CHAPTER 24 – WHAT DO YOU NEED
929 Words
LAYLA'S POV
Harper's words are still sitting in my chest when I knock on Bishop's door the next evening - they're starting to wonder if he's the one who's been lying. The crack is spreading. Now I need to find out who's willing to stand on my side of it.
Bishop's apartment is above the garages - small, dense, smelling like oil and old leather, and like a man who has been in one place long enough that the place has absorbed him. The garage below is quiet. I can hear him moving around inside before he opens the door.
He looks at me. Doesn't seem surprised. Steps back and lets me in without a word.
I don't bring documentation. No financial records, no accusations, no evidence. I bring a photograph.
My mother. I found it in my father's office years ago and asked to keep it - Elaine Rowan at an Iron Howl gathering, somewhere in the mid-nineties, laughing at something off-camera with her head thrown back and her hand on my father's arm. The kind of photograph that shows you who a person was when they weren't performing for anyone.
I sit across from Bishop and place it on the table between us.
He looks at it and his face immediately changes - not dramatically, not the way Colt's face changes or the way Rafe's jaw tightens. It's smaller than that. A softening behind the eyes. A loosening of something he's been holding rigid for months.
"You knew my mother," I say. "You were at her funeral. You held me when I was three years old because I wouldn't stop crying and I didn't understand where she'd gone."
He doesn't speak. His eyes are wet but he doesn't look away from the photograph.
"I'm not asking you to fight for me, Bishop." I keep my voice steady. "I'm asking you to remember who you swore to protect."
The silence that follows is the kind where you can hear someone thinking and actually wrestling with something they've been avoiding. I can read the argument in the small movements of his face. The tightening of his jaw. The release. The tightening again. A man who's been carefully neutral for months being asked to locate his actual convictions.
"You look like her," he says finally in a voice rougher than I've ever heard from him. "Same eyes. Same way of sitting in a room and making people forget you're the most dangerous person in it."
I don't respond to that because if I do, my voice will break, and I need to be steady right now.
"I need to think," he says.
"I understand."
I stand up and pick up the photograph.
"Leave it."
I look at him.
"Leave it," he says again, quieter. Like the words cost him something.
I put the photograph back on the table. I nod. I walk out.
In the hallway below the garages, I stop and lean against the wall and breathe.
I don't have his vote. I don't need it yet. What I have is a seed planted in the right soil - a memory of my mother in the hands of a man who swore his oath to my father and has spent two years watching my father's table get hollowed out by his niece.
I don't need Bishop to decide tonight. I just needed him to feel something he'd stopped letting himself feel.
I think about Pearl saying quiet, patient, right up until she wasn't. I think I understand now. The patience isn't passivity. It's timing. It's knowing when the right moment is "not yet" and holding yourself in place until it becomes "now."
Pearl is holding. Bishop is feeling. Gears is documenting. Harper is strategising. The triplets are - well, the triplets are doing several things, most of which make my pulse do something inappropriate when I think about them too hard.
The point is: I'm not alone anymore. And every day the list of people who see what Megan really is gets longer.
I'm walking back toward the main building when my phone buzzes.
Gears.
Found something else. Meet me in the garage tomorrow morning. Bring nothing written.
I read it twice. The instruction to bring nothing written means whatever he found is bigger than the first round of financial irregularities. You don't tell someone to leave a paper trail for small discoveries. You tell them that when the discovery is the kind that makes people dangerous.
I put my phone away and look up at the compound - the lights in the windows, the bikes in the lot, the building my grandfather built and my father ran and my cousin is slowly draining dry.
Tomorrow morning. The garage. Whatever Gears found, I'll be ready for it.
I walk inside and pass Rafe in the corridor. He glances at my face, reading me in two seconds, and then something in his expression shifts.
"You went to see Bishop."
It's not a question. Of course it's not a question. Rafe sees everything.
"How do you know?"
"You have that look." He pauses. "The one you get when you've just done something smart and you're trying not to feel good about it."
I almost smile. "Is that a compliment?"
"It's an observation." His grey eyes hold mine for a beat longer than necessary. "Goodnight, softie."
He walks away. And I stand in the hallway with my chest doing something warm and complicated and I think about how a man who communicates in single sentences somehow always says exactly the right thing.
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