Chapter 4
TESTING BOUNDARIES
Iwoke up warm. Not just comfortable—warm. The kind of heat that sinks into your bones and makes you want to burrow deeper, stay forever, forget the world exists outside this cocoon of skin and breath and heartbeat.
It took me a moment to remember why.
Axel was wrapped around me like I might disappear if he let go. One arm pinned under my head, the other locked across my waist. His leg had somehow wedged between mine during the night, and his face was buried in my hair, breath slow and even against my neck.
I stayed very, very still.
In sleep, the hardness had melted from his features. The permanent tension in his jaw had softened. He looked younger—not innocent, never that, but less like a man carrying the weight of a dead unit and more like someone who might actually know how to rest.
I could feel every inch of him pressed against my back. The solid wall of his chest. The ridges of his abs. The unmistakable hardness pressing against my ass.
Morning wood, I told myself firmly. Biological response. Means nothing.
But my own body was responding in kind, and there was nothing biological about the way my pulse had started racing.
He stirred. His arm tightened reflexively, pulling me closer, and a low sound rumbled from his chest—half groan, half sigh. Then his breathing changed, and I knew he was awake.
Neither of us moved.
"Kai." His voice was sleep-rough, barely more than a rasp.
"Yeah."
"This is..."
"Complicated?"
"I was going to say nice." His lips brushed my ear, sending shivers down my spine. "But complicated works too."
I should have pulled away. Should have put distance between us, given him space to process whatever was happening in his head. Instead, I pressed back—just slightly, just enough to make my intentions clear.
His breath caught.
"Don't." The word came out strangled. "If you do that, I'm going to—"
"Going to what?"
His hand splayed across my abs, fingers pressing into the muscle there. Heat pooled low in my belly.
"Things I'm not ready for." He pressed his forehead to the back of my neck. "Things I don't know how to want."
The vulnerability in those words hit me like a fist. I turned in his arms, facing him, close enough that our noses almost touched.
"Hey." I waited until his grey eyes met mine. "We don't have to do anything. We don't have to figure this out today."
"I want to." His thumb traced my hip through my shirt. "That's the problem. I want to, and I don't know what that means, and I—" He broke off, jaw tightening.
"And you're scared."
"I'm not—" He stopped. Exhaled. "Yeah. I'm scared."
I kissed him. Soft, close-mouthed, more comfort than passion. His hand came up to cup my face, holding me there, and when I pulled back his eyes were suspiciously bright.
"No rush," I murmured. "I'm not going anywhere."
A knock shattered the moment.
"Axel!" Irish's voice, entirely too cheerful for whatever hour it was. "Hawk wants you in Church. Something about the Devil's Dust situation."
Axel closed his eyes, muttered something under his breath that sounded deeply profane.
"Be there in ten."
"He said now."
"Ten minutes, Irish."
A laugh from the other side of the door. "Sure, boss. Take your time. We all know what 'ten minutes' means when there's a pretty nurse involved."
Footsteps retreated down the hall, and I buried my face in Axel's chest to muffle my laughter.
"I'm going to kill him," Axel said flatly.
"He seems fun."
"He's a menace." But there was fondness underneath the annoyance. He pulled back, sitting up, and I immediately missed his warmth. "I need to handle this. Will you be okay?"
"I'm a big boy."
His eyes darkened at the word big, and I watched him physically shake it off. "There's coffee in the common room. Food too, probably. Make yourself at home."
"And if someone objects to a stranger wandering around?"
"They won't." He stood, stretched—his shirt riding up to reveal a strip of tan skin and dark hair trailing down—and caught me looking. A slow smile spread across his face. "See something you like?"
"Maybe."
"Hold that thought." He grabbed his cut from where he'd draped it over the chair, shrugged it on. "I'll find you when Church is done."
Then he was gone, and I was alone in a room that smelled like him, trying to convince my body to calm down.
The common room was busier than last night.
Morning light streamed through high windows, illuminating a space that looked less intimidating in daylight. The bar was closed, but a coffee station had been set up, and the smell of bacon drifted from somewhere that might have been a kitchen.
Bikers clustered in groups—some nursing coffee, others working on laptops like this was a particularly leather-clad coworking space. They looked up as I entered, assessed me with varying degrees of interest, and went back to their business.
One of them didn't.
He was young—early twenties, maybe—with sandy hair and an eager expression that reminded me painfully of the new residents at St. Mary's. Nervous energy radiated off him in waves. No patches on his cut except one that read PROSPECT.
