FRICTION ZONE
TYLER
Idreamed about Cross again. Not the violent dreams—those had faded months ago, replaced by something worse. In this one, we were back in the Sacramento field office, sitting across from each other at the same battered desk we'd shared for four years. Late afternoon light slanted through the blinds, painting stripes across his face, and he was smiling. That crooked smile I'd once found charming, before I learned what lived behind it.
"You really thought you could run?"* His voice was gentle, almost fond. The way he'd sounded in the early days, when I'd still believed he was one of the good ones. *"You know me better than that, Tyler. I always finish what I start."
He reached across the desk and touched myhand. His fingers were cold.
"I found you. I'll always find you."
I woke with his words still ringing in my ears and the taste of copper on my tongue where I'd bitten the inside of my cheek. My heart was slamming against my ribs, sweat cooling on my skin, and for a long moment I didn't know where I was—didn't recognize the ceiling above me or the weight of the blankets or the particular quality of silence that surrounded me.
Then it came back. The clubhouse. My room. Six weeks of something that almost resembled safety.
The space was small but private—four walls, a door that locked, a window that looked out over the back lot. I'd kept it sparse out of habit, the way I'd kept every living space since joining the Bureau. A go-bag under the bed, packed and ready. Clothes in the closet, nothing I couldn't leave behind. The only personal item was a photograph of Kai and me from fifteen years ago, two teenagers grinning at a county fair, back when the future had seemed like something that might actually work out.
I lay still, staring at the ceiling, letting my heartbeat slow to something approaching normal.
The pre-dawn gray was leaking through curtains I never remembered to close, painting the room in shades of ash and steel. Somewhere in the clubhouse, a door opened and closed—someone else who couldn't sleep, or someone just getting home. The sounds of this place were becoming familiar in ways I hadn't expected. The particular creak of the third step on the main staircase. The hum of the industrial refrigerator in the kitchen. The rumble ofHarleys coming and going at all hours, as constant and rhythmic as breathing.
I catalogued what I had here, the way I'd been trained to catalogue assets in the field: A bed. A door that locked. A brother who looked at me like I was real, like the eight months I'd spent pretending to be someone else hadn't erased the person underneath. People who nodded when I walked past, who saved me a seat at breakfast, who were starting to learn my name.
Tank, saying"same time tomorrow"like it was simple. Like I was someone worth teaching.
I closed my eyes and tried not to think about how much it would hurt to leave.
The morning air was cool enough to raise goosebumps on my arms as I crossed the lot toward the garage, the sky above still holding onto the last traces of night. I'd come early for my lesson—couldn't sleep, couldn't sit still, might as well be productive—but the light spilling from the open bay doors told me Tank had beaten me there.
I stopped in the doorway.
He stood with his back to me, bent over the Shovelhead's engine, and he wasn't wearing a shirt.
The morning light fell through the bay doors in long golden shafts, catching the dust motes that drifted through the air and painting everything they touched with warmth. Tank stood in the center ofthat light like something mythic, something carved from bronze and shadow, and I forgot for a moment how to breathe.
He was enormous. I'd known that—had stood beside him enough times to register the sheer physical presence of the man, the way he seemed to take up more space than his body actually occupied. But seeing him like this, stripped down to jeans and work boots and nothing else, was different. This was Tank unguarded, Tank focused, Tank existing in his element without any awareness that he was being watched.
His back was a landscape I wanted to map with my fingers. Broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, the kind of V-shaped torso that came from years of physical work rather than careful gym routines. Muscle moved beneath his skin as he worked—the flex of his trapezius as he reached for a tool, the bunch and release of his lats as he leaned into the engine, the subtle ripple of his obliques as he shifted his weight. He was lean rather than bulky, the kind of powerful that came from function rather than aesthetics, every line of him built for use.
Scars marked him like a personal history written in flesh. A long pale slash across his left shoulder blade, old and faded. Something that looked like a burn on his right side, the skin slightly puckered. A scattering of smaller marks across his lower back—road rash, maybe, or something worse. Each one was a story I didn't know, a piece of his past that had left its trace on his body.
A tattoo wrapped around his left shoulder,disappearing beneath his arm and re-emerging across his back. Wings, I realized—stylized, geometric, the Steel Phoenix emblem transformed into something personal. The black ink stood stark against his skin, the lines clean and precise.
Sweat gleamed on his shoulders, caught the light, turned him golden. His hands moved with surprising grace, fingers gentle on the engine despite their size. A smear of grease marked his forearm, another on his ribs, evidence of hours already spent in this space.
I allowed myself three seconds.
Three seconds to notice. To catalog. To feel the heat that spread through my chest and settled lower, the pull of attraction I'd been pretending didn't exist since the first time he'd looked at me with those unreadable dark eyes. Three seconds to want something I had no business wanting, to imagine what it would feel like to cross the space between us and press my palm flat against the warm expanse of his back.
Then I shut it down.
I'd spent too many years learning to control my responses, to compartmentalize desire into something that couldn't compromise me. Cross had taught me that, among other things—how easily wanting could become weakness, how quickly intimacy could turn into leverage. I'd learned the lesson well.
Tank was not for me. This life was not for me. I was a temporary presence in a place I didn't belong,and the sooner I remembered that, the less it would hurt when I had to leave.
"You're early." I announced myself, stepping into the garage.
Tank straightened, turned. His expression didn't shift when he saw me—that same steady assessment he always wore, dark eyes giving nothing away. The front of him was just as devastating as the back: defined pectorals, a stomach ridged with muscle, a trail of dark hair leading down from his navel and disappearing beneath his waistband.
