Page 30 of Diesel’s Desire

“Could’ve.” I set the folder on her desk, carefully, like it’s an offering instead of a pretext. “Wanted to see you.”

“That’s not how any of this works.”

“Feels like it’s working fine so far.”

Her eyes narrow, but there’s no real heat behind it, not the kind that would send me back out the door. She looks tired in a way that’s got nothing to do with the shift—shadows under her eyes, a tightness around her mouth I recognize from every mirror I’ve avoided since Bone laid it out plain in the clubhouse. She’s a liability with a badge and a gun. Maybe. Maybe I’m one to her too. Standing here in her building, in her territory, I don’t feel like the dangerous one. I feel like a man who drove into town just to watch a woman push hair out of her face.

“You look wrecked,” I say.

“I had a missing kid today.”

That lands differently than I expect. My chest tightens. “They find her?”

“Not yet.” She rubs a hand over her face, and she looks too tired to keep pretending she’s fine. “I’ve still got three reports to finish before I can go home.”

“Then finish them tomorrow.”

“That’s not how paperwork works, Evan.”

“Everything’s got a tomorrow, Penny.” I step closer, and she doesn’t step back. “Even paperwork.”

She looks up at me, and whatever’s sitting behind her eyes isn’t the careful cop stillness she wears at crime scenes. It’s something rawer, something that’s been building since I walked out her front door two days ago and she hasn’t called and I haven’t called and both of us have been lying to ourselves about why.

“I need to get the bike details into the system,” she says, nodding at the folder, voice gone thin. “I need the intake form.”

“Lead the way, Officer.”

She doesn’t answer that, just picks up the folder and walks, and I follow her down a hallway lit worse than the lobby, past a break room with a coffee pot burning something black and bitter, to a door with a keypad and a sign that says:

RESTRICTED — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“You can’t come in here,” she says, punching the code.

“Then don’t let me.”

She doesn’t answer that either. The door clicks open, and she walks through, and I follow anyway, because we both already know how this goes.

The evidence room’s colder than the rest of the building, air conditioning cranked to keep whatever’s stored back here from rotting, and it smells like dust and old paper and something metallic underneath that I don’t let myself think too hard about. Steel shelves line the room, boxes stacked in careful, labeled rows, everything cataloged and numbered and sealed in plastic.

Penny sets the folder on a counter near the door and starts pulling out forms, movements fast and clipped, the kind of busy that’s really just a woman trying not to look at the man standing four feet behind her.

“You need to go back out front,” she says, not turning around. “This room’s logged. Cameras.”

“Camera’s dead. Has been for a month. Morris keeps saying he’ll get it fixed.”

Her hand stills on the form. “How do you know that?”

“I know a lot of things.” I close the distance, slowly, giving her every chance to say stop. She doesn’t say it. “Nobody’s watching, Penny.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what’s the point?”

She turns around finally, and there it is.

“The point is I work here,” she says, voice low, edged. “This is my job. My career. Everything I built since I left.”

“I know.”