He hadn’t been unconscious for more than three minutes before his breathing lengthened. The hard line between his brows softened slightly, though it never fully vanished. Even sleeping, he looked like he was carrying weight.
The thin lines of healing cuts mapped along his knuckles. A bruise shadowed his jaw where someone else’s fist had left a memory not long ago.His tattoos crept up his throat and under his jaw, disappearing behind his ear. I followed their pattern with my eyes, imagining the needle, the sting, the choice behind each piece. The pain. The trust.
I had no business finding any of it appealing.
He was trouble wrapped in leather and armed with a loyalty I hadn’t seen too often in men.
If someone had told me a year ago I’d be sitting in my room, watching the Devil’s Aces enforcer sleep while a backpack full of god-knew-what sat inches from his hand, I’d have called them insane.
Yet here we were.
I leaned back in the chair, crossing my arms over my chest, and let my eyes half-close, not in sleep but in that alert rest you learn when you’ve lived too long in houses that were never safe.
Memories skated close. A different room. Different walls. A door that never stayed closed. A man whose hands were never gentle. The smell of cheap whiskey and cheap cologne and expensive anger.
Liberty’s voice cutting through that fog. Pack your shit. You’re leaving.Now.
My fingers flexed around my own arms, grounding myself in the present. In the hum of the compound. In the faint vibration of music through the floorboards. In the sound of a soft even breath from the corner.
He shifted once, rolling slightly onto his side. His face turned toward me. A lock of dark hair fell across his forehead, boyish where everything else about him screamed hardened.
If he had a ring on his finger, I thought, if this were some other life, some other world, he’d probably be terrifying in a suit. Sitting at some table, smiling like that, hiding knives behind his teeth.
But this was our world. Our rules. Our war.
And what I found most attractive about him had nothing to do with his jaw or his tattoos or even his funny little smirk.
It was the way he wanted to cover that doorway in the hospital without thinking. The way his first instinct had been to shield his friend. The way he’d strapped a dangerous unknown to his back rather than leave it where someone else could take it and be someone else’s problem.
A man willing to die for his best friend and his club, and do it with a joke on his tongue.
Stoic. Stupid. Brave. The worst combination. The one that gets under your skin and stays.
“You’re not mine,” I murmured in my head. “You’re not anyone’s. You’re temporary. Just a problem to solve.”
Then a quieter voice whispered back.
For now.
I shifted in the chair. The wood creaked softly. He didn’t stir.
Outside, a bike started, then shut off. Someone laughed in the hall. A door closed. The compound settled into its version of sleep.
I stayed awake. Watching.Waiting. Guarding.
Every so often, my gaze dropped to the bag.
Whatever was in there had already tried to get him and his brother killed. It had already sent a hit man onto our roads and bullets into our hospital’s walls. It had already dragged one MC, and my whole damn world into its orbit.
I didn’t know whose names were written on the pages of whatever book had been mentioned. I didn’t know which empires were tied into this mess.
But I knew this much to be true if nothing else.
Whoever thought they owned it wasn’t going to stop coming for it. And whoever thought they could use it to burn our cities didn’t yet understand that snakes don’t run from fire.
We coil around it.
We sink our fangs in.
