She holds my gaze. Three full seconds of it. Then she tilts her chin and goes inside for her jacket.
She's back in ninety seconds.
I nod once.
I don’t tell her the rest of what I’m thinking—that her hands were shaking in the cold after that call, that she called it anold problemwith the weight of someone who’s dealt with it before. I don’t ask who was on the phone. I don’t need to. The Blackridge MC at her workplace, the way she held that phone in the dark—my gut does the math anyway.
Three tours taught me to trust that math.
The cabin sits at the end of a dirt track off the east ridge, pines on three sides, a valley drop on the fourth. No neighbors. No traffic. Only Judge knows exactly where it is, and Blaze—who found it once while trying to stop Dante Navarro from going anywhere.
Harper walks in without waiting to be invited.
She takes in the bare walls, the stone fireplace, the single shelf of books, the only proof that someone actually lives here instead of just shelters here. Her eyes move over everything carefully, the way she takes everything in, and she doesn't fill the silence with noise.
"It suits you," she says.
I start building the fire. It gives my hands something to do that isn't reaching for her, which at close range in a small cabin is a genuine operational concern.
She sheds her jacket. Hangs it on the chair back like she's done it before. Sits on the floor in front of the fireplace when the flames catch, knees up, hands out to the heat. Her hair is loose and the fire turns it amber at the edges and I sit in the chair behind her and don't pretend I'm looking anywhere else.
The wind pushes against the cabin walls. The pines move. The fire settles.
"Those men asking about the clinic," she says, to the flames. "Should I be worried?"
"Not while I know where you are."
She turns her head slightly at that. Just slightly. Doesn't push further, which I appreciate, because my answers past that point get complicated.
We go quiet again. The good kind.
Then she shifts, turns fully to face me, sitting cross-legged on the floor, firelight full on her face. Looking at me with that direct, unhurried attention she gives everything.
Then she reaches up.
Her fingers find the scar.
I go completely still.
She traces it with two fingertips, jaw to cheekbone, the full length, slowly. Like she's reading something the rest of the world never bothered trying to understand. No pity in it. No performance. Just her hands doing what her hands do, which is make contact with things that hurt and refuse to look away.
I close my hand around her wrist.
"Careful," I say. Low.
She doesn't pull back. Her pulse beats against my fingers, fast and honest.
"Why?" she asks.
I lean forward.
Close the space between us until I can see the exact color of her eyes in the firelight and the way the flames move inside them. Her breath reaches my jaw. Her wrist is still in my hand and the distance between us is nothing now, just heat and firelight and the full weight of everything I've been holding back since she walked into the bar.
"Because I might not stop," I say.
The wind hits the cabin hard.
She doesn't move away.
