The cabin appears through the firs, porch light glowing against the snow. He helps me off the bike, his hand spanning my waist, steadying me on the frozen ground. The air hits the places his body kept warm and I lean into him before I can stop myself.
He doesn't pull away. His arm comes around my shoulders, and we stand in the clearing with the snow falling and the bike ticking cool behind us.
I press my forehead against his chest.
The purr deepens.
Chapter 8
Garrett
The man at the end of the bar doesn't belong in Nightfall Cove.
I know it before I know why. My body registers a threat before my mind catches up, something I learned in the pits at ten and have never needed to unlearn. He sits four stools down from Colt, one leg crossed over the other, a tumbler of brown liquor in front of him he hasn't touched. Human. Mid-fifties. Weathered face, grey at the temples, wearing a jacket that doesn't belong on anyone in this bar.
Colt is telling a story about a customer who tried to pay for a new clutch in venison. Rex laughs into his beer, his shoulders loose for the first time in a week. Nina pushed me out the door this morning with both palms flat against me.Go see your brothers. I'll be fine. I have wine and a bath and no patience for you brooding at me.So I'm here. And the man at the end of the bar watches me over the rim of his glass.
He sets the tumbler down. Slides off the stool and walks the length of the bar.
"Number Seven."
Colt's story dies mid-sentence. Rex's beer stops halfway to his lips.
Fifteen years since anyone has called me that. Fifteen years, and the sound of it drops into me like a stone down a well. All the way to the bottom, where the water is black and I don't go anymore. My hand closes around the mug in front of me hard enough that I feel the glass give a fraction before I remember I like this bar and I like the man who owns it.
The man smiles, pleasant and conversational.
"Didn't think you were still breathing," he says. "The Kuznetsov family's been wondering what happened to their best fighter. Crowds still ask about you. You'd be flattered."
Rex is on his feet.
Colt's hand goes to his gun and stays there, the bar rail between it and the scout.
I don't move.
The purr that has been a fixture inside me since Nina moved into my cabin drops out in an instant, like a flame snuffed under a palm. What replaces it is the old stillness. The pit stillness. The quiet I used to drop into before the gate opened and whatever they'd brought to kill me that night came through it. My heartbeat slows. My breath evens. My vision narrows to a corridor with the scout's throat at the end of it.
I look at him.
He reads the look. He takes half a step back before he catches himself and makes it look like a shift of weight.
"Easy, big man," he says. The smile doesn't move but the eyes above it do. "I'm not here to strong-arm anyone. Courtesy visit. The family's expanding. New venues, bigger gates, better money.We're putting out feelers. And your handler sent me to say the door's open if you ever want to come home."
Home.The word from the mouth of a man who once hosed the blood off me with a pressure washer in a concrete stall.
He slides a card across the bar toward me. Thick stock, black on black, a phone number in silver.
"He sends his regards."
I pick up the card.
I turn it over once in my hand. The fingers that have cradled a newborn orc against me are the same fingers that once broke a jaguar shifter's neck to keep him from breaking mine first. Both facts sit inside me at the same time. I have been carrying them together for fifteen years.
I tear the card in half.
I set the halves on the bar.
The scout's smile widens. "That's okay." He straightens his cuffs. "We know where to find you now. Pretty little town you have here with a pretty little clinic." He taps the edge of the bar, a thinking gesture. "I hear you've got a pretty little nurse, too. New to town. Phoenix transplant."
