Iron Daughter

IRON DAUGHTER Chapter 15

"Who's Eli."

Raine asked it the second the nurse disappeared back through the double doors, no patience left in her for letting Cash sit on whatever he was sitting on, not tonight, not after everything else that had already cracked open between midnight and now.

Cash dragged a hand down his face, the gesture of a man buying himself three extra seconds he didn't actually have. "My brother."

That stopped her cold. "You have a brother."

"Had. Have. I don't know anymore, honestly, depends on the week." He finally looked at her, something tired and old in his expression, tired in a way that went back further than tonight. "Eli's two years younger than me. He left Route's End about five months after you did. Different reasons. Similar result."

"I never knew you had a brother."

"You knew him. You just knew him as Eli Boone, prospect, the kid who used to follow me and Wren and Marcus's crew around trying to get included in things he was too young for." Something flickered across Cash's face, complicated, half fond and half pained. "He was fifteen when you left. You wouldn't have paid him much mind."

Raine sat back down slowly, the plastic chair creaking under her, trying to place a face to the name and coming up mostly blank, a vague memory of a skinny kid hanging around the garage doorway, always a half step behind the older boys, always trying too hard. She remembered now, faintly, the way Wren used to find excuses to walk past the garage when the younger prospects were working, how Raine had chalked it up at the time to teenage boredom and nothing more, never once considering there might have been a specific reason behind it.

"Why would Wren be asking for him. After a crash. In a hospital."

Cash was quiet long enough that the silence itself became an answer, and when he finally spoke, his voice had gone low, careful, the voice of a man picking his way across ground he wasn't sure would hold his weight.

"Because I think they've been in love with each other since they were teenagers, and I think everybody in that club, including me, spent years pretending not to notice because it was easier than dealing with what it would mean."

"What would it mean."

"Eli left because of Wren. Not the way you think. He didn't leave because she broke his heart or any of that. He left because Denise found out how he felt about her and made it very clear that a nobody prospect with no family money and no standing in the club was never going to be good enough to stand next to her daughter, and she made Eli's life miserable enough about it that he packed up and left before he turned seventeen." Cash's jaw worked. "I let him go. I was supposed to look out for him and I let Denise run him off because fighting her on it would've meant fighting my own family's standing in the club too, and I was a coward about that the same way everybody in this family's apparently been a coward about something, one way or another."

Raine absorbed that slowly, turning it over, fitting it against everything else she'd learned tonight, a pattern emerging now that she didn't like the shape of, Denise's fingerprints on every quiet cruelty this club had apparently produced for the better part of a decade.

"Where's Eli now."

"Jacksonville, last I heard. We don't talk much. He calls on my birthday. I call on his. That's about the extent of it these days." Cash pulled out his phone, scrolling for a contact he clearly hadn't used in a while, thumb hovering over the screen. "I should call him. If Wren's asking for him like this, hurt, scared, he'd want to know. Whatever's between them, whatever history, he'd still want to know."

"You think he'd come."

"I think if Eli's loved her as long as I'm guessing he has, nothing short of dying would keep him from getting in a truck the second he heard she was hurt." Cash hit call before she could respond, phone pressed to his ear, and Raine watched his face as it rang, watched the tension building in his jaw with each unanswered second.

It went to voicemail. Cash left a short message, Eli, it's Cash, call me back, it's about Wren, she's okay but she's asking for you, and hung up looking more unsettled than he had a minute ago, not less.

"Now what."

"Now we wait, same as everything else tonight." He pocketed the phone, rubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand, exhaustion finally catching up to both of them in the fluorescent quiet of the waiting room, the vending machine down the hall humming its same indifferent hum, the whole building running on the low idle of a place that never actually slept, just quieted down between emergencies.

The automatic doors at the far end of the hall hissed open, cold night air rolling in ahead of whoever had just walked through them, and Raine turned along with Cash toward the sound out of pure reflex, expecting Duke, expecting Marcus, expecting anyone but the tall, road worn stranger standing in the doorway with a duffel bag over one shoulder and an expression on his face that looked like he'd driven through the night without stopping once, scanning the waiting room with the specific urgency of a man who already knew exactly who he was looking for.

Cash was on his feet before Raine fully registered who it was.

"Eli."

The stranger's eyes found Cash's face and something in his shoulders dropped half an inch, relief and dread arriving together. "She texted me around midnight. Said she needed to talk, said it couldn't wait. I've been driving since, phone was dead, I didn't even know about the accident until I stopped for gas twenty minutes ago and saw your message come through." His gaze swept past Cash to Raine, recognition flickering there too, slower, uncertain. "Is she okay. Somebody tell me she's okay."