Then I walked out.
Behind me, the clubhouse door closed.
And nothing about Dreadnought felt like a place I should be.Mentally I began planning my return trip home.
Chapter13
Loco
Isat on the bike longer than I should have.Engine off.Helmet hanging from the handlebar.The heat of the day still clung to the pavement, radiating up through the soles of my boots, through the bones that had started to ache more often than I liked to admit.Fifty-two years old and still making stupid decisions in parking lots like a man half my age.
Her rental sat three spaces down—mid-size sedan, silver, nothing remarkable about it except that it meant she was here.In my town.In my air.Breathing the same humidity that wrapped around your lungs and reminded you where you were every damn second.
Nita.Juanita Banks.The strongest woman I had ever known.Remarkable, the way she held everything down for everyone.And brave, she didn’t back down.I didn’t know of any other person, man or woman, from outside the outlaw life that had the balls to walk into a biker compound and demand answers.Yet, she did.And I would be damned if that didn’t settle deep in my balls.She had a fire I couldn’t deny.
Seeing her again had cracked something open inside me.Something I had boarded up and welded shut a long time ago.I told myself it was dead.I was dead inside.Life was easier that way.Cleaner.But the second my eyes found her, standing there with that spine-straight posture in my space and those eyes that always saw too much, it had kicked.Hard.
I told myself to go home.
I told myself I was tired.That I didn’t need this.That whatever war was stirring in my chest had already taken enough from me over the years.Friends.Blood.Pieces of my soul I could never get back.
I told myself she would be gone tomorrow.Back to her life in DC and I would be back to mine.Another memory of time in each other’s presence but not linking together.
That one almost worked.
I leaned forward, forearms resting on my thighs, hands dangling loose between my knees.The bike ticked softly as it cooled, metal contracting, settling.Same way I had spent years settling—shrinking myself into something quieter.Safer.
Not taking a chance on something right in front of me.
I had watched her life from a distance.News articles.Career updates that filtered through people who knew people.I never reached out.Never crossed that line.Told myself it was to protect her.
Besides I once tried to build a life with her sister.Even if that felt like a completely different life, it happened.Regardless I was a different man back then and that man died a long fucking time ago.Maybe that version of me wasn’t even real to begin with.
Now though, finding the Saint’s I knew the man I was and the man I would never be again.And the man she came and challenged tonight didn’t want to let this feeling whatever it was leave so soon.
But sitting there, staring at her car, I finally admitted the truth.
It had been to protect me.
Because if I let her back in—even a little—there was no pretending after that.No lying to myself about what she meant to me.What still mattered inside me for her.
She came here for me.Not for closure.Not for nostalgia or a casual visit.
For answers.For confrontation.
Because the woman Juanita was, she didn’t let me slide.She was the challenge I needed.She had the strength to call me on my bullshit, even the deadly, illegal level shit.She had that spine of steel every outlaw needed to hold him down.
And she was leaving tomorrow.
The war inside me surged again.Loneliness clawed at the ribs I had armored over a decade ago.I survived combat zones, riots, funerals with folded flags.I survived the kind of quiet that followed all of it.
But this?This felt like standing in front of a live wire, knowing exactly what it could do to you, and stepping closer anyway.
I climbed off my bike.
I didn’t think anymore.Thinking was how men like me talked themselves out of the only things that ever made them feel alive.My body moved on its own, a magnet unable to deny the pull.
I didn’t need to ask which room.Dippy had already done his thing earlier—five minutes, a grin, and a muttered “you owe me”—and I’d had the information before I could stop myself from accepting it.I told myself it was just in case.Told myself I wouldn’t use it.
