He crosses the garage in strides that eat the distance between us, and when he reaches me, he doesn't speak.
He just takes my face in both hands.
Rough palms, scarred knuckles, gentle as always with things that matter.
And looks at me, looks at me the way he looked at Wrenleigh on the gurney.
Like his whole world just narrowed to one person and nothing else exists.
"Show me," he says.
I pull the neck of my scrub top to the side.
The bruise is already darkening—a long, horizontal line across my collarbone, deep purple shading to black at the edges.
The shape of a man's forearm printed on my skin.
Coin looks at it.
Something happens behind his eyes. Something I've never seen before.
Not the cold, not the freeze, not the controlled shutdown he used on Angelica.
This is different. This is the thing underneath all of it. The thing he's been keeping locked away behind three generations of Adkins self-control and a decade of holding everything together alone.
He's quiet for a long time.
His thumb traces the edge of the bruise without touching it, and his hand is steady—dead steady, not a single tremor—and that scares me more than anything because I know now what Coin's steadiness means.
It means he's already decided what happens next.
"Garrett," he says. His eyes don't leave the bruise. "Church. Tonight. Call everyone."
Garrett nods. His phone is already out.
Coin looks at me. Those blue-gray eyes are made of something else right now. Something ancient and cold and patient and absolutely lethal.
"I'm going to fix this," he says.
"I know you are."
"You're going to stay with me. At the house. Until this is over."
"I know."
He pulls me against his chest, and holds me the way he held me in the hallway the first time.
I'm not in Church.
I've never been in Church, and I wouldn't be welcome even now.
That room belongs to the brothers, and the conversations that happen behind that door stay behind that door.
But I'm at the clubhouse. Sitting in the main room with Vanna and Waylon, a bag of frozen peas pressed against my collarbone because Vanna took one look at the bruise and went full mother hen.
She hasn't said much. She doesn't need to.
She's sitting beside me on the couch with her hand on my knee, and her golden hair piled on top of her head and Waylon asleep in the car seat at her feet, and her presence is enough.
