The idea of her between me and a gun again did something irritatingly complicated in my chest.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” I said.
She stood, close enough that her knee brushed mine. “Good,” she said. “Those are the worst kinds of jobs. I’ll consider you a particularly mouthy assignment instead.”
She started to walk away, then stopped and looked back over her shoulder.
“Oh,” she added. “And Jersey Boy?”
“Yeah?”
“That invisible string you keep pretending isn’t there,” she said. “Cut it. We’re on the same road for now, nothing more.”
I swallowed. My face didn’t give anything away, but something must have flickered, because her mouth quirked again.
“Like I said,” she murmured. “Loud.”
She walked back toward Liberty, who stood with Indigo and Rosé near the far wall, voices low, heads bowed together like generals over a map. They were probably figuring out how to plan the meeting with 8-Ball, where to draw some lines, and how to keep this explosion contained.
I sat at the bar, glass in my hand, weight on my back, girls with snakes on their cuts still all around me.
My worries lined up like cards.
Miami, in a hospital bed under sedation, with a hit already attempted and more probably queued.
Blackjack, pacing in his office with half the picture and a head full of bad possibilities, waiting on his Vice President to cross into someone else’s territory.
An unknown shooter with a wounded side and likely more friends.
A ledger that could burn cities.
And a woman who had dragged me out from under gunfire and now stood ten yards away, talking with her President about how much risk I was probably worth. Icouldfeel an invisible line between us. Invisible, but not imaginary. One I wasn’t planning on cutting.
I took another swallow of whiskey and stared at the bottles, letting the reflections blur.
“I came here to protect a brother,” I thought. “Now I’m chained to a woman who could kill me or kiss me… and I don’t know which would hit harder.”
The music rolled on. The clubhouse breathed around me. Outside, somewhere beyond the fence, the world spun closer to a war it didn’t know was even coming.
Whoever was expecting to get what was strapped to me surely knows it’s out there. The hospital hit was proof of that. And as bad as it was, it felt more like a beginningjust getting ready to explode.
Eight
Valkyrie
Riding back with a Devil’s Ace on my ass felt wrong.
The road from Shoreline General to our compound isn’t long, but today it felt stretched. Like someone had grabbed the edges of town and pulled until every second thinned both brittle and sharp.
I kept my eyes on the lane ahead, on the shape of traffic, on familiar cracks in the pavement. I didn’t look back. Not once.
I didn’t need to.
I could feel him.
His engine stayed tucked in my wake, not crowding, not lagging. The kind of disciplined riding that says ex-military or just very well trained. He matched every shift of weight, every lean. When I drifted around a pothole, he drifted around a pothole. When I slid between a minivan and a delivery truck, he slipped into the gap behind me like we’d run this route together a hundred times.
Only we hadn’t.
