The engine turns over. The SUV pulls north. The taillights shrink up the coast highway until the dark swallows them, and the body stays where it fell.
Knox doesn't look at me. He looks at the road.
"Dawson. Side of my bike has a tarp. Get rid of the body."
Finn spits on the ground where the older man lies.
"Good fucking riddance."
Rex lights a cigarette, steady-fingered. Colt exhales through his teeth, the breath fogging thick in the cold.
Knox stands beside me and we watch the highway. Neither of us speaks because some silences don't need filling.
Then headlights from the south. Not a bike. A truck, moving fast, rounding the headland curve and skidding to a stop behind the line of bikes. The passenger door flies open and Nina drops from the cab. Jax's truck idles behind her, the kid white-knuckling the wheel. The woman who called the cavalry andthen climbed into the first vehicle heading north because waiting has never been a thing Nina Castell does.
I turn to face her.
Blood on my knuckles. Blood on my shirt. Shaking in a way I haven't shaken since the night I walked out of the Kuznetsov compound.
She takes two steps toward me and stops. Her gaze drops past my shoulder to the asphalt behind me, to the shape on the ground that used to be a man, to the dark stain spreading under the streetlight.
I step forward, filling her field of vision. My palm finds her jaw and I turn her face toward mine.
"Nina. Eyes on me."
She swallows. Her focus sharpens on my face and holds, and the colour that drained out of her cheeks doesn't come back but her breathing steadies.
Every brother at my back. Knox, who gave me a name. Finn, who teased me into smiling. Rex, who never once flinched at the quiet I carry. Dawson, who taught me to rebuild an engine. Colt, who stood watch outside Nina's clinic.
These men have translated my silence for seven years. They've spoken for me at tables and in rooms and across bar tops because my voice locked itself and I couldn't find the key.
I find it now.
"I was wrong." The words come out rough, scraped, the hinge-sound my voice makes when it carries weight it isn't used to bearing. "I tried to keep you safe by driving you away and all it did was leave us both unprotected." My chest tightens around the next sentence and I push through it the way I pushedthrough concrete walls and steel gates and a lifetime of silence. "Please come home, sha'li. Never leave me again. I will spend the rest of my life earning back what I pushed away."
Her face breaks open. Not tears—deeper than tears, the collapse of a wall she built in Phoenix and carried through every contract and every city and every three-month exit strategy she used to keep the world from reaching her.
I reach into my jacket pocket. The hummingbird, warm from sitting against my chest. The piece of black walnut that holds the shape of every gentle thing the pit tried to beat out of me.
I hold it out to her.
She crosses the distance between us and takes it from my bloody palm. She turns it over once. Then she presses it back into my grip and closes my fingers around it.
"You're not getting rid of me or this."
The purr starts.
Rough and broken, catching and rebuilding in my chest like an engine turning over after a long winter. It rolls through me and into the ground under our boots. Nina presses her forehead against my chest and the vibration meets her there.
Behind us, Finn clears his throat.
"Can we go home now? It's freezing and my old lady's gonna kill me."
Knox's palm lands on my back. A single pat. The weight of it says everything his voice already told me on my porch two nights ago.
You deserve this, brother.
Nina's fingers lace through mine around the carved bird, and I broke my silence for her in front of every man who's ever had to speak on my behalf.
