One bar.
I watched the screen through the pocket fabric. The glow was small and blue and useless.
One bar flickered. Dropped. Came back. Dropped again.
No bars.
The door had put a building between me and the cell tower, or what passed for a cell tower in a town this size. The signal that was already weak inside was dead out here. I closed the phone slowly, pressing it shut against my thigh so it wouldn’t click.
Pitt stepped in front of me.
The other Diablo moved into the space behind. A wall that breathed. The geometry was simple and ancient: one in front, one behind, trees on the sides. A box made of bodies anddarkness and the absolute certainty that nobody inside The Timberline was going to open that door.
I stood in the circle of light from the single bulb. It hit the gravel at my feet, the toes of my boots, the lower half of Pitt’s cut. Above that was shadow. His face was in it. I could see the outline of him — the width of his shoulders, the shaved head, the serpent tattoo catching light on his forearm where his sleeves were pushed up.
The pine trees stood in their rows behind the lot. Dark, silent, unmoved by anything happening in their shadow. The mountains were out there somewhere, but I couldn’t see them. The sky was a roof with no stars.
Nobody was coming.
I knew it the way I knew the number of steps on the back staircase, the way I knew the order of bottles on the speed rail. I knew it with the part of my brain that had been doing this math since I was old enough to count — the math of how many people were in the room and how many of them were on my side and what the number was when you subtracted the ones who’d already looked away.
The number was zero. It was always zero.
Pitt’s boots shifted on the gravel. The sound was small and final, like a period at the end of something.
Nobody was coming.
Chapter 2
Pitt’smouthopenedandI braced for whatever came out of it — the threat, the terms, the shape of whatever he’d come back to finish — but the words never landed.
Something shifted first. Not a sound exactly — or yes, a sound, but so small it barely registered above the blood in my ears. Gravel. A single displacement of weight on loose stone, somewhere to the left and behind Pitt, at the edge where the yellow light gave up and the tree line began. The kind of sound you’d miss if you weren’t already listening with everything you had.
Pitt heard it too.
His chin came up. Not fast — nothing about him was fast in the panicked sense — but with the alertness of an animal catching a scent it hadn’t expected. His hand was still on my shoulder, thumb against the ridge of my collarbone, and I felt the pressure change before I saw why. His fingers tightened. Then loosened. Then left me entirely as he turned.
A man stood at the edge of the light.
Not in it. At its edge, where the yellow from the single bulb met the dark and lost. He was big — that was the first thing, the thing my body processed before my brain caught up, because size was the variable that mattered most when you were five-foot-four and backed against a fence. Big in a way that had nothing to do with bulk or performance. Built like the frame of something meant to bear weight.
Dark hair, going grey at the temples. A face I couldn’t read at this distance and in this light — lived in, settled, somewhere north of forty. He was wearing a plain jacket, dark, zipped halfway. Jeans. Boots that looked like they’d walked a lot of ground without caring about it.
No cut.
I clocked that with the part of my brain that was still running calculations even while the rest of me was pressed against the wooden fence hard enough to feel the grain through my flannel. No leather. No patches. No rockers, no club name, no insignia of any kind. Just a man in a jacket standing exactly where two Diablos didn’t want a man in a jacket to be standing.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Didn’t reach for his waistband or his pocket or any of the places men reach when they want you to understand what they’re carrying. He just stood there with his hands at his sides and his weight settled, and the quality of his stillness was something I had never encountered before and couldn’t classify.
It wasn’t the stillness of fear. I knew that one — knew it in my own body, was wearing it now like a second skin. It wasn’t the stillness of indecision, either, or of a man freezing up. This was deliberate. Chosen. The stillness of someone who had already finished every calculation the situation required and was now simply present in the answer.
Pitt faced him fully. His body had reorganized — shoulders squared, chin level, feet repositioned on the gravel with asound like something being loaded. Behind me, the other Diablo shifted too. I heard him move and felt the geometry of the lot change, the box they’d built around me developing a crack it hadn’t had three seconds ago.
The man at the edge of the light didn‘t adjust. He looked at Pitt.
Not a challenge — challenges are invitations, and this wasn‘t inviting anything. Not a threat, either, because threats contain the possibility that the threatened party has a choice. This was something else.
Pitt looked back.
