Page 19 of Colt
Those monsters were going to pay.
Chapter 8
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— Colt —
“Ineed a minute.” The words came out flat. Controlled. The voice I used when nothing was controlled at all.
I didn’t wait for a response. I pushed back from the table and walked—not fast, not slow, just walked—toward the back hallway. Dutch must have followed because when I pushed into his office and the door swung shut behind me, it didn’t latch. A second later it opened and closed again, and then it was just us.
I made it to the far wall.
Then I slid down it.
My back hit the concrete and I kept going until I was on the floor, knees up, hands flat against the cold ground. The sound that came out of me didn’t belong to any version of myself I recognized. It tore out of my chest in a wave and I let it because Dutch was the only one here, and Dutch had seen me bleed before.
She was pregnant. She came to tell me and they—
I pressed the heel of my hands against my eyes. The images were already forming. Lilac walking through the clubhouse doors. Scared, excited, waiting for me. Finding something else instead.
“Don’t.” Dutch dropped down beside me, shoulder against mine. “Don’t go there.”
“I can’t not go there.”
“I know.” His hand landed on the back of my neck. Not soft—Dutch didn’t do soft—just heavy and steady. Keeping me tethered. “I know.”
What came out of me next I would never repeat to anyone. It was grief in its rawest form, the kind that’s half rage and half devastation, the kind that has nowhere to go. Dutch took it. He didn’t flinch, didn’t move, just kept his hand on my neck and let me fall apart.
I don’t know how long it lasted. Long enough that my throat was raw and my hands had stopped shaking. Long enough for something to form on the other side of it—the shape of what came next.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“You good?” Dutch asked.
“No.”
“You going back out there?”
I breathed. Once. Twice. “Yeah.”
He stood first and held out a hand. I took it. He hauled me up and didn’t say anything else, which was one of the reasons he was the only man I’d have let see that.
I straightened my cut. Rolled my shoulders. Put myself back together piece by piece until I looked like someone who could hold a conversation.
Then we went back out.
?
Betty was still at the table, hands folded. Graham was beside her, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. At the far end of the table, Bernard had his briefcase open, papers spread in front of him, quietly comparing everything with Glitch—the two ofthem speaking in low voices over the evidence still pulled up on the screens. The rest of my brothers had spread out around the room, but none of them had left.
I crossed the room and stood in front of Betty.
“The amnesia,” I said. “Explain it to me. All of it.”
Betty looked at me—measuring, I thought, deciding how much I could hold. Then she nodded.
“Head trauma,” she said. “What was done to her that night was severe. The brain protects itself when it can’t survive what’s happened to it. It closes doors.” She paused. “Sometimes those doors open again. Sometimes they don’t.”
