Chapter Two
Cole
Cole Reyes ran five miles before sunup because it was the only hour of the day nobody needed anything from him, and because if he stopped moving long enough to sit still with his own head, he ended up somewhere he didn't like going.
One hundred and ninety-four days sober. He didn't count it the way some men counted it, didn't carry a chip or say it out loud to anyone, because Ironvow wasn't the kind of club that ran meetings in a church basement and he wasn't going to drive forty minutes to Coleraine to sit in a circle of strangers and explain what he'd done to deserve his own sobriety.
He just knew the number the way you knew your own pulse, without checking, and he kept it because it was the one thing in the last seven months he'd done entirely for himself, with no audience, no grovel attached, just a decision he'd made alone in a motel room the night Rowan told him to get his things out of the house and never once looked back on.
He ran the perimeter of the mill district twice, past the Yard's dark windows, past the loading dock where Rowan's inventory sheets sat clipped to a board by the back door even at five in the morning, and made himself keep his eyes forward instead of counting the lights in the apartment window above the storage building where she slept now.
That was a rule he'd set for himself early and hadn't broken yet.
He didn't look at her windows. He didn't linger outside her business longer than a piece of actual work required.
He didn't call, didn't text, didn't show up with anything that could be mistaken for a play instead of what it actually was, which was a man doing the only thing left to do, which was less.
He hadn't always run this route. Before, he'd run wherever he wanted, some mornings looping out past the county line just to clear his head before a long day of club business, and Rowan used to leave a mug of coffee on the porch rail for him without being asked, timed exactly to when he'd come jogging back up the drive.
He didn't run past that house anymore. He'd left it to her in every way that mattered, the mortgage still in both their names on paper because neither of them had gotten around to the paperwork that would make the separation as official as the fact of it, but he hadn't set foot inside since the night she'd told him to take his things and go.
He kept a duffel bag's worth of clothes in the back room at the garage, slept on a cot most nights, and told himself it wasn't a punishment so much as an accurate reflection of what he still had a right to.
By six he was back at the garage, showered, coffee in hand, going through the day's work order Preacher had left taped to the toolbox.
A Softail needed its tank pulled and the fuel line checked.
Diesel's truck needed brakes before the Run.
Nothing that required him to think, which was exactly why he liked garage work these days, the kind of problem that had a right answer you could find with your hands, unlike the other kind of problem he'd spent the last seven months failing to find a clean fix for.
Diesel wandered in around seven-thirty with two beers sweating in his hands, one already open, the other held out toward Cole the way he'd done most mornings for the better part of a decade, a habit older than either of them thought about anymore.
"Little early, brother, but Tuesdays feel long lately," Diesel said, and then caught himself, the beer still hanging in the air between them. "Right. Sorry. Force of habit."
"Don't apologize for a beer, man." Cole nodded at the open bottle in Diesel's other hand instead. "Drink yours. I'm good with the coffee."
"You sure? Nobody's watching."
"I'm watching," Cole said, and meant it plainly enough that Diesel let the offer drop without pushing, the way most of the brothers had learned to do over the last half year, not because anyone had made a rule about it, but because Cole had made the choice once, out loud, at church, back when he still had the standing to say something at church and have the room actually listen.
I'm done drinking. Not because anybody's making me.
Because I did enough stupid things with a clear head that I don't need to find out what I'm capable of with an unclear one.
Nobody had argued with that. A few of them, Preacher included, had quietly stopped keeping a case in the garage fridge without saying why.
Diesel stuck around long enough to help wrestle the brake drums off his own truck, and somewhere in the middle of it, wrench in hand, he brought up the thing that had been going around the garage in low voices for the better part of a week.
"You hear the Vultures put a guy at the Coleraine truck stop asking about our supply routes?" Diesel said it casual, the way you mentioned weather, but his jaw was tight around it. "Second time this month somebody's clocked one of theirs poking around the county line."
"I heard." Cole had heard more than that, actually, had heard Walt on the phone twice this week with a clipped edge to his voice that meant trouble, but it wasn't Cole's business to manage anymore, not directly, not since he'd stepped back from anything that used to sit under his VP patch that didn't strictly need his hands on it. "Preacher's tracking it."
"You'd think, with everything going on with you and Rowan, they'd have picked a worse week to start sniffing around." Diesel caught himself again, winced. "Sorry. Not my business."
"It's fine." It wasn't, particularly, but Cole had gotten used to being the subject other men tiptoed around, and there wasn't much use correcting them on it. "Territory's territory. It doesn't wait for a good week."
Diesel let it go, and they finished the brake job in the kind of comfortable, wordless rhythm two men fell into after enough years working side by side, and Cole was glad for it, glad for an hour where the only thing he had to think about was torque specs and whether the rotor needed replacing along with the pads.
It was the closest thing to peace his days offered lately, hands busy, mind quiet, no accounting to do.
He'd been VP of Ironvow for four years, the man Walt Doyle had been grooming to take the gavel whenever Walt finally stepped back, and he hadn't touched a single VP responsibility that put him in a room alone with Rowan's business in the seven months since the affair came apart.
He'd handed the security contract oversight to Preacher without being asked.
He'd told Walt point blank, the week after, that anything touching the Yard needed to run through somebody else, because Rowan didn't need her ex managing her insurance renewals under the banner of club business, and because Cole didn't trust himself to draw a clean line between helping her and using help as an excuse to stay close.
It had cost him visibly. Walt hadn't said much about it, but Cole had watched the way the older man's face went flat and unreadable the day he made the request, the particular disappointment of a mentor watching his successor volunteer to make himself smaller.
He knew exactly what he'd thrown away, and he made himself hold the full list instead of the soft-focus version, because soft focus was how a man let himself off easy.
He'd thrown away the sound of Rowan laughing at something stupid on the drive home from a supply run, the specific low, surprised laugh she only did when she wasn't trying to be anything for anyone.
He'd thrown away six years of being the person she called first when something went wrong, six years of being trusted with the keys to something she'd built with her own hands, the kind of trust that didn't come standard with a relationship, that she'd handed him slow and deliberate because she didn't hand it out any other way.
He'd thrown it away for five months of choosing, over and over, not to end something he'd known from the second week was going to end everything if she ever found out.
Not an accident. Not one bad night he could point to and call a lapse in judgment.
A pattern he'd maintained on purpose, inside the building she'd built, while she stood twenty feet away most days trusting him with exactly the thing he was busy breaking.
Nobody made him carry that specific accounting of it. He did it to himself, every morning, on the theory that a man who let the details go soft was a man rebuilding himself a story he could live with instead of the truth.
Walt found him at nine, still in the garage bay, elbow-deep in the Softail's fuel line this time, and didn't bother with a greeting.
"You reconcile the Yard's insurance premium with Rowan last month," Walt said. It wasn't a question. Walt didn't usually ask questions when he already knew the answer he wanted confirmed.
"I forwarded the renewal paperwork. That's it." Cole didn't look up from the fuel line. "Preacher's handling the actual reconciliation with her. I told you I'm not touching her books."
"I know what you told me." Walt leaned a shoulder against the bay door frame, arms crossed, the posture he used when he was about to hand somebody a problem he didn't want to hold himself.
"Deb over at the diner mentioned something to Preacher's old lady, who mentioned it to me, and now I'm mentioning it to you because you're the only one who was in the room when we set up that catering supplier account two years back.
There's a duplicate charge on the vendor side.
Same invoice number, paid twice, six weeks apart, out of an account that should've only had three people with access. "