I opened it one last time.
The photograph was three years old, taken at a Bureau event I barely remembered. Cross and I stood together in front of some forgettable backdrop, his arm around my shoulders, both of us smiling for the camera. We looked happy. We looked like partners, like lovers, like two people who trusted each other completely.
We looked like a lie.
I studied Cross's face—the sharp features, the easy smile, the eyes that seemed warm until you learned to read the coldness behind them. I'd loved him once. Or I'd thought I had. I'd believed the version of himself he'd shown me, believed we were building something real, believed that the darkness I sometimes glimpsed was just stress or exhaustion or my own paranoia.
I'd been wrong about everything.
The date on the back of the photograph was tomorrow. One week from the day the envelope had arrived, one week of letting Cross control me with nothing but paper and ink and the memory of what he was capable of.
Tomorrow, whatever he'd planned would happen. Or it wouldn't. Either way, I was done letting the anticipation destroy me.
I fed the photograph to the fire.
The edges curled first, browning and blackening, Cross's face distorting as the flames consumed it. I watched his smile melt, watched his eyes disappear into ash, watched three years of manipulation and fear and self-doubt turn to smoke and rise into the lightening sky.
Something released in my chest as I watched it burn. Three years of flinching at raised voices, of second-guessing my own perceptions, of believing that I deserved the cruelty he dressed up as love. Three years of learning to make myself small, to anticipate his moods, to apologize for existing in ways that inconvenienced him.
All of it, burning.
The envelope went next. Then the note—I see you—the words vanishing letter by letter until there was nothing left but flames and the faint smell of burning paper.
"You don't get to live in my head anymore." The words felt strange in my mouth, spoken aloud to the fire, to the ash, to the ghost of the man who'd almost broken me. "You don't own me. You never did."
Fragile words. Newborn. But true.
I'd spent the last week—the last three years, really—being afraid. Afraid of Cross, afraid of what he could do, afraid of wanting things I might lose. Fear had become so familiar I'd stopped recognizing it as fear; it was just the background noise of my existence, the constant hum of anxiety that colored every decision, every relationship, every moment of peace.
I was done.
I was done being afraid.
The realization settled into my bones with a certainty I hadn't felt in years. Fear had kept me alive during the undercover work, had kept me one step ahead of Cross's manipulation, had driven me to the clubhouse and the tentative safety I'd found here. But fear couldn't be the foundation of a life. It could only be a cage.
And I was done living in cages.
I sat by the fire until the last of the paper had burned away, until there was nothing left of Cross's message but gray ash mixing with the kindling. The sun crested the horizon, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold, and I felt something shift inside my chest—a loosening, a release, like setting down a weight I'd carried so long I'd forgotten it wasn't part of me.
I wasn't free. Not yet. Cross was still out there, still dangerous, still coming for me and everyone I'd let myself care about. But the fear that had been strangling me for six days, the paralysis that had kept me hiding and flinching and waiting for the next blow—that was gone.
I'd burned it with his photograph.
And now I had someone else to talk to.
Tank was in the garage.
Of course he was. It was barely seven in the morning, the clubhouse still quiet with theparticular hush that came before the day really started, and he was already at his workbench with a cup of coffee and a carburetor spread out in front of him. The Shovelhead sat in her bay, patient and beautiful, chrome catching the early light that filtered through the grimy windows. The whole space smelled like oil and metal and the particular scent I'd started to associate with him—leather and engine grease and something underneath that was just Tank.
I stood in the doorway for a moment, watching him work. His hands moved with the unconscious grace of long practice, each motion precise and unhurried. There was something almost meditative about the way he handled the parts—reverent, careful, the kind of attention most people reserved for fragile things.
He looked up when I stepped inside. His hands stilled on the carburetor, and something flickered across his face—wariness, maybe, or hope, or that particular mix of both that I'd seen every time we'd been in the same room since the kiss. The shadows under his eyes told me his nights had been as restless as mine.
"Tyler." His voice was careful. Controlled. "You're up early."
"Couldn't sleep."
A muscle in his jaw twitched. "Yeah. Me either."
