Angel was quiet for a second. That deliberate silence he used when he was weighing something, turning it over before he committed.
“She works for us,” he said. “That makes her problem ours if there is one.”
“Agreed.”
“Then it’s done.” He picked up his wrench, went back to the carburetor. “I’ll tell the others. She needs anything, she comes to you or she comes to me.”
I went back inside. Made coffee, because that was something useful I could do that didn’t involve standing outside her door like a man who’d lost his grip on basic human function.
She came out twenty minutes later. Hair damp from the shower, wearing the same clothes she’d been in last night, looking like she’d slept more in those few hours than she had all week. She stopped when she saw me at the kitchen counter, and for a second something uncertain flickered across her face. Like she were trying to figure out if the kindness was going to cost her in some way.
“Coffee?” I held up the pot.
“Please.”
I poured her a mug. Set it on the counter. She wrapped her hands around it and drank, and some of the tension in her shoulders eased.
“The bar’s right through the corridor,” I said. “You need anything from town, one of us will take you. You’re not sleeping in that car again, Evie. That’s not up for discussion.”
She looked at me over the rim of her mug. Level, measuring, that quiet intelligence I’d seen from the first day working behind the uncertain smile.
“I won’t be anyone’s charity case,” she said. Quiet, firm. There was a spine in it, underneath the exhaustion and the gratitude, a thread of steel that told me whoever this woman was before she ended up pouring beers in Forsaken, she’d made at least one hard decision in her life and she’d made it on her own terms.
“You’re not charity,” I said. “You’re staff. The club takes care of its people.”
She held my gaze for a beat longer than was comfortable. Longer than was safe, given the state of my self-control. The morning light was coming through the kitchen window, catching in her hair, turning it gold, and she was standing three feet from me in my kitchen and looking at me like she was trying to decide whether my kindness I was real.
“Whatever the problem you have is, we protect our own,” I said. “You hear me? You’re here. You’re safe. And nobody is taking you anywhere you don’t want to go.”
The mask slipped. Just for a second, the surface she’d been trained to show the world cracked and what was underneath came through. Her eyes went bright, her chin trembled, and for a second I thought she was going to cry. She didn’t. She just nodded, once, held my gaze, and drank her coffee.
I turned away. Busied myself with something on the counter that didn’t need my attention, because I needed to stop looking at her before she figured out that the thing in my chest wasn’t responsibility and it wasn’t brotherhood and it wasn’t anything I could pass off as the club looking after one of its own.
It was just her.
It had been her since the first night she walked into that bar.
I was gone. I knew it, I hated it, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
THREE
EVIE
I’d been at the compound for nine days when I stopped waiting for the catch.
It didn’t happen all at once. There was no clean break between the woman who’d slept in her car and counted every dollar and whoever I was becoming here. It happened in pieces. The first night, I barely slept at all. A real bed, and still I lay there staring at the ceiling waiting for someone to tell me what it was going to cost. The second night I slept for three hours and woke up reaching for the car door that wasn’t there.
By the fifth night I slept six hours straight and it was as if my body was starting to feel normality again.
By the ninth I was sleeping well. Eyes open, ceiling above me, the sound of someone in the kitchen down the hall, the smell of coffee through the door. My room. Mine. The word still felt borrowed, like something I was trying on that didn’t quite fit yet, but every morning the fit got a little closer.
The compound was nothing like the life I’d left. That should have been obvious, a biker compound versus a Cherry Hills mansion, but the differences weren’t where I expected them. It wasn’t the noise, the leather, the sheer physical scale of themen who moved through the lodge like they’d been built from different blueprints. It was the way they talked to me.
They talked to me like I was there.
They didn’t see a Carrington, a daughter, an asset. Just Evie, the new girl who couldn’t pour a drink well, and the brothers treated that information with the same casual acceptance they treated everything else. Razor called me “kid” and gave me shit about the time I’d mixed up his order so badly he got a plate of wings with his whiskey - neither of which he’d ordered. Priest was quiet, nodded at me when I passed. Angel barely spoke to me, but when he did, it was with a weight that made you feel like you’d been counted and not found lacking. If he didn’t have the president patch on his cut, you’d have guessed it anyway.
They weren’t always polite. They swore, they argued, they slammed doors and raised voices and handled disagreements with a bluntness that would have given my mother a stroke. Nobody managed their tone for my benefit. Nobody adjusted the room when I walked in.
