Chapter 5
East
The numbers on the screen blur into a meaningless grid.
Receipts, fuel costs, bar take—it’s all just noise.
My office in the back of the clubhouse is supposed to be the one place where everything adds up, a sanctuary of cold, hard logic.
Numbers have order. People don’t. I can balance books, not ghosts.
The math never covers what I owe. Tonight, I can’t make it past the second column.
My head is full of a conversation from yesterday, the words a low, insistent hum beneath my own thoughts.
“She needs us, East,” Frankie had said, her eyes intense over the rim of her coffee cup. “I can feel it.”
Frankie and her ‘feelings.’ I’ve learned not to question them.
Her intuition is supernatural bullshit I’ve learned to trust more than I trust the stock market.
We were a unit once—the four of us. Me, Frankie, Declan, and Darla.
Inseparable. After, when the world went quiet, Frankie and I were the ones who stayed tethered.
But two months ago, Frankie got one of her hunches and decided it was time to pull Darla back from the ghost-world she lives in, whether she liked it or not.
My phone buzzes on the desk, rattling against a stray socket wrench. A new text from Frankie lights up the screen.
Frankie: 5 mins out. Don’t be an ass.
I scrub a hand over my face, the rough scruff of my jaw scraping against my palm. It’s not a request; it’s a command. I’m the club’s treasurer. I have work to do. But Frankie’s on one of her cosmic crusades, and I know better than to get in her way.
Pushing back from the desk, I head for the door, grabbing my cut from the back of the chair. I’m not going out there for her. I’m going out there so Frankie doesn’t come in here and starts rearranging my life with her weirdly accurate intuition. A bullshit excuse, and we both know it.
I step out of the hallway, and the wall of noise and heat hits me. The room is packed, alive with the usual chaos. It’s too much. The air is too thick. I push through the crowd, heading for the back door, needing air, needing a minute before she gets here.
The alley's cool night air, thick with damp earth and the greasy scent of the neighboring diner, is a welcome shock.
I lean against the rough brick wall, my hands shaking as I pull a cigarette from the pack in my pocket.
I light it, the flare of the match a brief, bright spark, and take a deep drag, the acrid smoke a familiar, self-destructive burn in my lungs.
Headlights cut through the darkness at the end of the alley as a car turns into the back lot. Frankie’s car. My gut clenches. I watch as she gets out, a blur of leather and a wicked grin. Then the passenger door opens.
Darla. She showed up here again. God help me.
The cigarette falls from my numb fingers, dropping to the pavement where I crush it out under my boot without thinking.
For a heartbeat, I hear him, Declan’s laugh cutting through the noise of memory.
It guts me. Always does. It hits before I see her face.
A hook pulls through my ribs and sets hard. A familiar, sickening punch to my gut.
She doesn’t look at me. The girl I remember would have; her eyes searched for mine across a crowded room.
This woman doesn’t even seem to register my corner of the universe.
The sight of her is a physical blow, a jolt of pure, raw want that hits me so hard I forget how to breathe.
Fuck. She’s not just pretty anymore. She’s beautiful in a way that’s sharp and dangerous, like a shard of glass.
All clean lines and a defiant posture that dares you to get closer, dares you to see if you’ll get cut.
Seven years, and the ghost of the girl I knew is still there, but she’s wrapped in the armor of a woman who has seen too much.
All I can think is that I want to be the one to see what’s underneath.
My feet are moving before my brain can object with an impulse I don't name. I push back inside; the heat and noise is a wall I walk right through. It's a straight line to the bar where she's headed.
Frankie is already laughing with someone near the jukebox, the laugh that says she owns the oxygen. She taps Darla’s wrist, points toward an empty stool at the corner of the bar, then disappears into the bodies like smoke. Darla is alone.
A shadow detaches from the wall by the pool tables. Nash. He moves with a quiet efficiency, not intercepting me so much as just appearing at my side, falling into step with me.
“East,” he says in a low rumble that cuts through the noise.
“Getting a drink,” I say without looking at him, my eyes locked on the back of her head.
His hand lands on my shoulder, not to stop me, but to steady me. The pressure is slight, but it’s packed with meaning. I see you. Be careful.
“Is that all?” he asks, his tone flat. He knows better.
I don't answer. I just keep walking. He lets his hand drop. “Don’t start a fire you can’t put out,” he murmurs, right before he peels off, leaving me to walk the last few feet alone. The warning hangs in the air between us, a debt I already owe.
