Page 12 of Prospect’s Curvy Vinyl Girl

"Let them try."

The certainty in his tone makes the air leave my lungs. He isn't boasting. He’s stating a law of nature.

I stare up at him. The sheer possessiveness rolling off his frame is terrifying. He’s known me for a handful of days. He’s sleeping on a mattress on my floor. He’s trapped in this dead-end town right alongside me.

But looking into his eyes, the truth shifts.

He isn't caught in the cage with the Syndicate.

The Syndicate is caught in the cage with him.

4

Tyler

The oak counter groans against her spine.

I slam my hands down on the polished wood on either side of her hips, caging her in. The air in the Vinyl Vault is thick with the stench of the Syndicate enforcer’s cheap cologne fading into the warm dust and old paper scent of the shop. Fleetwood Mac drops on the turntable behind the register. The needle hits the groove with a sharp crackle. The bassline starts. Slow. Thumping. Matching the erratic hammering in my chest.

She stares up at me. Defiant. Angry. Trembling with the residual shame of handing over that envelope of cash. Her knuckles are stark white where she grips the edge of the counter. She’s trying to hold onto her independence, trying to maintain the armor she’s worn for four years carrying this business alone.

"Don't ever pay them again," I tell her. My voice is a low rasp. It doesn't sound like Tom from Portland. It sounds like the lethal operative I am.

She lifts her chin. The sassy, fiercely independent woman refuses to back down. "I have to. It's the only way to keep the doors open. You think you can just grunt orders at me in my own shop? Who are you to tell me⁠—"

"I said never again, Wendy."

She shoves a hand against my chest. It does nothing. I’m a stone wall. I’m the physical manifestation of the Ignition burning through my blood, locking onto her.

"Who are you?" she demands. The question is a raw, jagged thing. Her chest heaves with every rapid breath. "You're not Tom. You're not my cousin. You stand like a soldier. You look at that enforcer like you're calculating the pressure it would take to snap his neck. You've been sleeping in my back room for five days and you act like you own the block. Who the hell are you?"

The cover fractures. The eight months of breathing through a fake name, a fake history, a fabricated life. The endless phantom paper trails Daniel Gunnar dumped on a table at the compound. The Albuquerque stint. The long-haul trucker route. I’ve worn so many faces I don't even know what my own reflection looks like without a role attached to it. I’m the club's ghost. I’m the man who doesn't exist.

But looking down at her, the static in my brain goes quiet. The performance burns away. I don't want to be a ghost anymore. I want to be a violent reality for anyone who steps foot in this shop.

"My name is Tyler."

Saying it out loud in this room is a brand. It destroys the lie. It strips the operative down to the man. I hand her the only true thing I possess.

She blinks. Her breath hitches. The fight drains out of her shoulders, replaced by something much more dangerous. "Tyler," she whispers.

I watch her mouth shape the two syllables. Tyler. In Crimson Hollow, that name’s been dead for eight months. Nobody’s said it to my face since the Chapel handed me my last cover envelope. Hearing it out loud, in her voice, in her shop, against the hum of the Fleetwood Mac drop, breaks something in me that‘s been locked since I left Pine Valley.

My hand drops to her throat. Not pressing—just resting against the racing beat of her pulse. Anchoring myself to the only place in this town that knows my name.

Hearing my actual name in her mouth shatters my restraint. The Ignition flares, a violent, gasoline-soaked inferno roaring through my veins. It’s a territorial madness. I step into her space. My thighs crowd hers against the counter. The denim of my jeans drags against the worn denim of hers, those high-waisted vintage jeans hugging her hips. She gasps. The sound is a high, sweet note soaring over the Fleetwood Mac bassline.

She’s mine.

That’s the only truth left in Crimson Hollow. The Syndicate doesn't run this block anymore. I do. This shop is my perimeter. This woman is my reason for breathing. I want to consume her. I want to strip her bare, throw her down on this oak counter, and bury myself so deep inside her she forgets every second she spent surviving without me.

But not yet. Her pride needs to break first. The tension needs to break her pride first. She needs to surrender the weight she's carrying. She needs to unravel.

"Tyler," she says again, testing the syllables, tasting the truth.

"Don't say it again unless you want me to tear those clothes off you right here," I warn her.

She arches an eyebrow. That fierce, sassy spark flares right back up, cutting through the air. "Is that a threat, Portland?"