23. Gideon
GIDEON
The infirmary smells like bleach and a slow death. I pace the three steps of the cramped room, my boots heavy enough to rattle the medicine cabinets. Every time Savannah shifts on that thin mattress, I hear the friction of her skin against the cotton. I hear the hitch in her lungs.
"Stop moving," I growl.
She doesn’t look at me. She’s staring at the ceiling, her jaw locked into a hard, stubborn line.
A bead of sweat rolls from her hairline down to her temple.
She reaches up to wipe it, and the movement pulls at the stitches in her side.
She doesn't scream. She doesn't even groan.
She just sucks air through her teeth in a sharp, hissed whistle.
The sound is a hot poker stirred into my gut.
I want to grab her shoulders and pin her down, not to hurt her, but to force the stillness she refuses to accept.
Seeing her like this—leaking, fragile, grounded—is a special kind of hell.
I’ve spent my life knowing exactly where the danger is.
Now, the danger is inside her, a thread of black silk holding her flesh together, and I can't fight it with my fists.
"I need to check the perimeter," she says, voice a sticky rasp.
"You aren't checking a damn thing but the back of your eyelids. Sit still."
"Gideon—"
"I said sit still!"
I roar it, my voice bouncing off the white walls. She flinches. Just a fraction, but it’s there. The guilt that follows is a physical weight, making me want to put my fist through the drywall just to see something break. I turn and storm out before I can see the look in her eyes.
Outside, the compound is a minefield. Everything is a provocation. I stomp toward the motor pool, and a prospect has the misfortune of dropping an ammo crate. The wooden box shatters, spilling 9mm rounds across the oil-stained concrete.
I’m on him before the dust settles. I grab the front of his vest and hoist him until his toes barely touch the ground.
"You think this is a game?" I snarl into his face. I can smell his fear—hot and metallic. "You think the cartel is going to wait for you to pick up your toys? Get this garbage off my floor or I’ll use your teeth to plug the holes in the fence."
I drop him and keep walking, my blood singing a high, panicked note. Every shadow in the trees looks like a hitman. Every late report is a betrayal. I don’t just want to fight; I want to burn the world down until there’s nothing left to hurt her.
I'm kicking a dent into a rusted fender when a wrench clatters onto the metal workbench behind me. The sound is sharp as a gunshot.
"If you kill the kid, we’re down one more gun we can't afford to lose," Hex says.
She doesn’t look up from the carburetor she’s stripping. Her grease-stained fingers move with a mechanical, detached precision that makes my skin itch. I turn on her, my chest heaving, the "FEAR" and "GOD" on my knuckles white and bloodless.
"He’s sloppy," I spit. "Sloppy gets people dead."
"Sloppy is just the excuse you're using because you can't punch a bullet hole," she counters. She finally looks at me, her eyes flat and knowing. "You’ve been a walking heart attack since she took that hit. You’re scaring the brothers, Gideon. Even the ones who've seen you go off-leash before."
"I'm keeping this club tight. That's my job."
"No." Hex wipes her hands on a rag, stepping into my space.
She isn't intimidated by the height or the muscle. She’s seen the bruised boy underneath the Sergeant-at-Arms patch for too long.
"The problem isn't Savannah bleeding. The problem is that for the very first time in thirty-two years, you actually have something worth losing. And it’s eating you alive. "
The words hit me like a shovel to the solar plexus.
I want to roar at her, to tell her she’s wrong, but the lie catches in my throat and chokes me.
The anger drains out, leaving nothing but an icy, hollow terror that makes my knees weak.
I slide down the side of a tool chest, hitting the concrete with a heavy thud.
"I can’t handle this, Hex," I rasp. My voice sounds thin, alien to my own ears.
She stops moving. The silence in the garage becomes heavy, permeated with the scent of gasoline and old mistakes.
"I know how to take a beating," I say, staring at my scarred palms. "I know how to break a man's ribs or hold a line until the ammo runs dry.
But this?" I gesture vaguely toward the infirmary, my hand trembling just enough for her to see.
"This feels like standing in the middle of a freeway with my throat wide open. It’s a target.
Loving her is just giving the cartel a place to twist the knife where I can't reach it. "
Hex leans against the workbench, her expression softening into something dangerously close to pity.
