Chapter Three
Rowan
The shop still smells like broken glass and cold morning air when he walks in, that particular mineral smell a shattered window leaves behind, and somewhere behind me I can hear Deb's voice pitched low into the phone, working through insurance details like this is a normal Tuesday and not the morning eight months of careful distance started coming apart at the seams.
He comes through the broken glass like it isn't there, boots crunching over shards he doesn't even glance down at, and stops close enough that I catch the smell of leather and cold morning air off his cut, close enough that some old, useless part of my body wants to lean into it before the rest of me remembers exactly why that's not an option anymore.
Nine years of knowing exactly what that smell means, engine oil and leather and the particular soap he's used since before I met him, and eight months apart hasn't managed to erase the reflex, not completely, no matter how hard I've worked at it.
That's the maddening part. I can rebuild a business from nothing.
I can move out, change the locks on my own apartment, learn to sleep in a bed by myself again.
I cannot, apparently, retrain my own body not to recognize him.
"You're bleeding," he says, low, nodding at my hand.
I look down. A thin line of red along the side of my palm, must have happened when I was picking up the bigger pieces before Deb told me to stop. I hadn't even felt it.
"It's nothing."
"Rowan."
"It's nothing, Wyatt." I say his name flat, no softness in it, and watch something flicker across his face that might be hurt if I let myself care whether it was.
I don't, or I tell myself I don't, and I turn and grab the first aid kit off the shelf behind the counter myself before he can offer, because I am not, under any circumstance, going to stand here and let him play nurse over a two-inch scratch like the last eight months didn't happen.
There was a time, more than once, when I'd have let him.
When a scraped knuckle or a burn from the autoclave meant Wyatt's hands wrapping gauze around mine at the kitchen table, unhurried, thorough, like taking care of me was something he actually enjoyed doing rather than an obligation.
I don't let myself think about that table much these days. Some mornings it works.
Deb's in the back on the phone with our insurance, voice pitched low and businesslike, throwing me a look through the doorway that says she's watching this whole thing whether I want her to or not. Good. Somebody should be.
Wyatt stands there in the middle of my shop, hands loose at his sides in that careful way he's had ever since Denise's phone call, like a man permanently bracing for a hit he knows he's earned, and looks at the message on the brick through the shattered glass, jaw working.
"Who knows you as Ghost," I say, wrapping a bandage around my palm without looking at him, "outside the club?"
"Nobody's supposed to."
"Somebody does." I finish the bandage, tie it off harder than necessary.
"Somebody who also apparently knows I run this place, and knows to leave a message here instead of at the clubhouse or your house, which tells me they wanted it to land on me specifically, not just you.
So I'm going to need you to actually think about that instead of standing there looking like you're about to be sick. "
He does think about it. I'll give him that, he's never been a man who bullshits me when I ask him a direct question, not since Denise anyway, and the answer that comes out of him a long moment later is quiet and clearly costs him something to say.
"Reina," he says. "Her half-brother rides with Blackthorn."
The name lands in my chest like a stone dropped down a well, all the way to the bottom before I even hear the splash.
I've never said her name out loud, not once in eight months, not even to Deb, like keeping it unspoken somehow kept it smaller than it was.
Hearing him say it now, plain, no flinch, makes it real in a way the photo never quite managed.
I reach into my apron pocket and pull out the folded paper I found in the glass, hand it to him without a word. He unfolds it, and I watch his face change as he reads it, watch the exact moment his jaw goes tight.
"Where'd you find this?"
"In the glass. Under the window, like it was meant to be found.
" I fold my arms, watching him study it like it might rearrange itself into something less bad if he looks hard enough.
"Both our names circled. The address circled twice.
That's not vandalism, Wyatt. That's a message with a return address. "
He hands it back to me slower than he took it, like it weighs more now than it did a second ago.
"That's Blackthorn's style," he says. "They don't threaten loud unless they've already decided loud's necessary. This is them showing they know exactly where to find what matters to you. Efficient. Cold. It's how the Cole men do things, from what little I know of them."
"Cole," I repeat. "Reina's last name is Cole."
"Her half-brother's name is Dax Cole. Patched Blackthorn two years back, from what Denise told me after everything came out. I didn't put it together fast enough. I should have."
"You're telling me," I say, very carefully, "that the woman you spent five months lying to me about is connected to a motorcycle club that's now put a rock through my window."
"I'm telling you I think so. I don't know it for certain yet."
"You told me it was once, Wyatt." The words come out low and even, which is somehow worse than shouting, I can hear it landing on him that way.
"You sat across from me at that kitchen table and told me it was once, drunk, a mistake, and I believed you.
For eleven days I believed you. I canceled a lawyer consultation because I believed you.
And then Denise called me out of nowhere, a woman I'd met exactly twice in my life, and told me the truth because she couldn't stand to watch me walk back into a marriage built on a lie that small when the real thing was five months long and half your charter already knew. "
He doesn't argue. Doesn't offer a single word in his own defense, and somehow that's harder to sit with than if he had, because some old, tired part of me almost wants him to fight back so I'd have something clean to be angry at instead of this quiet, gutted man standing in the middle of my shattered window taking every word like he's been waiting eight months for someone to finally say it to his face.
"You're right," he says. "About all of it."
For a second I think he's going to say more, offer some fragment of context about why, about the isolation or the timing or whatever excuse a lesser version of this conversation might reach for, and I brace myself for it, ready to shut it down before it starts.
He doesn't. He just stands there and lets the accusation sit in the air between us, unchallenged, and something about that restraint unsettles me more than an excuse would have, because I don't know what to do with a man who's stopped defending himself.
"I know I'm right. I don't need you to confirm it.
" My voice cracks on the last word, just slightly, and I hate it, hate that after everything he can still find the one soft spot I haven't fully sealed over.
"I need to know what Blackthorn wants. Because a rock and some paint isn't the endgame here, Wyatt, that's an opening move, and I have a business to protect that has your name on the deed whether either one of us likes it right now. "
That lands. I watch it land, watch something in his shoulders go rigid, watch his hand come up to drag through his hair the way it does when he's working a problem he doesn't like the shape of.
There's a version of me, eight months younger, who used to find that gesture endearing.
Right now I just need it to turn into an answer.
"The deed," he says slowly, like he's working it out in real time.
"That's it. That's the leverage. They're not coming after you because of the shop, they're coming after you because my name's still on the paper, and if they can make this ugly enough, public enough, it puts pressure on the club through me without them having to come at Silas direct. "
"Which means this isn't over."
"No." He says it plain, no softening it for my benefit, which I respect more than I want to. "This is the first move, not the last one."
"How much worse does 'not the last one' get?" I ask, because if I'm going to let this take up any more of my week, I want to know exactly what I'm looking at.
Wyatt doesn't sugarcoat it, which is somehow both the thing I respect most about this new version of him and the thing that scares me most right now.
"Depends how bad they want to send a message.
Property damage escalates to threats against people close to the target.
Sometimes it stops there, posturing to get concessions without anybody getting hurt.
Sometimes it doesn't stop there." His eyes go hard in a way I haven't seen since before Amarillo, before any of this, a flash of the enforcer he used to be before he traded that patch in for a road name and a reason to be somewhere else.
"I'm not going to lie to you about what this could turn into. Not again. Not ever again."
Not again lands harder than I think he means it to, both of us hearing the second half of that sentence whether he says it out loud or not.
"Fine," I say. "Then I need real information, not reassurance. What's Silas's read on Blackthorn's reach right now? Do they have people in Larkspur, or was this a drive-by job?"
"I don't know yet. That's what church is for."