Knox nods. "I know. But that's not all." He pulls a folded sheet from the same drawerand slides it across to me. A photograph—grainy, taken from a distance. Two figures at the tree line east of town, heavy builds, cloaked.
"Dawson spotted them yesterday morning. Sat there for two hours, then left."
I study the photograph. The builds are orc. The cloaks are clan-issue, the kind the Bloodstone scouts wear on long-range patrols.
"They're not writing letters anymore," Knox says. "They're scouting. I'm doubling patrols and keeping this between us and the brothers. The women don't need this right now."
I shake my head.
"Sarah's got a three-month-old, Gore. Jess is pregnant. I'm not putting this on them until I have a plan."
And Nina. Nina who isn't club, isn't claimed, and has no bond to warn her if something comes through the tree line while she's working. He's wrong. I don't have the words for why yet, but he's wrong.
I shake my head again.
"We'll talk about it. Let's not worry them yet, okay?"
I nod. Not agreement. He knows it's not.
I walk out of his office and climb onto my bike and head to the clinic to make sure she's safe.
The clinic sits at the corner of Main and Third.
Someone has spray-painted the east wall in red. The paint is still wet.
MONSTERS OUT.
Four feet high across the siding between the two windows on the east wall. I sit on my bike with the engine idling and look at the red paint on the wall of the building where Nina works, and every territorial instinct I own locks onto it at once.
Someone put this on the wall of her work.
I pull the flip phone out of my cut. Photograph the graffiti and then send it to Knox. Then I turn the bike around and ride to Webb's Hardware. Lucas Carter brings me a gallon of beige exterior and a roller without asking. I pay in cash, ride back, and cover the paint. The first coat doesn't take. I do a second.
The sun is starting to set by the time the siding is clean. Her shift ends at six. I'm on the bike and moving before the clinic door opens.
I don't go home. I take the coast road north and ride until the engine heat works through my legs and the cold works through everything else. By the time I turn back, the sky is dark and the cabin windows glow against the snow.
Through the front window she sits on the couch with the phone pressed to her ear, the quilt over her lap, her legs curled under her. One hand in the air, moving the way her hands move when she's telling a story—ay, Mami, no, I'm telling you—and the sound of her laugh carries through the glass.
I stop the bike at the edge of the clearing. Cut the engine. Snow falls in thin flakes that catch in the floodlight off the porch.
I sit in the dark and watch the light in my window.
The purr starts, but it doesn't roll the way it has all day. It catches. Stutters against my ribs like something pressing outward that can't find the exit. It aches. Not the low easy hum from the breakfast table or the steady thrum under the truck—this one has teeth. This one knows about the letters in my cut and the cloaked figures at the tree line and the red paint I scraped off the wall of her building an hour ago.
My mother called this the finding sound. She told me once, before the raiders came, that I'd know when it happened. She said it would feel like my chest had outgrown my body.
She didn't tell me it would feel like fear.
I'm falling in love with her.And I've spent the afternoon reading threats addressed to my brothers, studying photographs of scouts at our borders, and covering slurs on the wall of the building where she works. Loving her doesn't just risk me. It puts her in the centre of everything I've spent fifteen years trying to stay clear of.
The terrifying part isn't that she might leave. It's that she might stay, and I might let her. I've survived everything life has thrown at me. I don't think I'd survive losing this.
Chapter 7
Nina
Fourteen motorcycles and a flatbed truck loaded with wrapped presents, and I can't get my arms around the man I'm riding with.
