“I’m ready,” I said.
Angel satacross from me at a long timber table in the common room. He was slightly older than I’d realized last night, and he gave off the air of a man whose authority came from earning it rather than demanding it. He introduced Ghost, who leaned against the far wall with his arms folded and a stillness about him that felt deliberate. Then Rook, who sat at the end of the table with a laptop open, lean and watchful, his fingers resting on the keys.
Priest sat beside me. Close enough that his warmth reached me without contact.
Angel didn’t waste any time getting started.
“Someone put rounds through your business on Main Street yesterday with one of my brothers inside,” he said. “Priest took a bullet keeping you covered. That makes this club business. We want to help, but we can’t do that blind. I need to know what we’re dealing with.”
Silence and I took a breath.
“I can’t.” The words came out before I’d decided to say them. Reflex. All that conditioning rising up like muscle memory, slamming every door shut at once. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone. That’s the rule. That’s how the program works. I don’t tell, I don’t trust, I don’t let anyone in. Those are the rules and I’ve followed every single one of them since the day they gave me this name.”
My voice was climbing. I pressed my hands flat on the table to steady them.
Angel didn’t push. He sat there with his coffee and his steady eyes and he waited — a man who’d sat across from frightenedpeople before and knows that silence does more work than pressure.
“The rules kept you alive,” Priest said beside me. Low, even. “But somebody broke them yesterday. Not you. From what you are saying, it sounds like you’re in witness protection.”
That landed. Right in the center of the thing I’d been circling all night. I’d followed every protocol. I’d been perfect. I’d done everything they told me and someone on the other side of the system had sold me anyway.
The rules hadn’t failed. The people enforcing them had.
“Macy Bowers is a cover identity,” I finally said. “US Marshals Service witness protection program. I’ve been in WITSEC for two years.”
The room shifted when I confirmed what they had already suspected. Not visibly, not with any dramatic reaction. Ghost’s eyes sharpened. Rook’s fingers stilled on the keyboard. Angel’s expression didn’t change, but the quality of his attention did.
I told them about Marco Salieri. The relationship, the charm, the gradual discovery that the man I thought I loved ran a drug distribution network behind clean business fronts. Going to the feds. Wearing a wire. Sitting in a federal courtroom and testifying until there was nothing left to say. He got twenty years to life. I got a new name, a town I’d never heard of and instructions to trust a system that was supposed to keep me invisible.
I told them about the handler. Inspector James Rawlings. Regular check-ins for eighteen months, then sporadic, then silence. The threatening call. The backup numbers that led nowhere.
Rook was already working. I could hear the keys, fast, precise. “Rawlings,” he said. “James. USMS?”
“Yes.”
He typed. His eyes didn’t leave the screen.
Angel looked at Ghost. Ghost gave a single nod.
“We’ll find out what happened to him,” Angel said. “Rook will run it down. I have a contact in federal law enforcement who can verify from the other end.” He paused. Leaned forward slightly. “You’re safe here. These walls, these men. Every brother in this club is ex-military. We know how to protect people the system can’t. For as long as you need.”
I believed him. I shouldn’t have. But this wasn’t a bureaucracy with a phone number that rang to voicemail. This was a man looking at me across a table with the weight of a promise behind his eyes, and beside me was another man with a bandaged shoulder who’d already proven what his word was worth.
The meeting broke up. Ghost went, Rook took the laptop into the back, already on a call and Angel put his hand on my shoulder as he passed. Brief, warm and reassuring.
And then it was just Priest and me.
We stoodin the hallway outside the guest room. He’d walked me back without being asked, and now the corridor was quiet and the lodge was still. I was standing in front of a man who’d caught a bullet for me less than twenty-four hours ago.
“You took a round for me yesterday,” I said. “You put your body over mine and you got shot. I haven’t thanked you for that properly and I don’t know how to, because thank you doesn’t really cover it. You saved my life.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“Priest.” I stopped. Looked at him. The bandaged shoulder. The stubble along his jaw. The eyes that had been watching me since my first week in Forsaken with a patience I hadn’tunderstood until now. “I need to tell you something. I held it back in there because it just didn’t feel right, and they’ll find out when they start digging anyway. But my name, my real name, I feel like you should be the first to know who I really am.”
He waited. He was good at waiting, I’d discovered that about him.
“Mia,” I said. “My real name is Mia Hart.”
