Page 47 of Open Road

The bolt is home. The walls are what they are. The difference between shelter and fortification is not the walls themselves, it’s what you’re willing to do within them.

For the first time since the gate was left open at four in the morning with Rose asleep against Roam’s arm, I am not asking whether I have the right to be inside these walls.

I’m asking what the walls need from me.

And that is a whole different question.

Chapter Sixteen

WINCHESTER

The errand is the security review.

What I tell Creed before I leave is that Bare Assets needs a walkthrough, the Rivet Knights are in the city, and Dani should know the lockdown protocol. He looks at me for one second. The particular second of a man who knows me and runs a calculation before he responds to information. Then he nods and goes back to the table.

The errand is not only the security review.

South on I-95, the afternoon heat is sitting on the tank, the road flat and wide, and the traffic thin. The longer route adds eight minutes. Eight minutes is enough to think about what I’m doing without the compound visible in my mirrors.

What I want is a straightforward enough thing to name. Naming it doesn’t make it simple.

Nova.

The name has been sitting in my head since a Thursday morning three weeks ago, when I drove to the club to fix a schedule she’d already fixed and found her in the dressing room at the end of the hall with an earbud in and a nursing lecture paused on her screen. I came home with a confirmed drinks order I hadn’t needed to verify in person. Drove the eleven minutes back, parked, went to my room, and did not think about the rear left tire on her gray Honda still needing to be rotated.

Didn’t think about it much.

She’s twenty-six, building something, and has a plan with a timeline and the quiet determination of a woman who doesn’t announce what she’s doing. She does it. A favor economy withthe logic of a youngest child who grew up knowing how to get a yes without asking twice.

‘Carina confirmed. Owes Mia from the March conflict.’The schedule note has no sign-off or name because the work explains itself.

I’ve been watching her work for eight months.

The rule about women in club-adjacent space isn’t a moral position. It’s a calculation, made a long time ago by men with more experience than principle. You don’t complicate a business arrangement with a personal one because when the personal arrangement ends, the business one bleeds. I’ve cleaned up the aftermath before, and the rule is sound.

Nova is technically an employee of a club-owned business.

I’m splitting hairs, and I know it.

The bike runs south through the flat white heat, the road stretching ahead like it already knows where it’s going.

Bare Assets sits on its corner in the afternoon quiet. The lunch crowd has long since disappeared, and the evening crowd is still a couple of hours away. I circle the block once before pulling in and parking.

It’s the same street it always is. There’s a delivery van outside the print shop, doors open, driver moving boxes on a dolly. Two cars are at the nail salon next door, and a pickup across the street, with the engine off, nobody visible in the cab. Nothing is parked at the curb with an engine idling—no bikes.

The Rivet Knights are looking for the compound. Moving on a business in broad daylight is a statement they haven’t made yet. They’re running leverage, not attention, at least for now. Still, I check. Years of doing this have made it second nature, and the ones who stop looking are usually the ones who get blindsided.

There’s nothing is out of place, the street is clean, so I park and head inside.

The strip club in the afternoon is the same building it always is at this hour. Working lights, the cleaning crew done and gone, the bar restocked, and the bottles in their places, the air carrying the smell of a closed room and last night’s crowd. Dani is at the far end of the bar, going through the evening bookings with a clipboard in her hand.

She looks up when the staff door opens. “Winchester.”

“Walk me through the exits.” I set my jacket on the stool. “All three.”

She puts down the clipboard without question. Twenty years in this industry, and she doesn’t need a reason explained when the reason is already in the city. “The Rivet Knights,” she says.

“In Jacksonville… two days.”