“The patch,” she said.“At Church.Proper.When I’m not pretending my hands aren’t shaking.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.“Soon.Once we cut Diaz’s legs down enough we can stand still without worrying about sniper fire.”
“You scared?”she asked.
“Terrified.”
She traced the outline of my tattoo with her fingertips.“You marked me without ink.When you call me ‘my woman’ with that growl in your voice.When your eyes tell me I matter beyond the headache I bring.”
“Worth every second.”
Her smile crept across her face, slow and warm.
“Diaz loses ground while we gain territory.”She leaned closer, her breath warm against my neck.“The scales tip in our favor now.”
She sighed and tucked herself under my arm again.We sat there in the dark, listening to the hum of the fridge and the faint cries of some forgotten cartoon in the TV room.I held Jade and planned the next move.
Love and war, all tangled up.
Savage Raptors business as usual.
Chapter Fifteen
Jade
I felt the shift before anyone said a word.
For three weeks, the club lived with its shoulders up around its ears.Every knock, every phone call, every unfamiliar car on the road made my heart slam against my ribs.We drilled the kids, checked the fences, watched the news.Two more laundromats were hit.A construction office.Each raid took a bite out of him.
He didn’t bite back.Not the way I expected.No drive-bys.No ambush at the gate.No black SUVs rolling up to smoke us in our sleep.Just… silence.
The silence crawled up my vertebrae, settling between my shoulders.
I woke up Thursday morning to something unexpected -- lightness.My lungs expanded fully for the first time in weeks.No alarms had sounded.No emergency calls had come through.The world seemed to breathe differently.
Kane lay sprawled beside me, one arm heavy across my stomach, mouth slightly open as he snored.Beyond our window, birds argued in the branches while the sun still struggled to clear the tree line.A motorcycle engine fired up somewhere in the compound yard, the familiar rumble fading into background noise my ears had learned to filter out months ago.
I lay there and listened to his heartbeat under my ear.
For the first time in longer than I wanted to count, my brain didn’t immediately run through a list of exits and worst-case scenarios.It just… existed.
“Your face is doing something,” Kane mumbled, voice rough with sleep.“Can’t see it, but I can feel it.”
“My face?”I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.“Less murder.More… I don’t know.Suspicious hope.”
I snorted.“You can’t feel my face.”
“Can too,” he insisted.“Your muscles move different when you’re stress-dreaming.”
I raised an eyebrow.“You pay attention to my face while I sleep?”
“Always.”Kane came fully awake now, his hand sliding up my back, fingers tracing each vertebra along my spine.“Tell me what’s happening in your head.”
“The sensation reminds me of standing in the ocean.”My voice dropped to almost a whisper.“I braced myself for a massive wave, locked my knees, tensed every muscle -- but the water went completely calm instead.My body doesn’t know how to relax after being on high alert for so long.”
“That makes you nervous,” he said.
