13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN #3
She was clean. Unharmed. The gravel had left a fine dust on the soles of her bare feet and there was a smudge of something,cordite, probably, or dust from the clubhouse doorway,across one cheekbone, but her skin was whole under my hands, her pulse steady where my thumbs pressed against the inside of her wrists.
I could feel it, the double-beat beneath the skin, and the fact that it was there at all,strong, regular, alive,made something in my chest unclench by degrees I could measure but not name.
“I heard what he said.” Her voice was quiet, steady, carrying just enough to reach me and no further.
The green of her eyes had darkened in the gray light, but the focus was the same—direct, unflinching, the way it had been since the first night in her kitchen when she’d looked down the barrel of a gun and offered coffee instead of panic.
“Garrett Cole. That’s a real name. That’s a real person who can be stopped. ”
I nodded. Once. My hands were still on her wrists, her pulse against my palms, and I didn’t let go because letting go meant acknowledging that the moment had passed and I wasn’t ready for that yet.
Not with the smell of cordite still hanging between us and the compound in ruins around us and the weight of what had nearly happened still sitting across my shoulders like something I could feel the shape of.
Ace appeared at my shoulder. Phone already to his ear, his voice low and measured as he coordinated with someone on the other end, Socket, probably, or one of the prospects manning the comms desk inside.
He didn’t look at us directly. Kept his eyes on the tree line, on the brothers securing the perimeter, on the practical geometry of damage control.
But I felt his presence the way I always did—calm, competent, the steady counterweight to whatever chaos the club had walked into.
He finished the call. Pocketed the phone. Turned to me with the plain conviction of a man delivering a report he’d already verified.
“Evidence is solid. Prisoner’s contained. Cole’s operation has three, maybe four days before it comes apart completely.” His gaze held mine for a beat longer than it needed to. “Club’s handling it.”
Three words. Club’s handling it. The oldest phrase in our language, the one that meant brothers were moving, channels were open, and whatever needed doing would get done by men who knew how to do it quietly.
I’d heard it a hundred times in twenty years.
Had said it myself. Had built a life around the certainty that those two words carried, and standing in a courtyard with Hannah’s pulse under my hands and Ace’s steady presence at my shoulder, I felt the weight of it settle into its proper place—not gone, not lighter, just distributed across shoulders that could carry it because they weren’t carrying it alone.
I released a breath. Slow. Deliberate. Felt it leave my lungs and take something with it—the coiled readiness that had lived in my muscles since the first crack of rifle fire, the hypervigilance that had kept me scanning the tree line even while my hands were checking Hannah for injuries.
My shoulders dropped. A fraction. Not much.
Enough that I felt the difference, the ache of tension unwinding after holding too long, and Hannah’s eyes tracked the change because she’d been watching me long enough to read the tells.
I pulled her against my chest. One arm around her shoulders, my hand finding the back of her head where her hair fell loose and warm against my palm.
She came into the space without hesitation, her face pressing against the front of my cut where the club’s patch sat over my heart, and I felt her breath through the leather, warm and even, and the smell of her,bread flour and sleep and something underneath that was just her, just Hannah,cut through the cordite and the blood and the morning dew like something I’d been waiting for without knowing I was waiting.
“It’s done.” I said it low, against the top of her head, the words meant for her ears only.
Not a promise. Not a guarantee. A statement of fact as I understood it: the threat had a name now.
The club had the name. And men like Garrett Cole didn’t survive having their operations laid bare by a brotherhood that had just taken a direct hit and was still standing.
She didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. Her arms came around my waist, under my cut, her palms flat against the small of my back, and she held on the way someone holds on when they’ve been falling for a long time and have finally found something solid to grab.
Around us, the compound moved. Brothers with brooms sweeping brass from the gravel.
Two men securing the buckled gate with chain and a come-along winch, pulling the twisted metal back into something resembling closed.
The prospect with the grazed shoulder sitting on the clubhouse steps while Socket cleaned the wound with whiskey and a cotton pad, his face tight but his mouth shut because complaining wasn’t in the prospect handbook.
Someone had backed a flatbed truck up to the wrecked SUV and was rigging chains through the crumpled frame, the engine ticking as it cooled in the strengthening dawn.
I kept one hand on Hannah’s back. Felt the rise and fall of her breathing through the flannel, steady and alive against my palm, and I watched my brothers work with the quiet pride that came from leading men who knew their jobs and did them without being told twice.
The compound was battered. The gate would need replacing.
The east fence had taken rifle fire in three places and the razor wire was hanging in loose coils where bullets had clipped the support posts.
But the clubhouse stood. The bikes were untouched under their canvas covers.
The perimeter was secure and the threat had a name and the woman in my arms was whole and breathing and here, which was the only metric that had ever really mattered.
I looked down at the top of her head. Red hair catching the first true sunlight of the morning, the pale gold of it warming against the gray flannel of my shirt, and I thought about the cabin—the sealed window, the reinforced chair, the herbs on the windowsill and the smell of bread in log walls that had never smelled like anything but gun oil before she arrived.
She’d brought all of that here. The warmth.
The certainty. The gravity of a person who made broken things whole by the simple act of caring for them, and I understood, standing in the wreckage of a compound that had just survived an attack because twenty men had moved as one, that what she’d built in that cabin hadn’t been left behind when we drove away.
It had come with us. Was here now, in the gravel under our feet and the air we were breathing and the way my hand rested on the small of her back like it had found the place it was supposed to be.
Hannah lifted her face from my chest. Looked up at me, her green eyes clear in the morning light, and I saw everything I needed to see without her saying a word.
No fear. No uncertainty. Just the steady presence of someone who had walked through fire and come out the other side standing beside the man who’d walked through it with her.
The compound around us was already healing.
Brothers calling to each other across the courtyard, the rattle of tools, the low rumble of the flatbed’s engine as it took the strain of the wrecked SUV.
Ace had moved to the guard tower, his phone out again, coordinating whatever came next with the efficient calm that had kept the club alive through twenty years of worse mornings than this one.
I kept my hand on Hannah’s back. She stayed at my side, bare feet on cold gravel, my flannel shirt hanging off her frame like something that belonged there, and the morning opened up around us—gray giving way to gold, cordite thinning on the wind, the compound battered but standing, the club intact, and Hannah Morgan, baker and witness and mine, no longer hidden, no longer a secret, finally exactly where she was supposed to be.