"You're Kai, right?" He appeared at my elbow, practically vibrating. "Axel's... uh... friend?"
"That's one word for it."
"I'm Jake." He stuck out his hand, and I shook it. Strong grip, callused palms. "I'm supposed to make sure you have everything you need. Axel's orders."
"Axel ordered you to babysit me?"
"He ordered me to 'keep an eye on the asset.'" Jake made air quotes. "But you don't look much like an asset to me. More like a person. So I figured I'd just, you know, be helpful instead of creepy about it."
I liked him immediately.
"Coffee would be helpful."
"On it." He led me to the station, poured two cups with the efficiency of someone who'd done it a thousand times. "Cream? Sugar? We've got that fancy oat milk stuff too—Tank's girlfriend brought it, says regular milk is murder or something."
"Black is fine."
He handed me a cup, grabbed his own—more sugar than coffee, I noticed—and gestured to a worn leather couch in the corner.
"Best spot in the house. You can see all the exits from here." At my raised eyebrow, he shrugged. "Axel's not the only one who pays attention."
We sat. The coffee was strong, bitter, exactly what I needed.
"So." Jake stretched out his legs, trying for casual and not quite landing it. "You and Axel, huh?"
"Is this the part where you warn me not to hurt him?"
"Nah." He grinned. "This is the part where I try to figure out how you got the scariest man I've ever met to look at you like you hung the moon."
"He doesn't—"
"Dude." Jake's expression was somewhere between amused and pitying.
"I've been prospecting for six months. I've never seen Axel smile.
Not once. Then you show up, and suddenly he's grinning like an idiot and threatening to murder anyone who looks at you wrong.
" He shook his head. "It's honestly kind of terrifying. "
I didn't know what to do with that information, so I drank my coffee and changed the subject.
"What's a prospect, exactly?"
"Probationary member. I do grunt work, prove I'm loyal, and eventually—hopefully—I get patched in." He touched the empty space on his cut where a full member's patches would go. "It's been six months. Most prospects take a year, minimum."
"You want this life? The danger, the violence?"
"I want the family." Something flickered in his eyes—old pain, carefully buried. "I grew up in the system. Aged out with nothing and no one. Phoenix gave me a place to belong."
Foster system. The words hit close to home.
"I grew up in the system too," I heard myself say. "After my grandmother died. Bounced around until I was eighteen."
Jake's expression shifted—recognition, kinship. "Then you get it. Why someone would choose this, even with all the bullshit."
"Yeah." I looked around the room—at the men who'd saved my grandmother's vase, who'd put themselves between me and danger, who'd welcomed a stranger into their home because their VP asked them to. "I'm starting to."
Church lasted two hours.
I spent the time exploring, carefully, with Jake as my unofficial guide.
He showed me the garage where a prospect named Danny was working on a vintage Indian Scout bike.
In the gym, Tank was working the heavy bag—shirtless, skin gleaming with sweat, muscles rippling with each brutal strike.
He nodded at us as we passed, but his eyes lingered on me a moment longer than necessary.
Something flickered in his expression—curiosity, maybe, or something he couldn't quite name.
"Tank's intense," I said once we were out of earshot.
Jake shrugged. "He's a good fellow. Quiet, though. Keeps to himself mostly. Had a girlfriend a while back, but that ended. Don't think he's dated since."
Jake showed me the kitchen next, where a woman named Maria was cooking enough food to feed an army. "Hawk's old lady," Jake explained when I raised an eyebrow at her presence. "She comes by most days to make sure we don't starve. Says left to our own devices we'd live on beer and beef jerky."
"She's not wrong," Maria called from the stove. "You boys would be dead of scurvy inside a month."
The clubhouse was bigger than I'd realized. More organized. Less chaos and more controlled operation. These weren't random criminals playing at rebellion—they were a functioning organization with hierarchy, rules, purpose.
It was nothing like I'd expected. And everything like I'd feared.
Because the longer I stayed, the more it felt like somewhere I could belong.
Axel found me in the gym.
I'd borrowed clothes from Jake—too big, but clean—and was working through combinations on the heavy bag. The rhythm was meditative. Jab, cross, hook. Jab, cross, hook. The bag swung and shuddered under my fists.
"Your form's good."
I didn't startle. I'd felt him enter, the way you feel a storm approaching.