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Hanna squeezed her best friend. “I’m so sorry about that. I…owe you some explanations. But not until it’s safe.”
Tori just smiled sadly. “You never need to explain yourself to me, Han. But when you’re ready, I’m happy to listen.”
And in the haze of smoke and shock and unyielding grief, Hanna had the strangest thought that maybe Tori wasn’t talking about the mission or the church or the investigation at all.
Hanna didn’t have much time to think about her friend’s words at the hours passed, though. Soon, it became a whirlwind of logistics and planning, talking with the firefighters and figuring out next steps. In the normal order of things, she would have called in her deputies, but Frankie was still in the hospital, and she didn’t know who she could trust. Nothing about her life at the moment was going along the normal order of things.
When the fire chief started to head her way, Hanna glanced to Ash and Nicco for reinforcements, and when she knew they would handle the chief for her, she slipped down the familiar path to her backyard. The treehouse was still standing, which was amazing considering how structurally unsound it had been for years, but the sight of it made Hanna’s heart clench. The memories, like the treehouse, they weren’t tangible things she could touch or hold. They were in the people she shared them with. They were in her.
She leaned against the base of the tree and looked at her house, where the window to her bedroom had been, where Rose’s room had been, where Ash had spent his year. She was alive, Ash and Nicco and the others, they were alive, and that was the silver lining. That was the okay part when nothing else was ever going to be okay.
“Oh, Rosie.” Hanna looked over to the flowerbed her father had tried to plant the summer after, only for them to realize they were both terrible gardeners and the ground was more clay than dirt. Still, Hanna had kept the patch, lined with shiny red marbles, and she stepped up to it now, running her hands in the cold dirt.
Until something hard brushed her finger.
In the dark, it was difficult to see what the small item was, but she held it up to the moonlight.
A pin. A small silver pin, inlayed in black, with an image of a…
She gasped.
It was the pin for the Iron Daggers Motorcycle Club.
Chapter Twenty-One
“I don’t want to kick the guys out,” Hanna said, as Ash pulled the truck up the hill to a small cabin.
“We have a couple of different safe houses in the area,” Nicco explained. “And Dante said they can stay at the club, if need be.”
“Still,” Hanna managed. But the truth was, she kind of wanted to be alone with Nicco and Ash. Jinx made her laugh, and Gray and Xander were solid soldiers in the field, strong and reliable. But she was hollow and close to cracking, and she didn’t need an audience for that.
Or maybe it had something to do with how Nicco and Ash were pillars holding her up, having her back, making her feel like no matter what, she wasn’t alone, and it was okay to not be okay.
“They’re on patrol for the night anyway,” Nicco pointed out. “Tracking down the Iron Daggers.”
Hanna had shown them the pin after the firefighters had left, and the consensus had been in line with her own theory. Whoever had set the fire, Iverson or Ralston or two of them working together, had used the same hired muscle they used for their drug operations. The same motorcycle club Ash had nearly joined once upon a time. Run by the same man who had once claimed to love Hanna’s sister.
“Right.” She walked up to the front door of the cabin, but stepped aside to let Ash input the complex code Jinx had given him. “Tell them I’m grateful.”
“They know,” Nicco replied. “We’re all here to help, Leone. If you’ll let us.”
She got the feeling he wasn’t talking about investigations and recon then, and she wondered what it was that would help her in the moment.
Forgetting. Just for a little while.
Hanna followed Ash inside, Nicco at her back. She was a well-trained police officer, capable of holding her own with several different types of weapons and in hand-to-hand combat, but she still felt so very safe between them.
Maybe it was time. Time to stop ignoring the draw, that burning ache that had been simmering nearly since Ash and Nicco had come to town. Maybe it was time for them to cross the lines they had been pushing farther and farther back in the sand, hoping it would make the terrible yearning go away.
The only thing Hanna wanted to go away now was the world outside, the hurt and the grief and the loss, the fear that she hadn’t been able to save her sister and she wouldn’t be able to save Grace, the knowledge that bad men were after her.
She braced herself at the counter, taking in the cabin as Ash and Nicco came to stand before her.
“That offer…” she managed. “To help… How…? What?”
She had never backed down from a challenge in her life. The charred ruins of her childhood home were the standing proof of that. And yet, here she was, choking on the question.
“Slow, Han,” Ash murmured, stepping up to her side, his presence clouding her thoughts and her judgment even more. “Nic and I are here. Whatever you need.”
