Didn’t mean I liked it.
Pushing the thoughts aside, I swung off the bike and headed upstairs. My condo was exactly how I liked it—clean, controlled, and everything in its place. Dark wood floors, low lighting, nothing unnecessary. A space that didn’t demand anything from me when I walked through the door. But tonight, it felt too damn quiet.
I stripped down, tossed my clothes in the hamper, and dragged a hand over the back of my neck as I moved through the routine of getting ready for bed. Shower. Brush teeth. Lights off. Same shit, different night.
Except my head wouldn’t shut the fuck up.
I grabbed my laptop from the kitchen counter instead of heading straight to bed and dropped onto the couch, leaning forward with my forearms braced on my thighs as the screen lit up. It didn’t take much to get what I needed. Between what I already knew and what was stored in our systems, it was easy enough to find her name, where she worked, and where she lived.
Clara Winslet. The name settled into my chest like it had always belonged there.
I leaned back slowly, my eyes scanning the basic information and committing it all to memory without even trying. Winslet Orchard and Farm. Family business. Small apartment above the store. Everything about her life painted a picture that didn’t fitanywhere near my world—and didn’t change a damn thing about what I felt when I looked at her.
If anything, it made it worse.
I closed the laptop and finally headed to my bedroom, dropping onto the mattress and staring up at the ceiling. The silence pressed in around me, and for the first time in a long while, it didn’t feel like peace.
It felt like something was missing.
I lasted maybe five minutes before I swore under my breath and shoved off the bed, grabbing the laptop again as I went back out to the living room. If I couldn’t shut my brain off, I might as well make it useful and get some work done.
The Hounds had their hands in more shit than most people realized, some of it clean and some of it sitting in that gray space where the law didn’t quite reach or didn’t want to look too closely. We didn’t operate by anyone else’s rules unless it suited us. Our code came first, always had. When something needed to be handled, and the system couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do it, we stepped in. Lines got crossed. Problems got solved.
Sometimes the people in charge looked the other way. Other times, they quietly appreciated the outcome. Didn’t hurt that money flowed where it needed to, smoothing things out without anyone having to say it out loud. We didn’t buy politicians, didn’t play those games, but we had allies—people who understood that what we did filled the gaps the law couldn’t cover.
What we were best at, though—what brought in the real money—was making people disappear.
Not the way outsiders would think. We didn’t take contracts to end lives. We erased them. Built new ones from the ground up. New names, histories, and paper trails so clean they could stand up to any scrutiny. We gave people a way out when staying where they were would’ve gotten them killed or worse.
Between Wizard’s tech, my security builds, Ace’s financial wizardry, and the rest of the club backing us, we didn’t miss details. We couldn’t afford to. Once someone stepped into that new life, it had to hold. And it did.
Most of the time, we charged. Sometimes we didn’t. Depended on the situation and the person. Those calls stayed inside the club, locked down tight. The last thing we needed was a flood of bullshit sob stories from people looking to game the system.
I worked through a few files, tightening protocols and double-checking a couple of active cases, forcing my mind to stay on the screen instead of drifting back to a pair of amber-brown eyes that had no business getting under my skin this fast.
It didn’t fucking work. Her laughter echoed in my head anyway. The way she’d looked at me. Curious, not scared. Like she wasn’t sure what to make of me but wasn’t backing down either.
Mine.
The word hit just as hard now as it did every time it flared in my mind, settling deep and solid in my chest.
I finally snapped the laptop shut and leaned back, scrubbing a hand over my face. My body was tired, my muscles heavy from the day, but my mind was still wired tight. But I needed some damn sleep. I forced myself back into the bedroom and dropped onto the mattress again, this time closing my eyes and not letting them open.
It took a while, longer than it should’ve, but eventually the exhaustion dragged me under.
The last thought in my head before sleep finally took me was the certainty that tomorrow, I was going to find her. The last thing I saw was her face.
2
CLARA
The cheese-stuffed sweet potato viral videos had done a lot of good for our family’s orchard. We’d already been growing sweet potatoes as a companion crop for some of our trees because they were a great groundcover for suppressing weeds and keeping the soil cool. Now we could barely keep them on the shelves of our farm store.
Every soccer mom, health aficionado, and teenage girl with a social media account within thirty miles showed up to buy them by the bagful. I’d already hauled three crates from the back before the doors opened at nine, and I was going to need to do a restock before we closed.
The bell jingled over the door, and a woman in yoga pants pushed through with two children. The older one pointed at the sweet potatoes immediately.
“Gross,” he declared, his nose wrinkling.
