"You look really happy." She says it like an accusation. "Who is making that noise?"
Behind me, the purr rolls through the mattress, low and steady. Garrett hasn't moved. My mouth curves before I can stop it.
"Someone who makes me happy, Mamá."
She stares at me through the screen for a long beat. Behind her, my brother Marco shoves my sister Lucia off the couch and Papi drops the nephew onto a pile of wrapping paper and Tía Valeria screams about the pozole.
"Bring him home sometime," Mami says.
The call ends. I set the phone down. Garrett's arm tightens around my waist. His face presses into the back of my neck and the purr deepens, and I hold the carved hummingbird in my free hand and watch the snow fall over the clearing.
My phone is still warm in my other hand. I open it. Scroll to drafts. The email to the Seattle clinic sits where I left it two weeks ago, half-finished, the cursor blinking afterI'm available to start March 1st.
I delete it.
I set the phone face-down on the nightstand, close my eyes and let the purr carry me back under.
Chapter 10
Garrett
Knox's name lights up my phone and I answer from under the '88 Ford with oil on my hands and grease in my fur and the wrench still locked on a transmission bolt.
He gives me the short version. A man walked into the clinic during Nina's shift. No appointment. Sat in the waiting room like he belonged there, and Colt, parked in the lot on day patrol, didn't flag him because the guy looked like every other walk-in with a cough and a magazine. Then Lily's school called about a meltdown and Colt left for twenty minutes, and in those twenty minutes Jess looked up from a chart and noticed the man hadn't moved, hadn't checked in, hadn't touched the magazine in his lap. He just sat there watching Nina work through the glass partition. Jess couldn't place why he made her skin crawl, then it clicked. She called Knox. The man left before anyone could reach him.
He didn't touch her, didn't speak to her, didn't need to.
The message was clear:We can reach her whenever we want.
I pull myself out from under the Ford. Rex is already at the parts counter with his phone in his hand, running plates from the parking lot camera Dawson installed last month. Colt is already hunched over Knox's laptop at the workbench, pulling records on the Kuznetsov family's known contacts in Oregon. He got back from Lily's school before I got off the phone. Dropped her with Sarah at the clubhouse and came straight here. His face is grey. He keeps looking at me and looking away.
I don't speak. Everything in me wants to put my fist through the wall, and the words I need aren't the kind that fix anything.
Knox rides. I ride with him, Rex behind us, Finn bringing up the rear. Four bikes down Main Street in the middle of the afternoon, the exhaust loud enough to turn heads on the sidewalk. Knox leads us to the Rusty Anchor. Colt's records traced the rental car to a room at the motel on Spruce, but the car is parked outside the Anchor.
Knox swings through the door first. Finn and Rex flank him. I come through last and have to turn sideways to clear the frame.
The two scouts sit at a booth in the back. The older one—the man from the bar, the one who called me Number Seven—sets his drink down. The younger one stands up.
"Garrett Maddox is a patched member of the Feral Sons MC." Knox's voice carries without volume. He doesn't need to raise it. "His debts to the Kuznetsov ring were paid in blood and years. If any representative of the Kuznetsov family enters Nightfall Cove again, they'll be leaving in pieces."
The older scout meets Knox's eyes. He holds them for two seconds, maybe less, and then his gaze shifts past Knox's shoulder to me.
I look at him the way I looked at him across the clearing on Christmas Eve.
He picks up his jacket. The younger one follows. They leave through the side door without a word, the bell swinging behind them. Gravel pops under the tires and the sound fades north toward the highway.
Finn exhales.
Knox turns to me. His hand comes up and grips my shoulder, a squeeze that says more than the speech he gave. He holds it a beat, then drops it.
"It's done," he says.
But it isn't.Knox has never dealt with the Kuznetsov family. I have. Almost two decades in their operation taught me how they work. They don't send two scouts unless there are six more you haven't seen. They don't back down from a bar speech. They smile, they leave, and they come back at three in the morning with a van and a sedative and the next time anyone sees you, you're behind a gate with a number on your back. Knox's words bought us days. Maybe a week. No more.
The clubhouse is warm and I sit at the oak table in Church and I can't stop turning it over.
The Kuznetsov family found me. They know about Nina. They know where she works, what shift she runs, what she looks like.The orc clan sent letters to Knox's cabin, and scouts have been photographed at the tree line east of town. Humans First spray-painted the clinic wall in red—MONSTERS OUT—and I covered the paint with two coats of beige from Webb's Hardware but the words are still underneath.
