Page 19

When we pull into the clubhouse, I cut the engine and sit on the bike for a moment.

My arm is actively making its complaints known now, the pain a steady drumbeat rather than the sharp flare of earlier. There is blood on my jacket that is not entirely mine. My hands, when I flex them on the handlebars, feel the residue of the tunnel.

I dismount.

The club is quieter than I expected, men moving at half their usual speed, voices low. Someone has already started coffee. Bullet moves between boots and nobody pays attention to him. Two men near the wall are checking each other for damage in the matter-of-fact way that means neither injury is serious enough to require more than acknowledgment.

When I look up she is already crossing the room toward me.

She does not slow down when she sees the state I am in. She does not scan me with alarm or blanch at the jacket. She walks directly to me and her hands go to my arm first, her fingers pressing along the bandage, feeling for whether the wound has opened and how badly. The pressure is firm and professional and her expression is focused in the way it gets when she is working.

Her lip is still swollen at the corner from last night. The bruise at her cheekbone is darker in the morning light than it was before, exactly as I predicted.

She assesses my arm and her eyes come up to mine.

She does not ask what happened. She does not need to. She is looking at me in a way that I am not accustomed to being looked at, with a clear-eyed understanding of what I am and what I just went back from.

She knows. She has known since the bar. The only thing that has changed is the depth of it.

My hand settles at her waist without a decision being made to put it there.

It is the kind of contact that does not ask permission, not because it is careless but because it has passed the point of asking, and she does not move away, and we stand like that for a moment with the club around us and the smell of smoke still coming off my jacket.

Grave is at the far end of the space.

I feel the moment he sees it. I do not look immediately, I give him a moment to process what he is processing, and when I do look, his face has the expression of a man who already knew what he is seeing and is finding the confirmation harder than he thought.

He does not move toward us. He holds the look.

I do not remove my hand.

We stay in that silent exchange for about four seconds, and then he turns away.

Leah goes to the supply kit. I take a chair someone has vacated near the main table and let her work on the injury, the bandage replaced with something cleaner, the wound assessed and re-dressed with the same brisk efficiency she brought to this last night.

The footsteps on the stairs come twenty minutes later.

The office door takes the impact of it closing and shudders in the frame with enough force to rattle the window beside the desk. Grave is already across the room by the time I have fully turned, and the shove comes without preface, both hands at my jacket driving me back into the wall with the full weight of his body behind it.

I let the wall take it.

"You touched her." It is not a question. His voice is low and locked down in the way that means he is working very hard not to let it become something he cannot take back.

I look at him directly.

"Yes."

The punch connects with my jaw before the word has finished landing, snapping my head sideways, and the shoulder wound registers its protest with some urgency.

I straighten. I do not swing back. I stand and hold his gaze and let him have the punch because some part of me has known since the parking lot in front of the bar that it was coming eventually, and the part of me that has spent fifteen years respecting what this man is to this club understands why.

"She is not—" he starts.

"I know what she is." My jaw is already beginning to stiffen. "She is not collateral. She is not a mistake. She is not something that happened to me by accident." I hold his gaze. "She is mine, Grave."

The word lands in the room.

He moves forward and gets his hands in my jacket and drives me backward into the desk and something on it hits the floor on the other side, and we are two seconds from this becoming something that neither of us will be able to walk back from when the door opens.