“Who’s ‘you’?” I asked, even though I already knew.
“You,” he said, pointing at me. “Valkyrie.” His hand shifted toward the door. “Turnpike. And Raptor. He’s been looking at the floor since the SUVs showed up. Time to see if the kid stands up straight when it matters.”
Valkyrie’s mouth twitched like she was already anticipating me and Dante in the same building.
“That’s a lot of ego in one room,” she murmured.
“If they start measuring dicks, you let them,” Blackjack said. “As long as nobody starts a shooting match unless it’s absolutely necessary. You’re going to assess. Show the Giorlandos our colors give a shit their glass stays safe. Make it clear to Dante we didn’t send this storm, but we’re not letting it blow through unchecked.”
“Copy,” I said.
“Everyone else knows their assignments,” Blackjack said to the room. “We treat this like the frontline now. No one gets comfortable. No one assumes a quiet hour means we’re safe. It just means the next hit hasn’t landed yet.”
He stood up. Meeting over by posture alone.
We filed out.
In the hallway, the noise of the main room filtered up—voices, clink of bottles, low curse words as men reloaded magazines and taped windows.
Valkyrie fell into step beside me without beingasked.
“You all right?” she asked quietly.
“Define all right,” I said.
She huffed. “That line’s getting old.”
“So’s this war,” I replied.
We stepped out into the night air.
The yard looked different in floodlight. The Devil’s Aces insignia on the concrete looked darker. Maybe that was just my eyes.
We stopped just outside the door, in the shadow where the noise thinned out.
“You meant what you said in there?” she asked.
“The part where I essentially told a mafia boss he needed to stop being precious about his consigliere?”
“That part,” she said.
“Yeah. Stumbling upon that ledger changed the timeline. But it didn’t create this. These moves were coming whether Miami took that bike or not. We just cut in on the dance early and fucked up their choreography. The Vincinos. Bolivars. Serpents. All of them were circling this before we even saw that bike. Men like Tesauro and Vladimir don’t just wake up on a Tuesday and decide to tear down an empire. They’ve been building up to it. Our club didn’t start this fire. We just saw the first sparks up close.”
Her hand lifted.
She hesitated for a heartbeat—enough time to decide whether touching me again tonight was a mistake—and then she put her palm on my arm. Rightover the ink that wrapped wrist to shoulder. Warm. Solid.
“I told you before,” she said. “Your club before everything. Mine too. We didn’t choose the shape of this war. We’re just choosing how we stand in it.”
I looked down at her hand.
Safe.
The word slid through my head before I could catch it. It was stupid. Nothing about any of this was safe. But right here, in this little pocket of shadow, with her fingers on my skin and her eyes on my face, the static in my spine eased a fraction.
Her gaze flicked to my mouth for half a second before jerking back up to my eyes.
We both thought about the kiss. I could feel it in the way the air shifted between us.
