Page 21 of Rune’s Solace

Kept my face expressionless. Kept my voice the same as it’d been.

An hour ago I’d been sitting at that table telling myself I had no business wanting anywhere near her.

Josie had stood against the wall, arms crossed, not a vote at that table yet but taking in every word the way he took in everything. When Devil finally reached for the gavel, Josie caught my eye across the room and gave me the smallest nod. You good. Not a question, the way he did it. He’d watched the thing land, and he was telling me anyway, in case I’d forgot.

The gavel came down and the room broke into the low talk that always came after, chairs pushing back, Bolt opening the door, the box of phones going around. I stayed in my seat a second longer than I needed to.

We had the threat. We had the woman it was aimed at. Drago wanted Zeynep, so we’d lock the whole damn compound down around her and make anybody coming for her regret getting through the gate.

Simple.

Come morning, I’d get Amy across that bridge, stay on her until she was back behind our walls, do it again the next day if Devil told me to.

Just a job.

I could call it that now.

I walked back to my cabin near midnight with the compound locked down behind me, brothers on the walls and Mystic’s light still burning yellow in the window where he’d probably sit awake till morning watching Zeynep breathe. I took my spot out front like Devil ordered and watched the back line, the garden black around me and the woods blacker past it.

Across the yard the clubhouse sat lit up, and I knew without counting which window was hers. I made myself look everywhere but there. That was the job: watch the dark for what’s coming, not the lit-up window where the one thing I had no right to want had just shut off her lamp and gone to sleep, safe, a few hundred yards off.

I watched till the birds started up. The treeline stayed empty. The river road stayed empty. I’d be back out here the next night, and the one after, watching the same stretch of dark, certain as every other man on this property that this was the way it would come.

Her window had gone black hours back. I hadn’t looked.

Much.

CHAPTER TEN

THE LOCKDOWN HAD been on a full day before it came for the one thing I had left that was mine.

It had gone from a place where men wandered around half-asleep with coffee to a place where everybody moved with a purpose and a direction and one eye on the treeline, doubled up, nobody alone, Zeynep somewhere at the center of it all with Mystic bolted to her side like a second shadow. Nobody’d told me the details. Nobody tells me details. But you don’t need the briefing to read a clubhouse that’s gone to war, and I’d kept my head down and my mouth shut and figured if I just stayed small and out of the way, the way I know how to do, it would all happen around me and leave me be.

It found me on the second morning, at my own car, keys in my hand.

“You can’t take that out by yourself.” Chain, coming across the lot, not unkind but not asking. “Not till this is done.”

“I have class at eight.”

“I know it. It’s handled.” He said it like handled was a comfort, and something in the way he wouldn’t quite look at me told me it was going to be the opposite of a comfort. “Brenda wants to talk to you first. Inside.”

Brenda was at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a mug she wasn’t drinking, and she had the face on. Not the Tom face. An older one. The one I’d only seen a couple of times, the one that meant she’d gone to bat for me somewhere and come back with nothing.

“Sit down, baby.”

“I’ll stand. I’ve got — ”

“Amy. Sit.”

I sat.

“You can’t drive yourself no more. Not while this thing’s on.” She turned the mug in her hands. “Devil’s locked the place down, and that means everybody, includin’ you. You want to keep goin’ to that school, and I want you to keep goin’, so… somebody’s gotta go with you. There and back. Every day, till it’s over.”

“Then you go with me.” Easy. Obvious. “You come. We’ll make a thing of it.”

And her face did something terrible, because she’d already thought of that, I could see it, she’d already stood in a room and offered exactly that and had it turned down flat.

“I asked,” she said, soft. “I asked to be the one. Devil said no. Said if somebody’s on you, it’s got to be somebody who can — ” her mouth pressed — “somebody who can do somethin’ about it, if it comes to that. A patch. Not a fifty-three-year-old woman with a bad back and a can of mace.” She tried to make it a joke and it didn’t take. “It’s got to be one of the men.”