His hand slid between us, his thumb finding my clit, circling in tight, precise strokes while I rode him. The dual pressure of him inside me and his thumb on me built to a peak so sharp I couldn’t breathe. I pressed my face against his neck, my hands gripping the back of his head, and I came apart. The orgasm tore through me in waves, my whole body clenching around him, and he gripped my hips and thrust up into me, hard, urgent, and followed with a groan that I felt in my chest.
We stayed. My arms around his neck, my face against his shoulder. His hands on my back. Breathing. Just breathing. The motel room was quiet except for us and the hum of the heater and the distant highway.
He pressed his lips to my temple.
I didn’t say I’d go back. I didn’t decide, not yet, not in words. But I stayed in his arms and I wasn’t performing. I wasn’trunning. I wasn’t planning the next exit or memorizing the next route.
I was just here. With him. And for the first time since settling here, enough was enough.
SIX
PRIEST
I brought her back to the compound and Angel called church within the hour.
Full table. Every brother. The room was heavy timber and low light and the faces around it carried the focus of men who’d been briefed before bad things happened. Angel at the head. Ghost to his left. Hawk at his right. Duke, Doc, Rook, Razor. Me. Eight men who’d served in places where the briefing was the last calm thing before the storm.
Rook laid out what he had. The crew that hit the flower shop was hired muscle out of Boise. Three, maybe four men. They’d come once and missed. They’d come again because the job wasn’t finished and the money was already spent.
Angel was mid-sentence when Mia appeared in the doorway.
Church was members only. Always had been. No exceptions, no guests, no old ladies. Angel looked at her, and for a second I expected him to tell her to wait in the common room.
He didn’t. He pulled a chair from the wall and set it at the end of the table.
“Sit down,” he said.
She sat. She looked at the faces around the table, the cuts, the ink, the particular weight of eight men who’d been planning operations since before she was old enough to vote.
“I want to be there,” she said. “When they come. I want to be in the shop.”
Silence.
“If they see me, they’ll come,” she said. “That’s the whole point. They’ve been sent to find me and finish the job. If I’m visible, if I’m behind the counter doing what I always do, they won’t be able to resist. I’m the draw. Without me, you’re just sitting in an empty building hoping they show up.”
“She’s got a point,” Hawk said.
“No.” I said it before I’d decided to say it. “Absolutely not.”
Mia looked at me. “This isn’t your decision.”
“You’re talking about standing in a room and waiting for armed men to walk through the door.”
“I’m talking about being done hiding. I’ve been hiding since the Marshals dropped me here. I hid behind a fake name and a fake life and a handler who sold me out, and I’m finished. If they’re coming for me, I want to be standing in my own shop when they get there.”
Angel let the silence hold. He looked at me. He saw what I was feeling and he didn’t dismiss it, but he didn’t let it override the operational logic either.
“She’s right,” Angel said. “Without her, there’s no draw. We control the environment. We control the timing. Every exit, every sightline, every position. She’s behind the counter. We’re everywhere else. The risk is managed.”
“I don’t have to be happy about this,” I said.
“No,” Angel said. “You don’t. But we build the plan around her.”
The club had arrangedto have the windows fixed while she was at the compound. New glass, clean frames, the shopfront restored as if nothing had happened. That was what the Angels did. They protected the town, and a flower shop on Main Street with broken windows was their problem.
We set up at dawn. Brothers came in through the back door one at a time, bikes stashed behind the building where they couldn’t be seen from the street. Each man found a position and disappeared into it. Ghost took the storeroom, which had a sightline to the front through a gap in the shelving. Hawk and Duke covered the approaches from the back hallway. Razor was behind the display cooler, coiled, radiating the energy he carried before an operation. Doc was upstairs at the apartment window with eyes on Main Street. Rook was in a truck half a block down, outside backup in case things went sideways. Angel was in the back workroom, running the whole thing as he’d run a hundred operations.
I was in the back room. Three steps from the shop floor. Close enough to hear every word. Close enough to be through the door before anyone finished a sentence.
