The grief and something else twisted together in my gut. Something I didn't want to look at, didn't want to examine, because examining it meant admitting that when I'd watched her eat a sandwich in my kitchen, I hadn't just been seeing Ryan's little sister. I'd been seeingher.The woman. The curve and the softness, the fierce set of her jaw and those eyes that held everything she was feeling right at the surface where anyone could see it. The way she'd squared her shoulders when she said she was fine.
Ryan's sister. Fifteen years younger than me. Terrified and under my protection.
I was disgusted with myself. The bone-deep kind that sits behind your ribs and burns because you can't put it out and you can't look away from what caused it. I was a forty-three-year-old man with a dead friend's blood on his conscience, standing outside this woman's door thinking about her in a way I shouldn’t.
I pushed off the wall. Straightened up. Locked it down the way I locked everything down, hard and total.
I owed Ryan everything, and I was going to keep her safe if it killed me. That was the only thing I could still do for the man I'd failed.
That was what this was. A debt. A duty.
I walked away from her door and told myself I believed that.
THREE
CALLIE
I'd been at the compound for four days and I was going out of my mind.
The room they'd given me was clean, warm, quiet. The bed was the most comfortable thing I'd slept on in years. There was a lock on the inside of the door that I'd used the first night and hadn't touched since, because somewhere between day one and day three I'd stopped feeling like I needed it. The compound was safe. I knew that in my bones, the way you know the ground is solid under your feet.
The problem was that safe meant still. And still meant thinking. And thinking meant the alley, the gunshot, the cop's face, the knife in my pillow, the life I'd left behind that wasn't much of a life but was mine. My apartment, my job and the regulars at Grady's who left decent tips. All of it, gone, because I'd taken the trash out on a Tuesday night and saw something I shouldn’t have.
So I kept busy. Made coffee in the mornings before anyone was up, learned where they kept things in the big lodge kitchen, wiped down counters that were already clean. I found the broom and swept the porch until Hawk looked at me like I'd lost my mind. I offered to help wherever I could.
I was earning my keep. Or at least, trying to. It was the only thing I knew how to do. If you're staying somewhere you don't belong, you make yourself useful. You prove you're worth the space you're taking up. I'd been doing it my whole life. After Ryan died, after the funeral and the folded flag and the unbearable silence that followed, I'd done it with work. Double shifts, extra tables, volunteering for the closes nobody wanted. It was better than being alone with my own thoughts and grief. The grief subsided with time, but old habits die hard.
The brothers were kind. That was the part I didn't know what to do with. Doc checked on me every morning, casual, like he just happened to be passing through the kitchen when I was making coffee. He'd ask how I slept, and wander off before it could feel clinical. Rook didn’t speak much, but I'd come downstairs one morning to find a phone charger on the kitchen counter with a sticky note that saidheard you needed this. Duke told terrible jokes to try and make me smile, and they did, even the ones that were genuinely awful.
They were testing me, too. I could feel it, the way you feel someone watching you from across a room. Figuring out who I was, whether I was what I said I was, whether I was a threat to their brother, to their MC. I didn't blame them. I'd have done the same.
But it was Angel I couldn't stop watching.
He was everywhere and nowhere. He didn't hover, didn't check on me the way Doc did, didn't make conversation the way Duke did. But he was alwaysthere.In the kitchen when I came down, already on his second coffee, reading something on his phone. On the porch when I stepped outside, leaning against the railing with his eyes on the treeline. In the workshop when I walked past, his back to me, the white cotton of his t-shirt pulled tight across his shoulders while he worked on something I couldn't see.
I noticed things about him that I had no business noticing. His hands, the size of them, the way they wrapped around a coffee mug and made it look like a toy. The way he listened when someone talked to him, completely focused, his whole body angled toward whoever had his attention. The low sound of his voice when he was talking to Ghost on the porch and didn't know I was sitting by the window inside, close enough to hear the rumble of it but not the words. The way he moved through a room, unhurried, deliberate, like every step was a decision he'd already made.
He was older. I kept circling back to that, prodding at it, embarrassed by how little it mattered to me and how much it should. This man had served with my brother. He'd been Ryan's commanding officer, his friend, his brother in every way that counted. He was almost old enough to be... I wouldn't let myself finish that sentence. The math was silly and the fact that I'd done the math at all was worse.
Because I doubted he was seeing me the way I was starting to see him. When he looked at me, I thought I could read exactly what was behind it. Duty. Obligation. The weight of a promise made to a dead man. I was Ryan's sister, a responsibility he'd accepted without hesitation, and whatever warmth I thought I saw in his eyes when they landed on me was probably just the ghost of his grief for my brother. He saw Ryan when he looked at me. I was sure of it.
Which made the heat that rolled through my stomach every time he walked into a room deeply, thoroughly mortifying.
On the fourth afternoon, I was in the kitchen again. Cleaning. The counter was already spotless but I was scrubbing it anyway, because the alternative was sitting on my bed staring at the ceiling and replaying the sound of a gunshot.
"You don't have to earn your place here."
His voice, behind me. I hadn't heard him come in, which was insane given that he was six foot three and built like a wall. But he moved quietly for a big man. Like sound was something he could choose to make or not.
I turned around. He was standing in the doorway, shoulder against the frame, arms folded. The afternoon light was coming in through the window behind me and catching him from the side, and I could see the way his mouth was set in that expression I was learning to read. Calm. Watchful. Patient.
"I'm not," I said. "I'm just cleaning."
"You've cleaned that counter three times today."
"It's a dirty counter."
Something flickered in his face. If I didn't know better, I'd have called it amusement. But it was gone before I could be sure, and his expression settled back into that steady, unreadable thing he wore like armor.
