Page 33 of Angel’s Doll

“Make her come home.” I know the voice before the sentence finishes. Ian Durey is in my uncle’s house. “She runs damage control from here, where I can see her. If she talks to my cousins, we’re as good as dead.”

The palm lifts. Victor comes back at full volume, pitched too bright. “You can’t talk to Ian’s cousins, Sloane. You’d be signing my death warrant.”

“Why should I care?”

“Because family takes care of family!”

“Then explain the part where you let him take me as collateral.”

“Because when the project died, he gave me a choice.” Years of running his calendar taught me the sound of a story being built. The draft revises itself midsentence. “Liability or collateral. Collateral was the lesser evil. That’s the only reason I let him take you when he asked.”

He’s good. I’ll give him that. But he’s forgotten I was in the room when it happened, and Ian never offered him a choice. There was no weighing. There was Ian saying what would happen, and Victor nodding before the sentence ended.

“Give me the phone.” Ian. No seal, no distance.

Furniture scrapes. Then his voice, loud and clear, “You’ve got half an hour to get home, bitch. If you’re not standing in this kitchen⁠—”

“Ian. Put that down. Ian⁠—”

The gunshot is one flat crack that blows the speaker into static. Then three tones, then nothing, and I’m on my feet with the burner in my hand and nobody left inside it.

Bishop is first out of his chair. Then the whole room is moving, keys, holsters, Smoke’s voice on his phone raising the clubhouse.

“They were at the house,” I say. “Both of them.”

“One man’s shot. The other’s loose with a gun and a head full of everything he knows,” Bishop says. “That house doesn’t sit unattended until someone official wanders into it. We take it first.”

“We don’t know who’s left standing,” Smoke says. “We ride like it’s the worst answer.”

“I’m coming with you.”

Every head turns. Angel is shaking his head before I finish.

“Doll!”

“He’s still my uncle.” Strange words. True anyway. “I’m not asking to forgive him. I need to know what I started when I dialed that phone. Someone’s bleeding in that house. I won’t learn how it ends from a hallway.”

“You’d be riding toward the man who priced you. Maybe toward a gun.”

“Yes.”

He holds my eyes. I let him. I won’t pretend it’s safe. He has never lied to me that way, so I won’t hand him one either.

Bishop’s decision comes fast and out loud. “She rides in the truck. She stays in the truck. Doors locked, engine live, Compass on the keys. Anybody hates it, hate it moving.”

“In the truck means in the truck,” Angel growls.

“I know what I’m agreeing to.” I do. This isn’t obedience. It’s me choosing the closest seat I can live with.

Compass drives with the needle buried. Rain starts on the bridge and doesn’t quit.

At the gate, Compass rolls my window down and I lean out into the wet to dial the code. Like I told them before, he never changed the codes. That sort of technical stuff was my job. The bars swing away from us. A small, stupid victory. The cage opens from the outside now, and I’m the one with the key.

The driveway curls up under the old firs, and the house rises out of the dark smaller than I remember.

Compass stops fifty feet short and kills the lights. Angel is off the truck before it settles, Smoke and Bishop flowing wide, three men folding into the dark.

The security bulb burns over the kitchen door. The front door stands open, spilling light down the three steps into the rain.