Chapter 5
June
Falling for Rafferty terrifies me more than the men who might be hunting me, and that sentence should sound insane even inside my own head, but it doesn't, because I understand exactly why it's true.
The men hunting me are a known danger. I know their shape, roughly, even if I don't know their exact next move.
Rafferty is a different kind of danger entirely — the kind where I let someone matter, and mattering is exactly how I ended up in this mess in the first place.
I trusted a person I shouldn't have. I was in a building I shouldn't have been in, at an hour I shouldn't have stayed, because someone I trusted asked me to be there and I didn't think twice.
That single act of trust is the reason I now flinch at slamming car doors and sleep with my shoes on.
Attachment, in my recent education, is a liability with a body count.
And yet.
I've turned this thought over a hundred times since it first surfaced — the specific, cruel irony of it.
I built four months of survival on the principle that I trust no one, tell no one, need no one, because needing someone is a door, and doors are exactly how the wrong people get in.
And here I am, weeks into Clover Ridge, feeling the pull toward a man I barely know with a gravity I can't argue myself out of.
Rafferty doesn't push. That's the thing that keeps dismantling my defenses when pushing would have only reinforced them.
He shows up steady, day after day, asking for nothing, offering pieces of his own history before he ever asks for mine, and somewhere in the accumulated weight of all that quiet consistency, I run out of reasons to keep him at arm's length.
So I tell him. All of it, finally, sitting on the low wall outside the hardware store where the whole thing between us seems to keep happening, like the wall itself has become neutral ground.
I tell him about the night in March — the office I wasn't supposed to still be in, the door I opened at the wrong moment, the man I saw doing something I will spend the rest of my life wishing I'd never witnessed.
Devlin Marsh. Businessman on paper, something considerably worse underneath the paper, with enough money and enough reach that the word "untouchable" gets used about him unironically by people who should know better.
"I was only there because a coworker asked me to grab a file before an early meeting," I tell him.
"That's it. That's the whole reason my life turned into this.
I trusted the wrong person's timeline, walked into the wrong hallway at the wrong hour, and saw something that turns you into a liability whether you asked to be one or not. "
"You didn't do anything wrong," Rafferty says, quiet and certain.
"I know that. Logically, I know that." My voice catches, and I let it, because I'm tired of not letting it.
"But knowing it doesn't stop me from replaying it every night, wondering what would've happened if I'd just been thirty seconds later, or thirty seconds earlier, or never agreed to grab that file at all. "
"You can't live inside the version where it didn't happen. Believe me. I've tried that with my own mistake for six years. It doesn't get you anywhere but tired."
That lands somewhere true and uncomfortable, and I let it sit there instead of arguing with it.
I tell him about the four months since. The first safe house, and the leak that came from inside the very system built to protect me, and the phone call at two in the morning that told me, without saying it outright, that staying put one more night wasn't a risk I could afford.
The running since. The names. The duffel bag I still haven't fully unpacked, three weeks into Clover Ridge, because some part of me still doesn't trust that I get to stop.
Saying it all out loud, to another human being, after four months of carrying it entirely alone, does something I didn't expect.
It doesn't just unburden me. It makes it real in a way that hiding it kept it from being — solid enough to look at directly instead of just feeling its weight in the dark.
Rafferty listens without flinching, without interrupting, without once looking at me like I'm something fragile that needs managing. When I finish, he's quiet for a moment, like he's turning the whole thing over carefully before he responds.
"Does it get easier?" I ask him, before he can say anything else. "Telling someone? I always imagined it would feel like putting a weight down. It doesn't, exactly. It just feels like handing half the weight to someone else and hoping they don't drop it."
"I won't drop it."
"You don't know that yet."
"I know myself," he says, simple, certain, no bravado in it at all. "I've spent six years being exactly as careful with things as I say I'll be. That's not going to change because the thing I'm being careful with is you."
I don't have a response for that. I just let it sit, warm and unfamiliar, in the space where four months of terror used to live uncontested.
"You've been running because you thought you had to do it alone," he says finally.
"And alone, running is all you can do." He looks at me steadily.
"But you're not alone anymore. You've got a whole club.
You've got a lawyer who eats powerful men for breakfast. You've got a town that protects its own.
" A pause. "Running isn't your only option now. Fighting is on the table."
I have not, not once in four months, considered that sentence as a possibility. Fighting. Not running, not hiding, not disappearing into yet another small town with yet another fake name — fighting, with people standing behind me instead of a duffel bag and a head start.
The idea is dizzying. It's also, if I'm honest, terrifying in an entirely new direction, because fighting means being visible, and visible is the one thing I've trained every cell in my body to avoid for four straight months.
"What if I'm not brave enough for that?" I ask, quieter than I mean to.
"You drove yourself across four states alone with nothing but a duffel bag and a fake name and survived four months nobody trained you for," Rafferty says.
"You're not short on brave. You're short on backup.
Those aren't the same problem, and I happen to know a whole club that specializes in fixing the second one. "
"That's a very tidy answer for a very messy problem."
"I'm a tidy guy. Ask anyone. My boots are always in the same spot by the door."
