Dark eyes. The scar catching the low light. His weight braced above me, both arms either side of my head, and the full reality of him right there—the size of him, the restrained strength, the intensity that never fully turns off, hits me somewhere between my chest and my stomach and doesn't stop.
"Harper."
"Still here," I say.
His jaw tightens. He drops his forehead to mine and for a moment we just breathe—both of us, the rain on the roof, the dying fire in the next room, the particular silence of a cabin in the mountains when the rest of the world has gone away.
His hand moves down my side.
I make a sound that is completely undignified and he responds to it with a focus that makes coherent thought genuinely impossible and I am just starting to lose track of everything when—
His phone goes.
The ringtone cuts through the cabin like a blade.
He doesn't move for exactly two seconds. I feel those two seconds—the tension in his arms, the decision happening behind his eyes. Then he reaches across me to the nightstand and looks at the screen.
His face changes.
Not dramatically. Just… closes. The Iron Havoc sergeant-at-arms reassembling himself over the man who was here a second ago.
"Judge," he says into the phone.
I sit up. Pull my shirt from the floor and put it back on. I already know.
Whatever Judge says takes less than a minute. Ronan listens without a word, jaw set, eyes on the middle distance. Then, "How many." A pause. "On my way."
He hangs up.
He's reaching for his own shirt before the call is fully ended. The efficiency of it, boots, shirt, cut, speaks of a man who has been called out of warm places into dangerous ones more times than he can count. No hesitation. No apology. Just the muscle memory of it, clean and practiced.
He stands at the foot of the bed and looks at me.
"Blackridge," he says. "Three of them at the Tavern. Blaze is already in it."
"Go," I say.
He doesn't move immediately.
"You're not going back to Cedar Street tonight." Not a question. Not a request. "They've been asking about the clinic and I don't have answers yet. Until I do, you stay here."
"Ronan, I'll be fine—"
"Harper." He says my name the way he says everything important, quiet, final, no room for debate. "The bolt on the front door. Use it."
I hold his gaze for a moment.
"Okay," I say.
He crosses to the door. Stops with one hand on the frame, I've noticed he does this, pauses in doorways like he's giving himself one last second before the world gets back in. He turns and looks at me one more time.
There's nothing soft in his face. But there's a shift there that didn't used to be, something it costs him to show, and I think I'm only starting to learn the vocabulary of Ronan Ryder well enough to read it.
Then he's gone.
The Harley starts up in the dark.
I listen to it move down the ridge road, the engine note dropping as he takes the first curve, then the second, then gone, swallowed by rain and distance and whatever's waiting for him at the bottom of the mountain.
