Chapter 5 House Rules

Raven

The first rule was that I couldn't leave.

"Not alone," Damon said. He stood at the head of the kitchen table with a coffee mug in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other, reading it like a judge sentencing someone. "Anywhere outside this compound, somebody rides with you. Rule two. Your phone stays on, and you answer when we call."

"Anything else, Your Honor?"

"Rule three. You don't touch my office, the garage safe, or the ledgers."

"Your safe is empty."

"The ledgers aren't."

I leaned back in my chair. Morning light fell through the kitchen window in dusty stripes. My back still ached from the garage floor, and my ears still carried a faint ring, but I had slept four hours with a chair under the doorknob, and it was enough to feel stubborn. "My turn."

"You don't get a turn."

"Then I don't get a thirty days either."

He stared at me. Across the table, Jace made a small sound into his coffee that could have been a cough or a laugh. His forearm was wrapped in fresh gauze, and he had the tired, rumpled look of a man who hadn't been to bed.

"Go on," Damon said.

"My gun stays mine. My room has a lock. And nobody goes through my bag."

"Two out of three."

"Which one are you cutting?"

"The bag."

"Absolutely not."

"Raven." He set down the mug. "Somebody put a bomb in my garage last night. I don't know you well enough to know what you're carrying. Dez checks the bag. You watch her do it. That's the deal."

I thought about it for exactly three seconds. The flash drive wasn't in the bag, and he'd find nothing to take. "Fine."

"And the lock," Jace said, "is a waste of everyone's time. I can pick it in ten seconds."

"Prove it."

"Now?"

"Now."

He grinned for the first time since the explosion, and some of the weight went out of the room. I led him upstairs to the little room at the end of the hall, and he knelt in front of the door with a bent paperclip and two fingers' worth of attitude.

It took him forty seconds. I counted. He swore twice and bumped his head on the knob.

"Ten seconds," I said.

"That was a warm up."

"It was a disaster."

"It was a first draft." He stood up, rubbing his forehead, and gave me a look I didn't have a name for yet. Part apology, part dare. "Fine. Your lock is better than I thought. Sleep tight, Raven."

Downstairs, the introductions went by in a blur. I let them.

Dez Navarro searched my bag with the calm hands of someone defusing a bomb, and when she finished, she held out her palm for a handshake like she was checking my pulse. "Medic. Tattoos on weekends. I'll stitch you up for free, but I charge for lectures."

"Noted."

"Good. You're skinnier than your photo."

I froze. "What photo?"

"The one you carried around last night." She shrugged, and the wrench tattoo on her forearm rolled with the movement. "Relax. I only looked at it for two seconds."

"You looked at it for a lot longer than two."

"Did I?" She zipped my bag. "I get dizzy around smoke."

She walked off whistling. I watched her go and tucked that away with everything else.

A kid with a buzz cut and a patch that said PROSPECT ducked through the doorway next. He couldn't have been twenty. He grabbed my duffel from the floor before I could stop him. "Ollie Brandt, ma'am. I'll carry that."

"I'm not a ma'am."

"Sorry, ma'am."

"Raven."

"Raven. Right." He went pink to the ears. When I offered him a five for his trouble, he looked at it like I'd offered him a snake. "I can't take that. Gus says prospects don't take tips. Gus says it builds character."

"Does it?"

"Mostly it builds blisters."

I liked him immediately, which was inconvenient.

The man who must have been Gus stepped out of the pantry with a coffee pot. Sixty-something, big shoulders gone soft with age, a white mustache like a push broom. He smiled when he saw Ollie. Then he turned, and his eyes landed on me, and the smile fell off his face.

"Calloway," he said. His voice came out rough. "You're Cole's sister."

"Yes."

"You have his eyes." The coffee pot trembled in his hand, and he set it down fast, spilling a little. "I'm sorry. Sit. Let me get you a cup."

"You knew him?"

"Everybody knew him." He poured with careful, shaking hands. Coffee slopped over the rim. He didn't seem to notice. "He was a good boy. A good, good boy."

Something cold nudged my leg. I looked down.

