First words since we left the cabin.
My chest tightens around them.
“Barely,” I say.
Her arms tense. “That’s what you told him.”
“That’s because it’s true.”
“You were shot.”
“Had worse.”
She goes quiet.
Wrong answer.
I know it the second the words leave my mouth. She isn’t one of my brothers. She isn’t Ghost or Havoc or Blade, trained to measure injury by whether I can still stand. She’s a nurse. A woman who was taken at gunpoint and still tried to save the man bleeding on a table.
Soft heart.
Steel spine.
Dangerous combination.
I ease off the throttle as my turn comes up, gravel crunching under the tires when I leave the main road.
“My place is close,” I tell her. “I’ll let you look at it there.”
“Let me?” she asks, and there’s the faintest tremble of fire in her voice.
My mouth twitches.
There she is.
Scared out of her mind, still bristling because I phrased medical care like a favor.
“Bad wording, sweetheart.”
She doesn’t answer, but her grip changes. Loosens a little. Then settles again.
Sweetheart.
I called her that without thinking, and now the word is burned into me.
I should stop.
I won’t.
The cabin appears through the trees, porch light glowing over old wood and stone. The place is nothing fancy. One room witha small kitchen along one wall, a bed tucked in the corner, two chairs near the fireplace, and a bathroom behind the only inside door. Weapons locked where they belong. Medical kit stocked because men like me are always pretending blood is an inconvenience.
It’s built for solitude.
Reina behind me makes that solitude feel thin.
I roll the bike to a stop near the porch and kill the engine. The sudden silence lands heavy. Crickets. Wind in the pines. Her breath, too close and too unsteady.
For a second, neither of us moves.
