gold, and nothing in it moved. “I’m her detail. All of it, every hour. The rest of y’all keep the world off my back and I’ll keep her and the baby breathin’. That’s the only version of this I’m sittin’ still for.”

Nobody argued. You didn’t argue that with Mystic, not about Zeynep. The man had gone into hell after her once already and come back out dragging her with him, he’d made it plain more than once he’d do it again and not break stride. Devil just nodded, slow. “The rest of us build the wall,” he said. “You’re inside it with them. Done.”

“Then whose hands is Drago usin’?” Mystic said, and now there was a thing underneath you didn’t ever want turned your way. “He’s in a cell. Somebody out here does the carryin’. We know the shooter?”

“No.” And I watched that cost Devil something to admit. He liked knowing. We all did, and not knowing eats at a club worse than any named enemy. “Our man heard the arrangement, not the name. Somebody Drago trusts to do ugly and not talk. Could be Dragon Fire leftovers. Could be hired. Could be somebody just walked out those gates with a debt to work off and nothing left to lose.” He shook his head. “We’re blind on the who. So we cover the what. We cover her.”

Mystic’s jaw worked, but he took it. Blind on the who. It’s about the worst thing you can hand a man about the danger coming for his wife, and he took it, because there wasn’t a thing else to take.

Blind on the who. I turned that over while the table talked logistics, while Chain laid out shifts and Gatsby said something about eyes on the road, the cameras and getting more of them up, while Thunder, always deep in thought, asked hard serious questions about the family homes, the ones of us who didn’t sleep behind the compound walls. I understood the why of it. He had a house full of what he loved sitting off this property with only him between it and the threat.

And somewhere under the front of me doing its job, the back of me did the thing it does. It went to her.

Had no damn reason to. Nobody had said her name. This was Zeynep. Drago wanted Zeynep, and there wasn’t a thing connecting Amy to any of it. She went to school across the river, slept three doors down from Brenda, and hadn’t given me much more than a cold look since the garden.

Didn’t matter.

Devil said nobody moved alone and there she was in my head: walking that long path out to my cabin after dark, driving that bridge every morning, crossing a campus full of strangers with that purple hair making her easy to pick out in any crowd. The need to keep her safe came up so fast I damn near had to choke it back down.

Wasn’t mine.

She wasn’t mine.

A man sure as hell didn’t get to put himself on a woman’s back just because he couldn’t quit thinking about her, and Amy had made it plenty clear the last time we stood close that whatever right I’d once had to worry over her, I’d burned it up myself.

“Rune.”

Devil was looking at me. Half the table was.

“You’re no good to me in the rotation,” he said. “I want you doing the thing only you do.” He held up a finger. “One. Somebody’s going to come to this compound bleeding before this is through: maybe one of ours, maybe one of theirs we need kept alive long enough to say something useful. You’re the closest thing to a doctor any of us is ever going to see. Stocked, sober, ready, day or night.” A second finger. “Two. You’re already out past everybody else. That cabin of yours sits at the back with a look at the treeline and the river road nobody else on this property has got. So you keep sleeping out there. But you keep your ears open, and you watch. Anything comes up that back line that shouldn’t, I want to hear about it before it’s halfway to the walls.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Course.”

“Good.” He moved on.

And that was that. Eyes on the back line, and the healer on his shelf waiting to be needed. Same as I’d always been to this club when you got down to it: the one they kept a little apart, because apart was where I did the most good. I’d never minded it. A man who keeps to the back sees what the men in the middle miss.

Church ran another hour. We nailed down the shifts and the signals, who took the road and who took the walls. And near the end of it Bolt spoke up from the doorway, where he’d stood with his arms crossed. “What about Amy?”

“Amy,” Devil said, looking down at the sheet in front of him. “She’s across that river every damn morning.”

My back tightened before I could stop it.

“College,” Bolt said. “Five days a week. Sometimes Saturdays.”

“She’s not going alone.” Devil looked up. “And before anybody says keep her home, save it. Girl’s worked too hard getting herself into that school for us to lock her behind these walls because some asshole she’s never met decided to make trouble.”

Nobody argued with that.

Devil looked around the table, past the men already spoken for on the walls and the road, then landed on me. Of course he did. I wasn’t standing a regular shift, and apparently the night wasn’t done finding new ways to screw with me.

“Rune. You’ve got the back line and the doctoring. Add her routes to it. Bridge, campus, wherever she goes, she doesn’t go alone. You’re on her.”

Every damn thing in me went still.

“Yeah,” I said.