Chapter Six
"Absolutely not."
Tess planted her feet in the compound parking lot and refused to move. Behind her, the converted meatpacking plant loomed like something out of a fever dream—brick walls, razor wire, and enough motorcycles to start a small invasion.
Lakeshore stood three feet away, arms crossed, looking at her like she was a problem he hadn't figured out how to solve.
"You said one night."
"I said one night at the compound. I didn't say I was moving in permanently."
"Nobody said permanently."
"You said—and I quote—'until Gregor's operation is dismantled.' That could be weeks. Months. I'm not hiding in a biker clubhouse while my shop falls apart."
Something flickered in his jaw. That muscle she was learning to read, the one that twitched when he was fighting the urge to throw her over his shoulder and make decisions for her.
She almost wanted to see him try.
"The apartment isn't safe," he said.
"The apartment is three blocks from my boats. If someone puts another hole in my fleet, I need to know about it before the boat sinks, not after."
"Tess—"
"Don't Tess me." She stepped closer, close enough to see the pale rings around his pupils and the tension in his shoulders.
"I'm not asking for permission. I'm telling you how it's going to be.
I'll stay somewhere safe—somewhere that isn't my apartment, somewhere you can watch if that makes you feel better.
But I'm not leaving the lakefront. I'm not abandoning my shop. I'm not running."
The standoff stretched between them, tight as a dock line in a storm. Tess waited, heart pounding, knowing she was pushing a man who probably wasn't used to being pushed.
"There's a safehouse," Lakeshore said finally. "Three blocks from the shop. Has a clear view of the parking lot from the roof."
"A safehouse."
"Wolf property. Secure. Close enough that you can keep an eye on your boats without sleeping above a target."
It was a compromise. She hadn't expected him to compromise.
"Okay."
His eyebrows rose. "Okay?"
"You heard me. Don't make me say it twice."
The safehouse was a narrow brick rowhouse wedged between a laundromat and an empty storefront. From the outside, it looked abandoned—boarded windows, faded paint, the kind of place people walked past without seeing.
Inside, it was sparse but clean. Kitchen, living room, two bedrooms upstairs, a roof access that Lakeshore checked three times before he seemed satisfied.
"Stockyard's watching the shop," he said, coming down from the roof. "He'll stay until closing, then do sweeps every two hours through the night."
"Stockyard?"
"Brother. Enforcer." Lakeshore's mouth twitched in something that might have been affection. "Big guy. You'll like him."
"Will I?"
"Probably not at first. He's got the personality of a meat grinder. But he's solid. Nobody gets past him."
Tess walked through the safehouse, touching walls and testing windows like she could absorb its secrets through her fingertips.
The kitchen was stocked with basics—canned goods, coffee, a few bottles of whiskey on the counter.
The bedrooms had bare mattresses and clean sheets, military corners on the beds.
"Who stays here usually?" she asked.
"People who need to disappear for a while."
"Witnesses? Criminals?"
"Anyone the club needs to protect." Lakeshore leaned against the kitchen doorway, watching her explore. "Or hide."
"Which category am I?"
"You tell me."
She turned to face him. In the afternoon light filtering through the boarded windows, he looked less like a threat and more like a man who hadn't slept enough in years. The shadows under his eyes matched the ones she saw in her own mirror every morning.
"I'm not hiding," she said. "I want that on the record."
"Noted."
"I'm strategically relocating to a more defensible position while maintaining operational oversight of my business."
His mouth curved. An actual smile, small and quick, but real. "That's a lot of words to say you're not hiding."
"I have a marketing degree. We're trained to use a lot of words."
She expected him to leave. He'd found her a safehouse, posted a guard on her shop, done everything a territorial biker with protective instincts could reasonably do. He had no reason to stay.
He stayed anyway.
"There's food in the cabinets," he said. "I'll have someone bring more tomorrow. And—"
"Lakeshore."
He stopped.
"I can cook," she said. "I've been feeding myself for thirty-one years. I can probably manage dinner."
"Wasn't saying you couldn't."
"Then stop hovering like I'm going to fall apart the second you leave."
That muscle in his jaw again. He pushed off the doorway and crossed to the window that faced toward the lake—you couldn't see the water from here, but she was starting to understand that he always knew where it was.
"I'm not hovering."
"You've checked that window four times."
"Force of habit."
"Four times in twenty minutes."
He didn't answer. Tess watched him stare at nothing, at the direction of the lake he couldn't see, and felt something shift in her chest. This man carried so much weight—she could see it in the set of his shoulders, the way his eyes went distant when he thought she wasn't watching.
"Stay for dinner," she said.
He turned. "What?"
"Dinner. Food. The meal people eat when the sun goes down." She walked past him into the kitchen, already cataloging what she had to work with. "You can check the windows all you want while I cook. Consider it multitasking."
"I should get back to the compound."
"You should eat something that isn't whiskey and regret." She opened a cabinet and found pasta, canned tomatoes, a sad-looking onion that had seen better days. "Unless you have somewhere more important to be?"
The silence stretched. Then: "Pasta's fine."
"Wasn't asking for permission."
She cooked.
It was a small rebellion, a tiny piece of normal in the middle of chaos. The safehouse kitchen was bare-bones but functional, and Tess had learned to make something from nothing in her father's galley kitchen when she was twelve years old.
Lakeshore circled the house while she worked. Checking windows. Testing doors. Climbing to the roof and coming back down with his phone pressed to his ear, speaking in low tones she couldn't quite catch.
