His answer was quiet but honest. “No. It isn’t working for me. No matter how many times I tell myself that you’re a bad idea, I can’t help but look for you. When you’re not around, I can’t stop thinking about you. It’s crazy how much I think about you, honey.” Inside, a door slammed, making her jump, as laughter echoed faintly through the clubhouse. The club was slowly falling back into rhythm, but his world had tightened to this small circle of breath and snow and her eyes on his.
He stepped closer until there wasn’t enough cold between them to hide behind. The air smelled like her—cedar, warmth, fear, something else that felt too much like home. “You think this ends any better if I let you walk away?” he asked.
“I think it ends worse if you let me stay,” she replied, but she didn’t sound convinced.
“Maybe, but I’ve made peace with things being worse, because I can’t seem to live without you, honey.” He reached out, his hand finding the back of her neck, not rough, just claiming a space that already belonged to him, whether she liked it or not. She didn’t flinch. That was the beginning and the end of every argument right there.
Her breath hitched, and she whispered, “People around you always end up paying for your choices, don’t they?”
He looked down at her, voice quiet enough that only she could hear it. “If they do, it’s because I saved them first.” The wind shifted then, carrying the sound of tires on distant snow. He knew it wasn’t the SUV—too light, too quick—but it reminded him that every second he stood there was another second the world outside planned its next move.
Still, he didn’t step back. “You should go inside,” he said finally.
“So should you,” she challenged.
He huffed something like a laugh. “If I go in there, Buck’s going to start asking questions.”
Her lips parted—not a smile, not yet, but it might’ve become one if the world were different. “Maybe you should tell him the truth then,” she said.
“And what truth is that?” he whispered.
“That you picked a fight with a ghost and started losing the second you let me stay.”
He studied her for a long time, then nodded once. “You might be right. Thing about ghosts, though—they never leave quietly.” When she finally turned away and went back inside, Gorgon stayed outside until he could no longer tell where the snow ended, and the smoke from his cigarette began. He didn’t light another. Didn’t need to. The ache in him burned hot enough on its own.
Cole would come back. The club would stand ready. And when it happened, Gorgon would do what he did best—end things before they began. But as he looked up at the soft light bleeding through Kimi’s window, for the first time in years, he hesitated to define what ending things meant. Because what if this wasn’t something to end at all? What if, for the first time, it was something that had finally started?
Kimi
Kimi was exhausted from not getting much sleep the night before, and then, everything that happened that morning. She decided to skip lunch and take a nap. Although telling Trudi that she wasn’t hungry didn’t go over well. The bartender seemed to want to feed her, and that thought almost made her laugh.
By the time Kimi woke from her nap, it was already late afternoon. Light leaked in pale and hard, filtering through the frost-covered window, washing the room in thin gold. For a while, she just watched the slow movement of dust in the air, quiet and still—trying to let herself believe that the silence meant safety. But it didn’t—not really.
The tension in the clubhouse had seemed to change shape. It was quieter now, steadier, but not gone. The sound of voices down the hallway carried a lower pitch than usual—men talking in code, keeping an eye on the road, pretending not to have one hand always near the weapons hanging by the door.
That SUV might’ve driven off, but no one believed Cole was finished—least of all her. And then there was Gorgon. She rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling, the sheets cool and tangled around her legs. She could still smell him here—smoke, engineoil, frost, and the faint memory of heat. He was too real to be a dream, and too complicated to fit neatly under the word mistake.
Last night’s images came back in fragments—his mouth on hers, the weight of his body on top of her, the half-broken sound he made when she stopped him just long enough to pull him closer again. And afterward—that impossible quiet. Just the heavy stillness of two people who understood they’d crossed something that couldn’t be uncrossed.
She pressed her hand to her lips, half-guilty, half aching—and then the guilt won. Because whatever this was between them, it wasn’t supposed to happen. Not here and not now.
The knock on the door startled her, but Trudi didn’t wait for her to answer. She came in carrying a tray of coffee, a slice of toast, and two thin strips of bacon. “You look like you wrestled a hangover and lost,” Trudi said, setting the tray down on the desk. Her hair was tied up, lips painted sharp. “Eat before I start spoon-feeding you out of principle.”
“Is this how you handle all your guests?” Kimi asked, voice still raspy with sleep.
“Depends,” she said, “most don’t last long enough for me to have to feed.”
Kimi smiled weakly, sitting up. “Figures,” she mumbled.
Trudi folded her arms and watched as Kimi sipped the coffee. “You get a good nap?”
“Yeah, I got a bit of sleep,” she admitted.
“That’s something,” Trudi said.
“It would have been better had it been peaceful,” Kimi murmured.
“Sure, but out here,” Trudi said, tilting her chin toward the window, “peaceful isn’t what you get. You just learn what kind of crazy you can live with, and you pray for it to get quiet.”
