The bikes start up behind us. The night fills with thunder and exhaust and the sound of brothers heading home. Nina tugs me toward Jax's truck.
I follow her.
Chapter 13
Garrett
Jess cleans the split on Finn's knuckles at the kitchen table while he tells her it doesn't hurt and she tells him to shut up.
Rex leans against the counter with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his jaw, scrolling his phone with his free hand. Dawson sits on the floor by the door with his boots still on, his head tipped back against the wall, eyes closed. Colt stands at the window, watching the tree line the way he's watched it since we pulled into the clearing—steady, patient, the gun still on his hip.
Knox sits in the rocker with a beer he hasn't touched. He hasn't spoken since we got back. He doesn't need to. His presence in the cabin is the statement—the president in the room, the silence that saysI'll stay here until I decide you're safe.
Nina moves between them.
She checks Rex's jaw, tilting his face toward the light with two fingers under his chin. She brings Dawson water without being asked. She stands behind Jess and holds the gauze while Jess wraps Finn's hand, and the two of them work together the way they work at the clinic.
The brothers leave one by one. Dawson first with Jax to deal with the body, then Rex with the frozen peas still pressed to his jaw. Finn kisses Jess's forehead and follows. Colt is the last to go—he pauses at the door and looks at me, and whatever he sees on my face is enough. He nods once and pulls the door shut behind him.
Knox stands from the rocker. He grips my shoulder and holds it for a beat.
"Get some rest." He squeezes once and lets go. "Both of you."
The cabin goes quiet.
Nina locks the door. She crosses to the hearth and feeds the fire two logs, the bark catching, the flames climbing. She moves through the room the way she moved through it weeks ago.
I stand in the middle of the kitchen and watch her rebuild what I tore apart.
"Nina."
She turns.
"I'm sorry." The words come out rough, scraped from the same place they came from on the highway, but here in the quiet of the cabin they cost more. No brothers at my back. No adrenaline. Just her face and the fire and the thing I need her to hear. "For the bags. For the silence. For using the worst part of what they made me to push away the best thing I've ever had."
She crosses the kitchen. Her palm finds my chest—over the scars, the ridges the pit left on my skin. She presses flat and holds.
"I know, Gar." Her voice is steady. "I'm still here."
She doesn't make it easy on me. She shouldn't. But she stays at the table, as I cook eggs at the stove because my hands needsomething to do that isn't violence, and by the time we've eaten and the fire has burned down to coals, my breathing matches hers and the shaking in my hands has stopped.
The next day she rehangs the pine boughs I took down. She stripped them off the doorframes herself—I'd left them piled by the woodshed, couldn't bring myself to burn them. Now she threads them back through the nails above the kitchen door, standing on the chair I built last winter, humming something off-key that I don't recognise. The candles go back on the windowsills. Her shampoo bottle reappears on the shelf in the bathroom. The cabin fills back up with the sounds I tried to erase, and the tightness I've carried in my chest loosens with each one.
Knox's New Year's party fills the clubhouse yard with firelight and noise.
String lights loop between the posts of the covered patio. The fire pit throws sparks into the dark. Someone dragged the speakers outside and the music competes with the wind off the coast, bass thumping through the frozen ground under my boots.
I stand where I always stand—the doorframe between inside and out, close enough to hear the laughter and far enough to breathe. Finn has Jess cornered at the end of the bar, leaning over her with that grin he uses when he's trying to get a riseout of her, telling her something that makes her shove his chest with both hands. She's laughing. He catches her wrists and pulls her in and kisses the top of her head, and the curve of her belly presses against him.
Across the room, Sarah settles baby Reeve into Knox's arms and Knox shifts the boy against his chest without breaking his conversation with Dawson, the adjustment automatic, a man who's held his son long enough that the weight has become part of his existence.
Betty fusses with the buffet table, rearranging platters nobody asked her to rearrange. Gerald trails behind her holding her coat. He drapes it over a chair when she ignores it, picks it up when she moves to the next table. The two of them orbit each other with the practiced gravity of people who've stopped pretending. Raven from the Mystic Moon stands at the end of the bar with a glass of something dark, her silver rings catching the firelight, talking to a woman I don't recognise. Griz guards the front door with a beer he hasn't touched. Jax hovers near the keg, prospect patch visible on his cut, looking like a man who hasn't decided whether he belongs yet.
Nina moves through the room and I track her without meaning to.
She hugs Sarah. She laughs at something Jess says, a full sound that carries above the music and hits me across the yard. She crouches to let Reeve grab fistfuls of her hair, and the baby yanks and she winces and laughs again, and Jess untangles her while Knox watches with an expression I've seen him wear exactly once—the night I told him I wanted to patch in, and he gripped my shoulder and saidwelcome home, brother.
Nina fills the spaces I leave empty. The conversations I can't start, the handshakes I can't offer, the easy warmth that a roomfull of people requires and I've never been able to give. She does it without thinking and the club loves her for it.
