They don't have that leverage anymore. Nina is behind us. Safe. Standing in a clearing with a phone and the number of a man who has never failed to come when I needed him.
The hummingbird sits in my jacket pocket. I grabbed it off the counter when I heard the knock, three sharp raps that echoed across the clearing like a summons. My fist closed around the carving before I opened the door. Instinct, maybe. The same instinct that made me carve it in the first place, the need to hold proof that these fists can make something instead of break it.
My body drops into the old rhythms without asking permission. Heartbeat slowing, breath evening out, peripheral vision widening to take in the locks, the door handles, the distance between my seat and the tree line beyond the glass. The pit trained this into me—the predatory calm before the gate opened—and I hated it for years because the calm made me good at what they forced me to do.
I don't hate it now. The calm has a purpose the pit never gave it.
The older man turns.
"You made the right call, Number Seven." His voice carries the same pleasant, conversational tone he used on the porch. The tone of a man who trades in bodies and calls it business. "One season. The family gets their return, the investors are satisfied, and you walk out clean. I've seen the contract. It's fair."
Fair. A contract for a cage.
My handler used to talk like this in the van between fights.Big crowd tonight, Seven. They love you out there. Make it a good show and I'll leave the muzzle off tomorrow.The same friendly cadence, the same assumption that the animal in the back seat is listening because animals don't have better options.
But the last time I sat in a vehicle like this, I had nothing. No cabin with pine boughs strung over the doorframes. No brother who gave me a name and a seat at his table. No woman whose off-key singing through a bathroom door rewired years of silence.
I had a number and a muzzle and concrete under my knees. I had years behind me and the rest of my life stretching out like a sentence with no end and no reason to believe anyone would come.
Now I have every reason.
The highway curves along the coast. Through the window, the Pacific sits black and flat under a sky with no moon. The trees thin as we climb toward the headland and the pavement straightens. I read the terrain the way I read every room the pit put me in. Two-lane highway. No shoulder. Douglas firs tight on both sides. The tree line sits eight feet from the asphalt. If the vehicle stops, I can reach the trees in four strides.
I don't need the trees. I need the road behind us, and what's coming up it.
The purr is gone. Died when Nina's face broke in the clearing, when my thumbs brushed her cheekbones and I gave her two words instead of the hundred I owed her. The silence in my chest sits where the hum should be, a hollow frequency, an absence so total that my ribs ache around the shape of it.
"The ring's got a new venue in Bend," the older man says. "Converted warehouse, climate-controlled. No more outdoor fights in January. Viktor's put in heated pens, too. Ventilation. It's a different operation now."
The younger one taps his thumb against the wheel and glances at the mirror. His eyes move over me and move away. He'snervous. The older one isn't. The older one sat in Nina's waiting room and watched her work through the glass partition, drove past my cabin at a crawl, stood on my porch and used the woman I love as a bargaining chip, and he's never once considered that I might be more than the animal his employer put a number on.
I let him keep thinking it.
Twenty minutes later, headlights in the mirror.
Not one set. Five, six, staggered in a line, the beams cutting through the dark behind us. The growl of engines reaches the SUV before the lights do, a sound I know in my bones, the low rolling thunder of V-twins running in formation, the exhaust harmonics of bikes I've ridden beside since Knox pulled me out of the ash.
The older man checks the side mirror.
"We've got company," the younger one says.
The bikes close the gap. Through the rear window I see them. Knox at the centre on his black Heritage, his cut visible under the streetlight. Finn on his left. Rex and Dawson flanking wide. Colt bringing up the rear. Every patched brother.
The road ahead narrows where the headland meets the tree line, a stretch where two vehicles can't pass without one giving ground. Knox accelerates into it. The formation widens. Bikes fan across both lanes and the SUV has nowhere to go.
The younger one brakes. The tyres grab gravel and the SUV slides to a stop at an angle across the centre line.
Knox parks his bike twenty feet from the bumper. He kills the engine. The brothers kill theirs. The quiet that follows rings louder than the exhaust.
The third man reaches under his jacket.
My grip closes around his forearm. The bones shift under the pressure and I hold his eyes while his face drains white. He lets go of whatever he reached for.
Knox swings off his bike and walks toward the SUV with his shoulders squared and his arms loose at his sides. He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to. The look on his face says everything his words said at the Rusty Anchor, except this time the words aren't coming first.
The older man steps out with his palms up, the same pleasant smile he wore at the bar, at the clearing, on my porch twenty minutes ago.
"Gentlemen. Let's not—"
