Page 42 of Rune’s Solace

“That’s exactly what we’re looking for. Mystic starts with what we’ve got and works backward. School enrollment may give him enough to get a thread. Birth record if he can narrow it. Parents, addresses, whatever comes with it. Once he’s got one real piece, he’ll build from there.”

“How long.”

“Long as it takes.” He looked up. “Days. Maybe a week or more, depending on what he has to reach into. It’s not fast, Rune, and I know you want it fast.”

“I want it yesterday.”

It came out of me hard. Too hard. And I heard it, and Devil heard it, and something in the room changed temperature.

He set the pen down.

“Sit down,” he said.

“I’m fine standing.”

“Rune.” Not loud. He never has to be. “Sit down.”

I sat.

He looked at me for a long moment across that desk, this man who’d taken a rotten club and cleaned it out with his bare hands, who my father hated enough to leave over, who’d stood at my mother’s grave when I couldn’t stand up straight. He’d known me a long time. There’s not a thing I’ve ever gotten past him and I don’t know why I keep trying.

“How long,” he said, “have you been in love with that girl?”

There it was.

I thought about lying. I’ll be honest about that. I got about half a breath into building one before I understood there was no version of it that would live longer than the time it took to say, not in that room, not to him.

“A while,” I said.

“A while.” He almost laughed. Almost. “Rune. I’ve watched you drift around this property for months looking like a man carrying his own coffin. You don’t sleep worth a damn. Josie puts food in front of you, half the time you don’t touch it. You sit out at that cabin every damn night acting like misery’s your job, and I let it alone because your private shit is yours.” He leaned forward. “Stops being private when it fucks with club business.”

I didn’t say anything.

“So I’m asking once. Can you do this? Not want to. Not mean to. Can you keep that girl alive without getting so wrapped up in her you miss what’s coming from the side?” He held my eyes. “Because if the answer’s no, I put Chain on her tonight. You can hate me till one of us dies.”

And I sat there, and I thought about the parking lot and the hole in the radiator, and about how a man with jailhouse ink on his throat had stood out on that campus easy as you please, close enough I should have made him, and didn’t, because for three weeks I’d kept my eyes on her and not on the ground around her.

Devil was already right. I’d felt how right down in my gut back in that garage, before he ever put a word to it. I’d just been too busy hating myself to name it.

“I’ve already fucked up once,” I said. “Was watching her instead of what was around her. Somebody got to the car. Never saw it.”

Devil didn’t blink. “And?”

“Not happening twice.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Yeah, it is.” I met his eyes and let him have it, because there wasn’t much left worth hiding. “You put Chain on her, he’ll do the job. Not saying he won’t. But Amy knows me. She’s used to me behind her. Used to where I sit, how close I get, what my bike sounds like when it’s coming up behind her. Put somebody new on her now and she’ll feel watched every second of the day, and she’ll start watching him instead of living her life.”

Devil’s eyes narrowed.

“I know where I fucked up,” I said. “Won’t do it again. And there’s not another man on this property knows her tells the way I do.”

“That last part’s exactly what worries me.”

“Shouldn’t.”

“Bullshit.” Devil picked up the pen and turned it once between his fingers. “Don’t dress this up like loving her makes you better at the job. Love makes men stupid. Seen more good men destroyed by that than whiskey.”