Chapter 1 #2
"Not like that." She caught the look on my face and almost — almost — laughed, though there was no humor in it, just a kind of exhausted reflex. "It's not what you think."
"Then what is it?"
"It's not a conversation for a fish market, Tomas." Her voice wavered on my name, just slightly, and it was the wavering that told me something was underneath all of this that I hadn't even started to understand yet. "I have to go."
"Will I see you again?"
"You live here now, apparently." A ghost of dry humor slipped through despite herself. "Small town. Hard to avoid people."
"That's not what I asked."
She looked at me then, really looked, and for one unguarded second I saw everything I used to know in her face — the woman who used to meet me on the clifftop bluff at midnight because neither of us could stand to wait until morning, the woman who used to laugh at my terrible jokes like they were the funniest thing she'd ever heard, the woman I'd spent six years trying and failing to stop loving.
"Yes," she said quietly. "You'll see me again."
Then she turned and walked away up the harbor path, quick, purposeful, like she needed distance more than she needed anything else in that moment, and I stood there in the fish market with gulls screaming overhead and my whole chest cracked wide open, and I thought: whatever she's guarding, it's bigger than six years of absence.
I just didn't yet understand how much bigger.
Diesel found me still standing there ten minutes later.
"You're doing the thing," he said.
"What thing?"
"The staring-into-the middle-distance thing. Very dramatic. Very 'man who just saw a ghost.' I've seen Marco do it. I've seen Elio do it. Whole club's got a type, apparently."
"Shut up."
"There it is. Welcome home." He grinned, slinging an arm around my shoulder, steering me back toward the garage.
"Come on. Beer first. Interrogation second.
And brother — whatever that was back there, we're gonna talk about it, because you've got a face on you like you just found out the ocean's made of something other than water. "
He wasn't wrong.
I let him lead me back toward the garage, but some part of me stayed rooted in that fish market, watching the space where Lena had disappeared up the hill, already counting the hours until I'd see her again.
The Anchor was packed by the time the sun went down, every stool at the bar filled with a face I half remembered and a few I didn't recognize at all.
"New guys," Diesel said, following my gaze. "You missed some recruiting. Relax, they've all been vetted. Mostly."
"Mostly."
"One of them used to be a locksmith. We don't ask too many follow-up questions."
Reaper called the room to order with two fingers around a beer bottle and a look that still made grown men go quiet mid-sentence.
I stood at the head of the bar while thirty pairs of eyes settled on me, and for a second the old instinct kicked in — count the exits, read the room, stay ready to move.
"Easy," Reaper said, low, just for me. "Nobody's coming through that door but Marco, and he's late because his daughter wanted a bedtime story."
"Lucia's very particular about her bedtime stories," Marco called from across the room, not remotely embarrassed. "Three chapters minimum. She's got standards."
"She gets that from you," someone said.
"She gets that from her mother, actually, who reads contracts for fun, so really I got off easy."
The room laughed, and something in my shoulders came down half an inch. This was still my club. Whatever six years had done to the roster, the bones of it hadn't changed.
I gave them the short version. Dark business, a debt from an old life that had followed me before I'd ever ridden into Cala Sirena, a threat that couldn't be handled from inside a home without dragging that home into the blast radius.
I told them I'd spent six years making sure the thing chasing me had nowhere left to run, until finally it didn't.
"And you couldn't have sent one letter," Diesel said, not unkindly, more like a man still working through his own hurt feelings out loud. "One. We'd have burned it after reading, very dramatic, very spy movie."
"Anyone tracing me traces anyone I write to. That's how these things work."
"I know how these things work, I watch the same shows you do." He shook his head, but he was smiling now, some of the sting gone out of it. "I'm glad you're back, is what I'm saying. Under all the complaining."
"Noted."
Reaper raised his bottle. "To Hawk. Home in one piece, which around here counts as an achievement."
"To Hawk," the room echoed, and for one warm, uncomplicated minute, it felt like nothing had ever gone wrong at all.
It didn't last, of course. Diesel leaned in close enough that only I could hear him over the noise.
"So," he said. "Lena."
"Not now."
"That's not a no."
"It's a not now."
"Fair enough." He clinked his bottle against mine, easy, but his eyes stayed sharp, like a man filing something away for later.
"But for what it's worth, brother — that woman's spent six years being fine.
Just fine. Never more than fine. You want to know what changed the second she saw you standing in that parking lot? "
"What?"
"She stopped being fine." He shrugged, took a pull of his beer. "Make of that what you will."
I turned that over for the rest of the night, long after the bar had thinned out and the new guys had gone home and Marco had left early to relieve whoever was babysitting Lucia.
I turned it over riding back to the small room above the garage that Reaper had kept ready for me without ever saying so out loud.
She'd said someone was waiting on her. Not like that, she'd said, quick, too quick.
I ran through possibilities the way I used to run through exit routes on a job, methodical, turning each one over for a weak point.
A boyfriend, maybe — the thought landed like a fist to the ribs, but I made myself hold it up to the light anyway.
A sick relative. A tenant. A hundred ordinary explanations that had nothing to do with me at all.
None of them explained the way her voice had wavered on my name. None of them explained the flash of something close to panic before she'd turned and walked away.
Diesel found me on the balcony outside my room a little before midnight, two beers in hand, apparently unwilling to let the night end without one more round of unsolicited commentary.
"You're not sleeping," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Observant."
"Six years of enforcer work does that to a man's face.
You've got a very specific look. I call it the thousand-yard stare of someone doing math they don't like the answer to.
" He handed me a beer and leaned against the railing beside me, looking out over the dark harbor.
"Want to talk about it, or you want to keep pretending you're just admiring the view. "
"The view's nice."
"The view's fine. You're not looking at it.
" He took a slow pull of his beer, patient in a way that told me he'd wait me out all night if he had to.
"Something's off about her, Hawk. I've known Lena six years.
She's careful with everybody — comes with owning a business in a town this small, you learn to keep some doors shut.
But there's careful, and then there's whatever that was today. That wasn't careful. That was scared."
"Scared of me?"
"Scared of something." He shrugged. "Could be you. Could be something bigger than you. Either way, you're not gonna solve it standing on a balcony at midnight staring at a harbor that hasn't done anything to you."
"Helpful, as always."
"I contain multitudes." He clinked his bottle against mine and pushed off the railing, heading back toward the door.
"Get some sleep, brother. Whatever it is, it'll still be there tomorrow.
That's the thing about secrets in a town this small — they never actually go anywhere.
They just wait for the right moment to walk into a fish market. "
He left me alone with that, and the harbor lights, and the slow certainty building in my chest that whatever Lena was guarding, it was close enough to reach out and touch if I just waited for the right moment to move.
I lay awake a long time after that, running the day back and forth in my mind, and got no closer to an answer by the time the sky started going gray at the edges, only more certain of one thing.
Whatever it was, I wasn't leaving again until I understood it.