The bar is sticky with heat and spilled drinks. The air smells of sweat and whiskey. She notices me when I’m almost there. It’s not a turn of her head, just a flick of her eyes in the mirror behind the bar. It lands like a punch.
“Didn’t expect to see royalty gracing our humble establishment,” I say, leaning an elbow on the counter. My voice is a low, teasing drawl, a weapon I use to keep her at a distance, to pull her in close. “Lose your way, princess?”
“Never,” she says, her voice flat and bored as she turns her head. It’s a slow, deliberate movement. She takes in my cut, my worn jeans, the grime under my nails. “But don’t worry. I can slum it for a night.”
I let out a short laugh, moving a step closer. “Shame. I shaved and everything.”
Her mouth twitches. Almost a smile. It’s a flicker of the girl from before, and my gut clenches with a phantom ache. She kills it fast, her expression smoothing back into a mask of cool indifference. “You missed a spot.”
“Still looking close enough to notice, huh?” The words are out before I can stop them, more revealing than I intended.
Kyle appears with a beer I didn’t order and sets it in front of me.
The kid’s eager, too damn much like Declan when we were his age.
All nerves and big dreams. Makes me want to keep him far from every kind of ruin I’ve learned to live with.
He glances between me and Darla before wisely backing away.
I slide the water he brought earlier toward her. She leaves it where it lands.
“Frankie dragged me here,” she says, her eyes already moving past me, dismissing me. “Save your ego the trouble.”
“Frankie has taste,” I say.
“She has loyalty,” she corrects, and the word lands soft and heavy between us.
That’s when a guy I don’t recognize drifts in. His breath is thick with cheap rye. He plants a hand on the bar too close to Darla’s wrist. “Didn’t know Frankie had friends this gorgeous,” he says.
Darla turns her head as if she might be bored to death. “Didn’t know Willowridge let strays off the leash.”
The guy smirks, leaning in further. “I can show you a good time.”
I’m moving before I think, wedging between them with a grin sharp enough to cut. The guy’s breath reeks of rye and sweat, the kind that makes your skin crawl. The heat of her body through the thin fabric of her tank top is a jolt against my arm.
“Back off,” I tell him, my smile still in place. “Not your pond.”
He shifts his weight in that twitchy pre-fight tremble. A second shadow leans in on his far side. Nash. No sound, no threat. Just a hand closing on the back of the guy’s collar. “Walk away,” Nash says, so soft the words barely exist. The guy goes.
Darla lets out a breath. Controlled. As if she refuses to let me hear her pulse. “I had it,” she says without looking up.
“Didn’t say you didn’t,” I answer. “Didn’t like watching it.”
Her eyes find mine. They are not kind. “You don’t get to care.”
There it is. The steel under the silk. She learned how to weaponise pain, and damn if it doesn’t cut clean. The words hit like a fist to the solar plexus, knocking all the air out of me. I push a laugh through my teeth like it doesn’t matter.
“Noted.”
Frankie materializes on Darla’s other side with two shot glasses and a feral grin. “You good?”
“Peachy,” Darla says.
Frankie clocks me, points at my chest. “Behave.”
I lift my hands. “Always.”
“Liar,” she says, smiling, and melts back into the crowd.
Now it’s just us again. Music thick as humidity. Darla rocks the untouched shot back and forth between her palms. “You still think you’re the funniest guy in the room,” she murmurs.
I smirk. “Usually am.”
Her gaze flicks up, sharp. “Usually exhausting.” She looks away, her voice a near-whisper when she adds, “God, it’s been a long time since I’ve laughed.
” The words land heavier than they should, a crack in her armor that makes my chest ache.
She sets the shot down, pushes it away. “Some things never change.”
I swallow. The words stick where they shouldn’t. I shift closer, only a breath away. Her perfume isn’t sweet. It’s clean and sharp, citrus that cuts through the smoke. “You came back,” I say.
“To see Frankie.”
“Sure.” I tip my chin toward the room. “Tell yourself that.”
“Why did you step in?” she asks, her voice all business.
“Because he was about to be stupid.”
“Then let him.” She looks up, and the mask slips for a second. A tremor of hurt in the set of her mouth. “You don’t get to pick when I need saving.”
“I know.” The words are raw, a confession. “I know.”
Her throat works. Our shoulders are close enough that the fabric of her tank skims my arm when she breathes. The room recedes until I can hear her inhale, the tiny catch on the exhale as if she’s holding herself together by the edges.