I drive home, I shower, and I get into bed.
I put the flannel back on before I slide under the blankets.
I lie there in the dark wearing a man's shirt that smells like everything I've been telling myself I don't need.
His hands on mine.
The way he saidthat's the problem.
The inch of space between us that felt like both the longest and shortest distance in the world.
I think about his hands.
I think about how long it's been since anyone made me feel like I wasn't just useful, but wanted.
That's the word. Wanted. Not needed—I've been needed my whole life.
By patients, by Garrett, by the ER, by everyone who's ever looked at me and seen someone who could fix what's broken.
Needed is familiar. Needed is safe.
Wanted is something else entirely.
And the way Coin looked at me on that porch—like I was the first good thing he'd let himself see in years—that was want.
Pure, terrified, held-back want.
I press my face into the collar of his flannel and breathe in, and I make a decision the way Mercers make all their decisions: stubbornly, completely, with the understanding that it's probably going to hurt.
I'm not running from this.
Whatever this is, wherever it goes, however complicated it gets with Garrett and the club and the secrets and the danger—I'm not running.
I've spent my whole life saving other people.
Maybe it's time I let someone save me back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Coin
Church is standing room only.
Every officer and every full patch is crammed into the room.
The air is thick with leather and tension and the kind of quiet that happens when men who understand violence are deciding how much of it to use.
Ounce stands at the head of the table next to Ruger.
He's pinned a map of Monongalia County to the wall behind him—old school, hand-drawn routes in red marker over a gas station road map that looks like it's from 2004.
On it, he's marked three properties, six access roads, and a web of lines connecting them that looks like a circulatory system feeding a tumor.
"Here's what we know," Ounce says. His voice is low and unhurried, the way it always is when he's about to say something that matters. "The pipeline is running product out of Ohio—cooking it there, shipping it in through the rural corridors, and staging it at three properties before distributing into Morgantown. The main stash house is here." He taps the map. "Abandoned farm off County Route 19. Confirmed. Bloodhound and Maddox have had eyes on it for a week."
"What are we looking at?" Ruger asks.
"Rotating crew. Four to six men at any given time. Armed, but sloppy—they leave at predictable intervals, run the same routes, and don't post a perimeter watch after midnight. They're comfortable. Nobody's pushed back on them yet, and they think WV is easy territory."