That startles a laugh out of me, unexpected and real, the first genuinely light moment in a conversation that's been anything but. "Is that supposed to be reassuring?"
"It's supposed to be true. Reassuring's just a nice side effect."
"I don't know how to do that," I admit, sobering again. "I don't know how to stop running. I've forgotten what standing still even feels like."
"You don't have to know yet," Rafferty says. "You just have to be willing to find out. We'll figure out the how."
I want to believe him. God, I want to believe him. And for one long, quiet evening, sitting beside a man who's spent weeks proving himself trustworthy in exactly the ways that matter, I let myself start to.
I think about my old life that night, back in my room above the hardware store, staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping.
I think about the office, the file, the thirty seconds that changed everything.
I think about my sister, and Biscuit curled up on someone else's feet now instead of mine, and the group chat I still haven't answered, and the version of me that used to make logos for craft breweries and worry about normal things, like rent and whether a client would like a font choice.
That version of me feels impossibly far away now, like a person I used to know rather than a person I used to be.
I don't know if I'll ever get her back, exactly, or if I even want to — four months of running have changed me in ways I'm still discovering, hardened parts of me that used to be soft and softened, strangely, parts of me that used to be hard.
I trust less. I also, somehow, appreciate more — a hot meal, a locked door, a quiet evening with no immediate threat in sight.
Rafferty's words keep circling back through my head.
Fighting is on the table. I turn the phrase over and over, trying to find the fear in it and finding, instead, something that feels dangerously close to hope.
I haven't let myself hope in four months.
Hope, I learned early on, is expensive, and I couldn't afford the currency.
Maybe, I think, drifting finally toward sleep, I can afford it now. Maybe that's what a whole club and a sharp attorney and a quiet, watchful man are for — spreading the cost of hope out across enough shoulders that one person doesn't have to carry the whole weight of it alone anymore.
The universe, predictably, does not let me enjoy that for long.
Two days later, a man comes into town.
I clock him the moment I see him, the way I clock everyone, and everything about him sets off every alarm four months of running has installed in me.
He's asking careful questions at the diner — not obviously, not clumsily, he's good at this, professionally good — about whether anyone's seen a woman matching a description that is, with a few cosmetic differences, unmistakably me.
Late twenties. Dark hair. Traveling alone. Arrived recently.
I hear about it from Harper, who slides into my booth with a face gone serious in a way I haven't seen on her before.
"Guy was in here an hour ago," she says, quiet, direct. "Rafferty already knows. Wanted you to hear it from someone first before you heard it from him and panicked."
I don't panic, not in the way I would have four months ago, when panic meant grabbing my bag and being three states away by morning. I sit very still instead, and something cold and familiar settles into my chest, the specific dread of a hiding place that just stopped being safe.
"They found me," I say, and it comes out flatter than I feel it, four months of practice keeping my voice even while my whole body screams.
"Nobody's found anything," Harper says, firm. "Somebody's asking. That's different, and this whole town's about to make sure it stays different."
"You don't understand what these people are capable of," I say, and it comes out sharper than I mean it, four months of terror looking for somewhere to land.
"Maybe not," Harper allows, unbothered by my tone in a way that somehow settles me more than gentleness would have.
"But I understand what this town's capable of, and I'd put my money on us.
Rafferty already told Knox. Knox already told half the club.
By tonight there won't be a soul in Clover Ridge who doesn't know to keep their mouth shut around a stranger asking careful questions.
" She squeezes my hand once, brief and fierce.
"You're not doing this the way you did the last four months. Not anymore."
I don't know yet how it stays different.
I don't know yet whether Clover Ridge is a fortress or a trap with better scenery.
All I know, sitting there with cold coffee and Harper's steady hand briefly on my arm, is that four months of running alone is about to become something else entirely, and I don't have the first idea whether that's the best thing that's happened to me or the beginning of the worst.
I go looking for Rafferty. I find him already looking for me.
He doesn't say anything dramatic when he sees my face.
He just says, "We knew this might happen eventually.
Come on. We've got work to do," and something about the "we" — steady, certain, already assuming I'm not doing this alone — is the only reason I manage to walk toward whatever comes next instead of toward my car.
We don't talk much on the walk to the clubhouse.
There's not much to say yet, not until we know more, and Rafferty seems to understand that better than I would have expected from a man I've known barely a month.
He walks close enough that I can feel the solid presence of him beside me without him ever actually touching me, and it's exactly the kind of comfort I didn't know I was capable of accepting until he started offering it in doses small enough not to spook me.
"You scared?" he asks, finally, as the clubhouse comes into view.
"Terrified."
"Good. Means you're paying attention." He glances over at me, something almost gentle under the flat delivery. "Terrified and alone is the worst place to be. Terrified and surrounded is just Tuesday for most of the people in this club."
"That's either very reassuring," I say, echoing words I don't yet know I'll be saying again soon under very different circumstances, "or deeply concerning."
"Both," he says. "It's a whole thing."
I don't know it yet, but I'm about to learn exactly how much that phrase means to him, and how much room there is in this town, in this club, in this one careful, watchful man, for someone like me to finally stop running.