"That’s the deal, Judge," she says quietly. "Love either softens a man until he's worth something, or it destroys him. It all depends on whether you let that fear rot you into a monster she won't even recognize."
The infirmary is a tomb of moonlight and shadows.
I sit on a hard plastic chair, my spine rigid, watching the rhythmic lift of the moth-eaten blanket covering Savannah.
This is the first time since she arrived in Tartarus Pass that the mask has truly fallen.
The sharp, assessing light in her eyes is buried beneath closed lids.
The predatory tension in her jaw has dissolved into something soft, almost agonizingly young.
I find myself leaning forward, tracing the jagged silver line of the scar across her collarbone with my eyes.
I memorize the erratic flutter of her pulse in the hollow of her throat.
My hands, stained with a lifetime of grease and other men’s blood, feel clumsy and monstrous in the presence of her stillness.
Even as she sleeps, her right hand curls toward the edge of the mattress, fingers seeking a grip, a weapon, a lifeline.
It’s a sacred thing, this silence. I’m a man built for the roar of an engine and the wet thud of bone on bone, but sitting here, I’m terrified to breathe.
If I exhale too loud, the world might remember she’s vulnerable.
If I blink, the cartel might snatch the air right out of her lungs.
Watching her feels like holding a live wire—it burns, it hums, and I can’t let go even as it chars me to the bone.
The floorboard groans under my weight.
Her eyes snap open. There is no fog of sleep, no slow return to the world. She is simply there, wide and alert. I freeze, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I’m ready for the sarcasm, the bite in her voice that pushes me back to a safe distance.
She doesn't speak. She doesn't move away.
Savannah reaches out, her arm moving with a slow, deliberate grace that bypasses every one of my defenses. Her fingertips, calloused from triggers and wood-carving, graze my jaw. They trail over the rough stubble, tracing the silver ridge of an old scar left by a brass-knuckle brawl a decade ago.
I stop breathing. My entire body turns to stone beneath the feather-light pressure of her palm. It’s a touch without a price—no transactional violence, no demand for strength. It’s just... soft.
"Your heart is racing, Gideon," she whispers, her voice a low vibration in the dark.
I close my eyes, leaning my face into the heat of her hand, a dog surrendering to a kindness it doesn't understand. The "GOD" on my knuckles looks blurred in the dark, and I don't feel like fighting. I just feel human. And that’s the most terrifying feeling of all.
The air in the infirmary is too thin for us both. I want to pull away, to regain the distance that kept me whole, but her touch is an anchor dragging me into deep, dark water. My chest aches with the pressure of words I’ve never owned, words that feel like glass shards under my tongue.
"I used to find it easy," I say, my voice a gravelly rasp that breaks the quiet.
I don't look at her; I look at her hand, small and pale against my scarred skin. "Walking into a room with six men and a death wish. I never cared if I walked back out. Death is just a light turning off. It’s quiet. It’s simple. "
I swallow hard, the muscle in my jaw jumping. I take her hand, my fingers engulfing hers, feeling the delicate heat of her palm.
"But now, when a gun goes off, I don't think about the target.
I don't think about the club." I finally force my eyes to hers, and the intensity in her amber gaze nearly hollows me out. "I think about you. I think about who’s going to guard your door if I’m not there.
I think about the world continuing to spin without me seeing you carve one of those damn birds again. "
I lean in, the smell of her—soap and iron and cold rain—filling my senses.
"It’s not the cartel that’s going to kill me, Savannah.
It’s this. Every time you bleed, I lose a year of my life.
Every time you push me away, I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a clearing waiting for the sniper to find me. I’ve spent thirty years learning how to be a wall, and you just... you walked right through me."
I expect her to laugh. I expect the sharp, defensive wit she uses to keep the world at bay.
Instead, she shifts, ignoring the flare of pain in her side, and hooks her fingers into the collar of my kutte.
She pulls me down until my forehead rests against hers, our breath mingling in the narrow space between us.
I close my eyes. I’ve lived with 'FEAR' tattooed on my hands for half my life, a reminder to everyone else. But as I feel the steady, fragile rhythm of her heart so close to mine, I realize I finally understand the word. Fear isn't a threat anymore. It isn't a shadow or a bullet.
It’s her. It’s the terrifying reality of being half a person without her.