Page 3 of Rust of Control

Jude could not have repeated a word of what Nate said to Rand. He only saw the room change. He saw Sovereign, President of the Lords of Darkness MC in the high-backed chair at the back, not moving, watching Rand with cold appraisal. And he saw Scarlet’s knife. It had been turning between the Enforcer’s fingers the whole time, a small bright wheel, and at some point in what Nate was saying it simply stopped, point-down, and went still. And that was what closed Rand’s mouth. Not Nate. The knife.

Then Nate’s hand came to rest against the small of Jude’s back. Barely. The lightest Nate had ever touched him in fifteen years, two fingers and the side of a palm, just enough to mean this way.

Jude went.

Outside the cold was clean and total, and the lot had gone dark in the corners, and nobody followed them.

Nate walked him to a truck Jude didn’t know, an old Ford, opened the passenger door, and Jude climbed up into it. The door shut. He watched Nate come around the front of the truck through the windshield, big and unhurried, and get in on the other side. He didn’t start the engine right away like Jude expected.

Nate put his hands on the wheel and left them there.

Jude looked at the side of his face. He knew a rescued person was supposed to be quiet and grateful and small about it, and he had every intention of being all three. Instead, however, the only words left in him climbed straight up and out.

“You came for me.”

“Yeah.” Nate’s voice had gone rough at the bottom. He turned the key, and the truck shook itself awake around them. “Yeah. I did.”

He pulled out of the lot. At the mouth of the service road he turned left, and Jude’s tired brain took a full block to understand that left was wrong, that left was not the way to his condo, not the way back to the rooms where Rand’s things were and Rand would, eventually, also be.

“This isn’t the way home,” Jude said. Even he could hear how small and quiet his voice was.

“No,” Nate said. “It’s not.”

He did not explain it. He just drove, both hands on the wheel, the heater ticking as it came up warm, and Jude sat in the passenger seat of a borrowed truck and didn’t let himself look too long or too hard at how easy it had been to get in. With Nate. Because if there was one true thing in his whole life, it was Nate.

Chapter 2

Nate drove with both hands on the wheel and counted streetlights to keep his mind off what he wanted to do to Rand.

He was good at this. He had spent two years in a desert learning to keep his hands steady while the rest of him wanted to come apart, and then four more years in Marcus’s crew sanding the skill down until it ran without him thinking about it. His voice had stayed level in the clubhouse. His hands had stayed open. He hadn’t put Rand through the wall, though there’d been a stretch of about four seconds, while Rand said he’s mine in that arrogant voice, when Nate had known exactly how the wall would feel and exactly how Rand’s collarbone would give... and had wanted it the way a thirsty man wanted water.

He hadn’t done it because Jude had been standing right there, watching, with a panic attack still draining out of his face.

Jude hadn’t needed to watch someone he considered safe, swing. Jude had needed him steady, so Nate gave him steady, gave it to him so completely that Scarlet’s knife stopped turning out of what looked like professional disappointment, and Sovereign didn’t bother to stand. At least the worst night of Jude’s recent life ended with nobody bleeding. Nate counted that as a win.

Beside him, Jude had gone quiet, the wrung-out quiet of someone with nothing left to spend.

Nate didn’t look over. A look would land on Jude like a demand for a reaction, and Jude had performed enough tonight. He kept his eyes on the road and ran The List.

The List was four years old. Nate had started it the first time Jude texted him at midnight, some small soft nothing of a message, a question about whether Nate thought a lyric was too much, and Nate had answered it and then lain awake adding items. Things Jude needed and wasn’t getting. Jude ate when other people fed him and not otherwise. Jude apologized before he asked for anything, every time, the apology stapled to the front of the request like a customs form. Jude had a brother in a cell and a mother in a pew and a man in his bed, and only the first two of those had ever once put Jude first. The List had gotten long. Nate had never shown it to anybody. He’d especially never shown it to Jude, because The List was also, if he was honest, a confession, and Jude was his best friend’s little brother, and Nate had decided a long time ago to carry it rather than make it.

He’d read every text Jude had ever sent him. Most of them more than once. He knew that about himself and didn’t examine it on bright days.

Tonight there were three.

can u get hold of rand. Then the second, the address of the thing wrong with the night: im at the lords clubhouse he was supposed to drive me home. Then the third, one word, the one that had put Nate’s boots on the floor before his brain finished waking up. please. Jude asking for help and apologizing for the size of the ask in the same five letters.

He hadn’t asked what’s wrong. He’d learned, over four years, that what’s wrong was a door, and a panicking Jude couldn’t walk through doors; he could only stand in front of them apologizing for not being able to. So Nate had sent instructions instead. Then he had sent them again, the same four orders twice over, don’t move, don’t drink anything you set down, don’t go anywhere with Rand, fifteen minutes, rattled out and fired off before he could tidy them into something that sounded like a man in control of himself. He didn’t repeat himself. He had that night. He had pulled Jack’s truck keys off the hook and gone.

“You’re not going to ask,” Jude said.

It was the first thing he had said since this isn’t the way home, and his voice had the sanded-thin sound it got when there was almost nothing left under it.

“No,” Nate said.

“Why not?”

Nate thought about how to answer that without it becoming a door. “Because you’ll tell me when you tell me,” he said. “And because I already know enough.”