"You're making me dizzy," she said when he passed through the kitchen for the fifth time.
"Just being thorough."
"You're being paranoid."
"Same thing."
She stirred the sauce and tried to ignore the way her awareness tracked him through the house. His footsteps on the stairs. The creak of the roof access door. The rumble of his voice through the floorboards, checking in with someone at the compound.
This was insane. She was hiding out in a biker safehouse while a smuggler's deadline ticked down, and instead of panicking, she was making pasta and trying not to think about the way Lakeshore said her name.
You're mine to protect now.
Nobody had ever said anything like that to her. Not her father, who'd shown love through actions instead of words. Not the string of mediocre boyfriends she'd collected through her twenties, men who wanted the marketing executive but not the girl who could gut a fish and read a storm.
Lakeshore didn't seem to mind either version of her.
"Food's ready," she called.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway like he'd been waiting for the summons. Tess handed him a bowl and a fork and pointed at the small table by the window.
"Sit. Eat. Stop pacing."
"Bossy."
"You have no idea."
They ate in silence at first—the comfortable kind, the kind that didn't need filling. The pasta was basic but decent, tomatoes and garlic and whatever dried herbs she'd scrounged from the cabinet. Lakeshore cleaned his bowl in five minutes and didn't complain about the quality.
"When's the last time you ate?" she asked.
"This morning."
"Liar."
His eyes met hers. "Yesterday, maybe. It's been busy."
"Busy watching my dock in the middle of the night. Busy taking pictures of smugglers. Busy moving me into a safehouse and posting guards and—" She stopped herself. "You're running on empty."
"Been running on empty for years. You get used to it."
The words landed heavy between them. Tess looked at this man—this dangerous, complicated, apparently self-destructive man—and felt something crack open in her chest.
"The lake," she said quietly. "That's where you go when it gets bad."
He didn't answer, which was answer enough.
"I used to do the same thing," she continued. "After my dad's stroke. I'd go out on the water at dawn, before the shop opened, and just... sit there. Let the waves do the talking, because I didn't have any words left."
Lakeshore's gaze sharpened. Focused on her like she'd said something he hadn't expected.
"Does it help?"
"Sometimes. Sometimes it just reminds me that the lake doesn't care if I'm drowning. But there's something... honest about that. The water doesn't pretend. Doesn't lie. It just is."
"Yeah." His voice came out rough. "That's exactly it."
They finished dinner as the sun went down, the safehouse filling with shadows and the distant sound of traffic. Tess washed the dishes because it gave her hands something to do, and Lakeshore dried because she handed him a towel and he didn't argue.
Domestic. That's what this was. Domestic and dangerous and completely insane, and she couldn't bring herself to want it to stop.
"I should check the roof," he said when the last dish was put away.
"You checked it an hour ago."
"Things change."
He headed for the stairs, and Tess followed because she was tired of being left behind. The roof access opened onto a flat stretch of tar paper and ancient vents, with a view that stretched toward the lakefront three blocks east.
She could see her shop from here. Just barely—the edge of the parking lot, the outline of the dock against the dark water. A figure moved near the boats, large and deliberate.
"Stockyard?" she asked.
"Yeah. He'll stay until midnight, then do checks every couple hours."
"Must be nice. Having people who'll do that for you."
Lakeshore stood at the edge of the roof, face turned toward the lake. "That's brotherhood. You don't ask, they don't wait. They just show up."
"And you showed up for me."
"Told you. You're on Wolf territory."
"Is that all I am?" The question slipped out before she could stop it. "Territory?"
He turned. In the darkness, his eyes caught the distant lights from the street, pale gray reflecting like the lake at night.
"You know that's not all you are."
Her heart stuttered. "Do I?"
He moved closer. One step, two, until he was near enough that she could feel the heat of him even in the April cold.
"You're a woman who won't quit, even when quitting makes sense. You're stronger than anyone I've met in a long time. And you look at the water the way I do—like it's the only thing that tells the truth."
"Lakeshore—"
"That's not my name."
She blinked. "What?"
"Lakeshore's what the brothers call me. The road name, the patch. But my name—" He paused, and something in his face shifted. Opened. "My name is Tyler."
Tyler.
She let it settle into her, this piece of him he'd chosen to give her. A real name for a man who'd been nothing but danger and protection since he'd walked into her shop four days ago.
"Tyler," she repeated softly.
"Yeah."
They stood on the roof in the darkness, the lake invisible but present, and Tess felt the ground shift beneath her feet.
Headlights swept across the street below.
Lakeshore—Tyler—went still. His hand found her arm, pulling her back from the roof's edge with a grip that was gentle but immovable.
"Get inside."
"What—"
"Now."
She went. Down the stairs, into the kitchen, heart pounding as she heard him move to the front of the house. Through the boarded windows, she caught glimpses of headlights passing slow. Too slow.
Ivan's truck.
It crawled past the safehouse, past her shop, past the dock where Stockyard's shadow moved among the boats. Then it turned and came back the other way, even slower, like whoever was inside wanted to make sure she knew they were watching.
Lakeshore appeared in the kitchen doorway. "Stay here."
"Where are you—"
"Roof. I want eyes on that truck."
He was gone before she could argue. Tess stood in the dark safehouse, hands trembling, and listened to the sound of the truck's engine fading into the night.
It came back twenty minutes later. Same slow crawl, same message: We know where you are. We're always watching.
From the roof, she heard nothing. No footsteps, no movement. Just Lakeshore, invisible in the darkness, watching Ivan's truck circle her new refuge.
Watching without blinking.