"Jake—"
The door opens and closes, and he's gone. I sit in the silence he leaves behind, the city humming outside, Marcus breathingbeside me, my heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my fingertips.
What the hell just happened?
Chapter 6 - Havoc
I make it to the parking lot before I stop walking.
My hands are shaking.
I stand next to my bike in the dark, in the shadow of this shithole motel, and my hands are actually shaking, hands that have held weapons, hands that have carried the dead, hands that have never once trembled under enemy fire, and they're shaking because I kissed a woman.
Because I kissed Ruby.
No. That's not why. The kiss is the least of it.
The kiss I can explain away. She was close, and she was beautiful, and I haven't been with a woman in months, and the proximity did something to my judgment. That's the story I'll tell myself. That's the version I can live with.
What I can't explain is everything that came before it.
I sat in that floral chair in that tiny motel room and I talked. Not the clipped, functional sentences I use with the brothers. Not the tactical brevity I learned in the military. I talked the way I've never talked to anyone: about the foster homes, about aging out at eighteen with nothing but a duffel bag and a chip on my shoulder the size of a mountain. About my unit. About the ambush. About sitting on a Fremont Street curb at two in the morning with a loaded weapon and absolutely no reason to put it away.
Things only Pope knows because he was there. Things I never told anyone.
And the worst part, the part that's really fucking with me, is that I feel better.
I feel lighter, like I've been carrying something in my chest for years and I just set it down for the first time. Like saying it out loud to someone who listened, who actually listened, who cried for me without making me feel pitied, shifted something that's been stuck so long I'd forgotten it could move.
I don't know what to do with that.
I've spent eight years convinced that my story was too heavy to hand to another person. That the darkness would contaminate anyone I let close enough to see it. And Ruby just sat there in the half-dark with her son sleeping beside her and she took every word I handed her and held it with care.
And then I kissed her and ran like a coward.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Fucking hell.
I should go back up there. Knock on the door, explain myself, stop letting fear make my decisions. I turned my whole life around once, chose the club over the gutter, and that took guts. This shouldn't be harder than that.
Except it is, because Pope was offering me survival, and Ruby is offering me something I don't have a name for yet, and survival I understand. This other thing terrifies me in ways that artillery fire never did.
I get on the bike before I can talk myself back up those stairs.
The engine comes to life under me, and I pull out of the parking lot without looking back, because if I look back I'll see the light in her window and I'll go back up there and I won't stop at a kiss this time.
And she deserves better than someone making that decision out of confusion and desire at midnight in a motel parking lot.
She deserves someone who shows up decided.
I ride until the city blurs around me—the Strip, the downtown lights, the dark stretches of highway where Vegas pretends to end before sprawling outward again. The desert air hits me cold at this speed, and I ride into it until my head clears and my hands stop shaking.
By the time I get back to the casino it's almost one in the morning.
I don't sleep.
I lie on my bed staring at the ceiling with my bandaged hands folded on my chest like a man laid out in a funeral parlor, and I think about dark brown eyes and a constellation of beauty marks and the way she said Jake like my name was something worth repeating.
I think about her mouth.
