So I do what they’ve trained me to do.
I swallow my pride, and my hate, and I nod.
Midnight steps back into the swing of the light, the bulb carving shadows across his cut —SONS OF SORROWarched like a funeral banner. He turns like he’s done with me.
“One more thing,” he says over his shoulder.
“What.”
He stops, profile sharp against the line of light. His mouth twitches — not a smile, but something worse.
“If the bartender keeps saying no,” he says, “make her say yes.”
Chapter Three
Molly
By the time I’m locking the doors at The Noble Fir, my eyes ache so bad I can barely read the numbers on the keypad. A day that started with an 8 a.m. online accounting lecture segued into fries and whiskey sours, a never-ending parade of loud, needy men, and Riley having to take half the night off because she got sick. I haven’t sat down in ten hours. My feet burn, my back aches, and my soul is shriveled to the size of Havoc and Mayhem’s collective common sense. If I had a dollar for every time someone called me “darlin’” tonight, I could buy myself a one-way flight to somewhere tropical and never look back.
The clubhouse is finally quiet behind me — just the lingering smell of beer and smoke and fryer grease, and the faint thrum of a motorcycle engine out on the highway like an echo that refuses to die. I flip the sign, set the alarm, and drag my ass to my car.
I fumble my keys, nearly drop them, mutter a curse, then sit myself in the driver’s seat. My fingers are so numb from reorganizing the walk-in fridge that the steering wheel feels weirdly soft. I crank the heat all the way up and blast punk rock just to keep my head above water for the drive home.
All I want is heat.
A long bath. A scalding shower. Steam that melts the day off my skin. Then bed. Then eight straight hours of nothing.
Ironwood Falls is a graveyard at this hour. Just wet blacktop, blinking traffic lights, and the distant pulse of a singlemotorcycle engine stretching out across the mountains. The sleepy calm is a lie, of course — if you know the right streets, the right backyards, you can always find a couple Devils on a bender or a young man with the foolish dreams of becoming a prospect huffing around the edge of town, looking for trouble. But tonight the town plays dead, and I’m grateful for it. Only a fool or a cop would be out now, and I’m neither.
My building is three blocks from the main drag, tucked behind a shuttered pizza place and the world’s saddest strip mall. I’ve lived in this apartment for two years and still don’t know the names of half my neighbors. The sign out front says RAINIER VIEW APARTMENTS, but the only thing I can see from my window is the dumpster and a cloud of smokers who gather on the loading dock when it rains. The brick facade is pitted and chipped, the stairs creak, and the entryway buzzer has never worked. The landlord sends out monthly emails about “planned improvements,” but mostly he just finds new ways to charge us for shit that didn’t need fixing in the first place.
I park, climb the stairs, and let myself in.
I drop my bag, kick off my boots, and pause in the dark to take a single, greedy breath of silence. This is the best moment of my day — just me, my empty apartment, and the knowledge that no one can ask me for anything, at least until sunrise.
But the second the door closes behind me, the smell hits. Not apartment smell —mesmell.
Beer. Stale tequila. That rusty, sour tang of fryer oil stuck to my hands and wrists and scalp. My hair’s been up in a bun all night, but I can feel the sweat clinging to the roots, like glue. My palms are sticky from wiping down bar tops, my jeans have absorbed enough spilled liquor to get an underage kid buzzed, and my bra feels like a medieval torture device.
There’s only one solution to this kind of filth, and it’s not self-pity. It’s a shower. Now.
I strip fast — shirt, jeans, bra, underwear — everything hits the floor in a tired heap. I twist the knob all the way to hot and step under the spray without even testing it.
The water hits my face like a slap.
Ice.
I jerk back with a hiss. “What the fuck?”
I twist the knob again, like sheer violence can change physics. The pipes groan in compliance, but the water stays cold. Not “takes a minute to warm up” cold.Arctic. Hate-crime. Polar bear funeralcold.
No.
No, no, no.
“Fuck you!” I yell at the pipes, because that’s who I am — someone who talks back to inanimate objects when she’s too tired to do anything else. Then I slam my palm against the tile. Once. Twice. Like that will intimidate the plumbing into doing its damn job, and if it knew what was good for it, it would.
It doesn’t.
