Thank you for the other night.
No signature, just the raw fact of her. I stood there with the wrench still in my left hand, the phone in my right, caught between two completely different kinds of loyalty. My heartbeat stuttered, then picked up speed, like the last seconds before a race.
I put the wrench down. The sound was sharp, like a tooth breaking. My thumb hovered over the keyboard. I wanted to tell her to run, to vanish, to never trust a man with a face like mine. I wanted to tell her that I’d kill for her, but that was a language she’d already learned to fear.
Instead, I typed, Stay safe.
I let it hang there for a while, unsent. Then I hit send.
For a minute, I stared at the reply icon, waiting for the three little dots that meant she was thinking of me. Nothing. The world had already moved on. I dropped the phone into my pocket, picked up the wrench, and went back to the bike. The engine block was still warm from my last failed attempt to fix it.
“You in love with her?” Damron asked as he entered the garage. He’d come in to talk.
“You know I don’t know what the fuck that is.”
Daron grabbed a beer from the garage fridge. He tossed me one. “Don’t be an asshole, Nitro. It’s just a question.”
I opened the beer and sat on one of the Harleys. “She’s got me so fucking confused, brother.”
“I’m just giving you shit, Nitro. If she’s a good woman, hang on to that shit. The club will deal with the bow back.” He was being fatherly.
I took a couple of long drinks before speaking. “As fucked up as it sounds, with her, it feels right.” I shrugged.
Damron finished his beer and started toward the door. “Do what you got to do, brother. We got your back.”
Damron left the garage, leaving me questioning where I thought my life was heading unexpectedly.
13
Seraphina
Isat on the couch, knees up, right hand wrapped around a stemless glass of red, left wrist still ringed faintly purple from two weeks prior. The fire pit in the yard had slumped to embers hours ago, but I kept watching it, the red glow echoing the shape of the wine in my glass. It was the only color in a world of sodium vapor and dead lawn.
The man had released something animal-like inside me. My work was suffering, and Holloway enjoyed giving me the constant ass chewings. Though he’d yet to take it to the board like he claimed he would.
Motion sensor floodlights pulsed the yard in and out of existence. Every ten seconds, some ghost animal or wind-pissed branch would trip the system, blinding the night with a sick, institutional glare. The instant it clicked off, darkness took the world in both hands. The security system had been Nitro’s idea.
My phone vibrated once on the table beside me—no caller ID, no text, just a notification. I didn’t look at it.
I told myself I was waiting for nothing, that I was just burning time, but I’d dressed for the possibility of company. Not a date, not the doomed romance kind, just something with structure and sleeves and a hope for armor. I wore a loose wool sweater, gray, frayed at the left cuff, and black running pants that made my knees look sharper than they were. My hair was up, but only because I hadn’t washed it since Thursday, and the roots had started to betray me. If I’d ever known how to look inviting, it was buried under a decade of security audits and a childhood spent watching my mother drink herself into stillness.
The Harley’s rumble started half a mile away, crawling over the canyon in a slow, inevitable crescendo. I tracked it by vibration—felt the first tremor in the boards under my heels, then the low, climbing whine as it chewed through the subdivision’s hardtop. The sound forced a memory, unbidden: hands on my hips, the world tilting left and right, laughter caught in the airflow behind us. I killed it with a swallow of wine.
He let the engine idle for a full minute before killing it, like he needed the hum to cover the next move. The silence that followed was complete; every other sound had gone into hiding. I listened for boots on gravel, the tap of his lighter, the creak of the porch stair, but all I got was the wind, and the sudden animal yip from the trees behind the house. Even the animals knew to keep their heads down.
He didn’t knock. He just stood at the foot of the steps, helmet in one hand, the other jammed deep in his cut’s pocket. The motion-sensor light blasted him into view—tall, hunched, the burn scar on his jaw silvering in the electric wash. He looked up, eyes reflecting the porch bulb, and for a second, I saw a coyote staring down the barrel of a motion camera.
“Nitro,” I said, because it was easier than using his real name. I set the wine down slow, like I was afraid it might detonate.
He grunted. “Doc.”
I shifted on the couch, folding one leg under the other, and waited for him to make the next move.
“You gonna invite me in, or are we doing this in the yard?” His voice was rougher than I remembered, the edge of it scraped raw by whatever he’d been smoking or swallowing.
I shrugged, gestured at the other chair. “I don’t do inside after dark. Paranoia.”
He nodded like this was normal, then sat. He took up twice the space I did, even slouched. He set his helmet on the table with a carefulness that bordered on reverence.
