Diego tipped his head, a question and a promise. “Your call.”
Silas smiled wider. It showed teeth. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. That dude was creepy enough but the look on his face sent goosebumps along my spine.
The man took in the line of cuts and bruisers and history in black leather. Even more people had made their way into the yard. Rodney. Clint. Johnny and Dan. Names I had learned over the last couple of years. It was ten to one. Twenty, if you counted the shapes moving inside. This low-life had courage, I’d give him that. He also had a survival instinct that finally kicked in.
“Yeah,” he muttered, backing up, hands spread. “She ain’t worth it.”
“You’re wrong.” I called, my voice carrying across the yard. “She’s worth ten of you. And it’s time for you to go. Shoo.”
He sneered at me, and the guys shifted until they were between him and me. I lifted my chin, looking down my nose and sneering right back. The man swore vehemently then turnedon his heel and went back to his car. Tires spat gravel. Taillights vanished. The cicadas screamed like the world had just exhaled.
No one moved for a count of five. Ten. Twenty. Then Dalton blew out a breath, turned, and grinned at me.
“Guard dogs,” he said, winking like this was homecoming and not a line someone had almost tried to cross. “We sit. We stay. We heel.”
I laughed then, sharp and bright and helpless. The sound came out like relief.
Inside, Mara sobbed once—a single ragged sound that ripped and stitched at the same time. Maria was already there, arms around her.
I sat down again, hands shaking now that it was over. Hannah lowered herself in the rocking chair beside me with a small grunt.
“Look at you,” she said.
“Ummm…” I said, eyebrows up, not really sure where she was going with that.
“It was perfect,” she said. “You didn’t fight the fire. You held the door.”
I tipped my head onto her shoulder for a second the way I never did, because if I looked at her face I’d cry.
Later, when the clubhouse had settled into its habitual midnight hum, I headed home and slipped into the quiet of the guesthouse before pulling out a postcard I’d been saving. A picture of the Arch downtown, all wrought iron and superstition. I flipped it over and wrote small.
J—
Lila smiled today. It felt like sunlight after weeks of rain. A new mom and her girl are safe here tonight. You would’ve hated the guy who came looking for them. He left fast. The Saints saw to it.
I don’t know how mail works where you are. The letters wander. But on the off chance this one finds you quick—hurry home, handsome. We’ve got work to do.
—H
I set the card on the stack by my keys so I couldn’t forget to mail it in the morning. Then I lay back and stared at the ceiling while the night breathed around me. In another world, in a life I barely remembered, I wouldn’t have had anything to offer a woman like Mara except pity. Now I had a room with clean sheets. A phone no one else could ring. A line of men in black leather who would put their bodies between her and whatever hell tried to reach for her. And a dream with a name that finally felt like it fit.
Willow’s Harbor. A place to land. A place to leave from, different.
The ache for Jackson rolled through me, slow and tidal. I let it. I folded it beside the pride and the exhaustion and the thousand logistics I’d spend tomorrow untangling. Then I closed my eyes and slept like I belonged to the future I was building.
In the morning there would be coffee and a grant to finish and a meeting with a city clerk who owed my mother three favors. There would be Lila’s rabbit propped on a folding chair and August swearing at a tape measure and Hannah pretending she didn’t cry when nobody was looking.
There would be my pen smudging ink across the side of my hand and good trouble to make.
And somewhere across an ocean of sand, there would be a man with my photo tucked under the band of his Kevlar, reading a crooked postcard that told him the truth:
I was not waiting. I was readying the ground.
Come home. We’ve got work to do.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
? Jackson ?