A fat, scarred bulldog was leaning his whole weight against my shin, eyes half shut, breathing like a leaky bellows. A notch had been bitten out of one ear, and a pale line ran across his muzzle.

"That's Biscuit," Gus said, and some color came back into his face. "He doesn't like anyone."

"He's leaning on me."

"I know." Gus stared at the dog. "That's what worries me."

I scratched Biscuit behind the torn ear, and he groaned like I'd cured him of something. Then a shadow crossed the doorway, and the whole room went still.

The man who walked in was built like a refrigerator, with a gray braid over one shoulder and a face that hadn't changed expression in years. He wore a patch that read SERGEANT AT ARMS. He didn't say hello. He looked at me from my boots to my hair and back again, taking his time, like he was memorizing a license plate.

"Bishop," Damon said. "Raven."

Bishop nodded once. That was all.

"Does he talk?" I whispered to Jace.

"Only at funerals."

"That's comforting."

"It was supposed to be funny."

"I know."

Another voice cut through the kitchen. "So this is her."

A lean man in a leather vest stood in the back doorway, one shoulder against the frame, a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. Dark hair, a thin scar through his lip, and eyes with nothing friendly in them at all. The patch on his chest read ROAD CAPTAIN. Rafe Delgado.

"I heard about last night," he said. "Heard you came to shoot the boss."

"That's one way to say it."

"Is there another?"

"I came for answers. The gun was extra."

He smirked without any humor in it. "Cute." He pushed off the doorframe and looked at Damon. "A dead man's baby sister walks into our house with a pistol, and she gets coffee and a room upstairs. This club doesn't need her. It doesn't need her trouble."

"That's enough," Damon said.

"Is it?" Rafe chewed the toothpick. "Because I've seen what trouble costs, boss. I've buried what trouble costs."

He left. The screen door banged behind him.

The kitchen stayed quiet for a beat. Ollie studied his shoes. Gus rubbed his eyes. Biscuit growled low in his chest and didn't take his weight off my leg.

"Well," Jace said. "He likes you."

"I noticed."

Later that afternoon, Damon cornered me on the porch, where I was pretending to read a bike repair manual so nobody would ask me questions.

"You haven't asked where the flash drive is," he said.

"You haven't asked where it is either."

"I figured you'd lie."

"I'm not a liar."

"I'm not saying you are." He leaned on the railing, close enough that I could smell soap and engine oil. "I'm saying you'd be foolish to tell me."

"Then you've learned something."

For a moment his mouth twitched, like he was almost amused. "So it's not in the building."

"No."

"Good."

"Why good?"

"Because if somebody breaks in again, they'll find nothing. And you'll still be alive." He pushed away from the railing. "That's the only thing I care about tonight."

It wasn't an answer. It was almost a kindness, and I didn't trust it, so I went on staring at the same page of the manual until he left.

I wasn't careless. Four years of preparing for this had taught me that much. The flash drive sat inside a button tin on a shelf in Mrs. Odom's flat, two floors above the laundromat, between a jar of orange marmalade and a box of her late husband's cufflinks. She was eighty-one and deaf in one ear, and she thought I was a nice girl who needed somewhere to keep her sewing supplies. A friend I trusted had instructions taped inside her cupboard. Miss three check-ins, and copies would be mailed to a reporter in the next city. Nobody could take the drive from me without taking it from Mrs. Odom first, and nobody was going to think of Mrs. Odom.

That night I locked my door. I wedged a chair under the knob. I put my gun under the pillow and my knife under the mattress, and I lay in the dark listening to the building breathe, the old pipes ticking, a motorcycle coughing somewhere far away.

Sleep came in pieces. I dreamed of the bridge. I dreamed of glass.

I woke at three with my heart pounding, certain I'd heard something.

The room was silent. The chair was still jammed under the knob. The lock was still turned.

I turned my head.

On the pillow beside me, laid neatly in a pair, was a set of worn leather gloves. Cracked at the knuckles. Stained at the fingertips. I knew those gloves. I had known them since I was twelve years old, because they had belonged to my brother, and they still smelled like engine oil.

I looked at the door. Still locked…