Boots hit the floor hard. Voices rise. Doors open. Men come crashing into the room like someone lit a fire under them.
Logan. Cain. Carter. Dom. Shadow. Joker. Jimmy. Blaze. Landon.
Every single one of them looks…
Focused. Sharp. Ready.
“What the fuck—” Logan starts.
Mac just smiles sweetly. “Hi, baby.”
Cain mutters something under his breath that sounds a lot like a curse and a promise at the same time.
“Jesus Christ,” Blaze says, running a hand over his face. “Y’all are gonna be the death of us.”
“Worth it,” Bella shoots back.
“Absolutely,” Kya agrees.
“Prospects!” someone yells. “Watch the kids!”
There’s movement everywhere. Fast. Controlled chaos. And before I can fully process what’s happening…
Cobra is in front of me. His hand comes to my waist, firm, grounding. “Come on.”
I don’t argue. Don’t hesitate.
His hands comes around my back lifting up before I can even think about it, like I weigh nothing, like it’s the most natural thing in the world to carry me through a room full of people.
My arms wrap around his neck automatically, my hands playing with the hair at the nape of his neck. My breath catches as the world shifts, as the noise fades slightly behind us.
He takes me to his room. To where everything started to change. And as the door closes behind us, as the noise dulls and the space settles around us again. A thought slips in. Quiet. Uninvited. Impossible. What started as a nightmare, might have turned into something else entirely.
Something dangerous. Something consuming. Something that feels an awful lot like…
A fantasy.
It shouldn’t be the quiet that does it. Not after everything else. Not after the fight, the van, the cage, the blood, the way I put men down without thinking twice about it. None of that touched me the way this does. Silence shouldn’t be the thing that cracks something open.
But it is.
The room is still. Too still. The kind of still that lets sound carry farther than it should. The kind that makes every small noise sharper, more defined, harder to ignore.
She’s in the bathroom, the soft rush of water running, then shutting off. Fabric shifting. Movement that doesn’t belong to me, doesn’t belong to the club, doesn’t belong to anything I’ve built my life around. It belongs to her.
That matters more than it should.
I sit on the edge of the bed, elbows braced on my knees, hands clasped loosely together. My head is down, but I’m not thinking. Not really. I don’t do that. I process. I track. I stay ahead. But right now there’s nothing to track. No immediate threat. No next move.
Just… space.
And that’s where it starts to go wrong.
The door opens behind me.
I don’t turn. I don’t need to. I feel her. The shift in the room when she steps back into it, the quiet way she moves like she’s still figuring out where she fits, even though I already know the answer. She stops a few feet away. Doesn’t speak. Doesn’t rush to fill the silence. That’s different. Most people do. Most people can’t stand it.
She just… lets it sit.
