Page 46 of Open Road

Rose has moved on to explaining the proper crayon grip to Mr. Rabbit, and Jet watches her for a moment.

“I was taken,” she says. “By men working for Hector Sanchez. I was leverage for my brother, Hawk. The Crimson Wheelers held me.” Her voice is level, the kind of level that takes practice to achieve. “I was there for a while.”

The room is quiet.

“When they brought me here…” she pauses, and the mug goes back into both hands. “The first time Devil locked this bolt, I thought I’d come out of my skin, being locked in somewhere, even somewhere safe.” Her eyes find mine. “The sound of it.”

“The sound of it is different now,” I say.

“Yes.”

I think about Craig’s hallway, and the particular hollow sound of an interior door closing when you’re on the wrong side of it. The way locks sound like different things depending on who’s turning them. “Different isn’t always worse,” I say.

Jet looks at me with those dark eyes. “No,” she says. “It isn’t.”

Rose holds up a finished horse for evaluation. It is primarily purple, with some green decisions around the mane.

“Very realistic,” Jet says.

Rose examines it critically. “Horses can be purple.”

“Absolutely, they can.”

Rose returns to the page, satisfied.

Devil has produced a deck of cards from somewhere. This seems to be a skill she brings to these situations, the quiet filling of time with something the hands can do while the mind is elsewhere. She deals without asking, four hands, the movements practiced. Lucy picks up hers. Jet reaches for hers. I hold mine.

Roam is on the other side of that bolt. Not pacing, he doesn’t pace, doesn’t perform worry. He’s wherever Creed has put him, doing whatever the club needs done, his body between this room and whatever Axel Vane has brought into Jacksonville. I know this without knowing the specifics because it’s what he does. It’s what he’s built for. It’s in the way he moves through a room, positions himself between the table and the door in Church without making a production of it, and stands at the porch edge to put himself between the yard and me on a night when there was nothing specific to guard against.

He guards because it’s in the very fabric of him.

The knowing should feel like something Craig manufactured, the reliance on a man’s physical presence as safety. Craig was careful about that. He made himself the only available safety so the dependency became absolute. I know the mechanism and have turned it over and examined it from every angle.

What I feel now is not that.

Roam never made himself the only option. He handed me the bolt. He showed me where the exits are. He put Mr. Rabbit in the doorway at four in the morning and didn’t wait for acknowledgment. Safety in this building has never been something he withholds to manufacture need, but something he distributes and then steps back from.

The bolt on this door is mine.

I close my hand around my cards. “Your deal was generous,” I tell Devil.

Devil looks at my hand. “You’ve got nothing.”

“Nothing’s something.”

The corner of her mouth moves. “That’s the spirit.”

Lucy lays a card down with unnecessary confidence. Jet studies hers with the focus of someone who intends to win. Rose has abandoned the crayons and is attempting to participate in the card game with no rules and complete commitment.

Outside this room, somewhere in this building, the men are running the numbers. Church without ceremony. Reaper thinking in straight lines about threats and countermeasures. Winchester calculating. Scout being the version of himself that the serious moments require, the version most people outside these walls don’t know exists.

Roam.

The compound is stone, weight, two decades of decisions made at that worn table, and tonight, it is pointed outwardat Axel Vane, at everything the second directory means, at the machine Craig built for men he never understood.

Rose plays a card with enormous conviction—it is the entirely wrong one.

“Excellent move,” Devil says, without missing a beat.