The silence lasts thirty seconds. Then it ends.
"This doesn't fix anything."
Her voice carries nothing. Not anger, not sadness, not the heat that tore through us ninety seconds ago. A flat statement of fact from a woman who's learned to separate what her body wants from what she deserves.
I close my eyes. My arms tighten around her and I press my face into her hair and breathe in. The truth sits in my chest like a stone I can't swallow.
She's right. Sex with Holly has never been the problem. Sex with Holly is the only honest thing I do. It's everything around it I'm failing.
"I know," I say.
Holly pulls back enough to look at me. Her dark eyes search my face and I don't know what she's looking for, but I know she doesn't find it because her expression closes. She pushes off the floor, finds her jeans, pulls them on with her back to me. I sit onthe cold concrete and watch her button her belt and straighten her hair and put herself back together piece by piece, and every move puts another inch of distance between us that has nothing to do with the room.
She turns at the door. "Clean up the napkins."
Then she's gone, the stockroom door swinging shut behind her, and I hear the bar sounds flood in. The jukebox, the regulars, the clink of glasses.
I clean up the napkins and restack the bourbon box,sweep the broken glass into a pile with the side of my boot and dump it in the bin.Pull my shirt on and check myself in the reflection of the stockroom's steel door. My neck striped with her nail marks, my hair wrecked, my eyes carrying something I don't have a name for.
The side door leads to the alley between the Anchor and the hardware store next door. I push through it for air and the January cold hits my skin like a slap. I stop breathing.
A dark SUV sits across the street. Engine running, exhaust curling white in the cold. The lean orc in the passenger seat, and this time he's not aiming the telephoto at the clubhouse or the harbour overlook.
He's aimed at the Anchor's front door.
I go still before my brain catches up. They've never come during business hours before. They've never positioned on the Anchor's front entrance. Every morning I've tracked them they've worked from elevated positions at dawn. This is different. This is close, public, and bold.
The lean orc adjusts his lens and I follow the barrel angle. The window with the packing tape over the rock hole. The sidewalk where customers walk in and out.
He's not mapping the club's movements anymore. He's photographing the people who come to the bar.
Holly's face is in that camera. The orc behind the lens has no idea what she is to me, and it doesn't matter. She's in the frame. That's enough. Holly, who my blood has been pulling toward for months like a compass needle that won't stop spinning. She's standing behind a bar ten feet from a lens she doesn't know exists
The fated mate bond hits like a hammer blow to my chest. Not the wanting. The wanting I can handle. This is the thing underneath it, older and meaner, the protective instinct Knox described the night Sarah's ex showed up at the compound, the one that turns an orc from a man into something that doesn't take no for an answer. My vision sharpens. My hands curl at my sides. Every muscle in me coils toward that SUV and the word in my skull changes pitch fromminetoprotectand the gap between the two narrows to nothing.
I don't engage. Knox's order sits in my head beside the instinct:Track. Don't engage. Two full weeks of data before we move.
Knox's order says stay. The bond says protect. And while those two duke it out, the rest of me is already calculating how far I can get by midnight.
Photographs of the Anchor mean photographs of everyone inside it. Every regular, every staff member, every orc in a Feral Sons cut who parks his bike out front and sits at the bar nursing bourbon until closing. Holly lives and works in that building. I've been showing up in my patch for months. If they're connecting dots, the line between her and the club runs straight through me.
My association with the club puts her in the frame. My presence at the Anchor puts her in the frame. Every night I'vesat on that stool, every morning I've left her bed, every time I've walked through that front door in my cut with the Feral Sons patch across my back—I've been drawing a line between Holly and the Bloodstone Clan's crosshairs.
It hits me all at once. I want to protect her but I'm the reason she needs protecting. I want to walk across the street and rip the camera out of the orc's hands and break it on the pavement and put my fist through the passenger window, but I can't do any of it because the moment I reveal what Holly is to me, she becomes a target instead of a bystander.
The SUV pulls out. Heading south the same way they leave every time. I watch until the taillights disappear around the bend by the harbour.
I stand in the alley long enough for the logic to build in pieces. If I stay, I'm the link. Every night I walk into the Anchor in my cut, I'm drawing a line between Holly and whatever the Bloodstone Clan is planning. If I disappear, the line breaks. She goes back to being a bartender in a bar, not the woman connected to the club's Road Captain. The logic is clean and simple and I know it's bullshit even as I build it, but my hands are already reaching for my keys.
I go back inside. Holly is behind the bar pulling a pint for one of the dock workers, her face composed, her hair re-tied, every trace of the stockroom locked away. I wait until the dock worker moves to his table.
"Holly."
She sets the glass down and looks at me, and her eyes are already bracing for it.
"Bloodstone scouts are photographing this building." I keep my voice low. The jukebox covers the rest. "A dark SUV across thestreet with a camera on the front door. They're not just watching the club anymore. They're watching everyone who comes in and out."
Her hand stills on the tap. "How long?"
