2. Saint
SAINT
Rook had assigned Avery to the worst possible man.
He knew I’d take a bullet for her. What he didn’t know was that I’d spent years imagining all the ways I wanted her under me, over me, saying my name like it belonged to her. Duty had kept my hands clean, but by morning, duty was hanging by a fucking thread.
I sat outside her room in the officers’ corridor, boots planted wide, while the compound woke around us.
I hadn’t slept. Every time old pipes knocked in the walls, I saw Pike’s hand on her arm.
Every time a bike started in the yard, I saw the van door opening.
The room Rook had given her was directly across from mine. Close enough to hear if she called.
Her door opened at six thirty. Avery stepped into the corridor wearing tiny gray sleep shorts and a black tank that fit every curve I’d promised myself not to ever touch.
I forgot how breathing worked. Her dark hair was twisted on top of her head.
A bruise shadowed her left cheek, and finger marks darkened one arm.
She’d put on no makeup to hide either. That should have been all I saw.
But it wasn’t. Her nipples pressed against thin cotton. The shorts rode high on her thighs. One bare foot rested over the other while she studied me sitting outside her door.
“Were you there all night?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
I made some sort of grunting noise in response because after seeing her like this, my words escaped me.
Her brows rose. “Good morning to you too.” She walked past me, and I stood and followed.
The compound was an old freight depot we’d rebuilt with thick walls, reinforced gates and enough cameras to make cops jealous.
The officers’ rooms occupied the quieter east wing.
The main room opened beyond them, all scarred wood, mismatched leather and the smell of coffee strong enough to strip paint.
Mace sat at the long table with photographs spread in front of him.
Riot stood by the windows, phone pressed to his ear.
Three patched brothers argued near the kitchen.
Every conversation dipped when Avery entered. Most of these men had known her since she was a sharp-mouthed teenager visiting Rook. They knew better than to stare.
One of them looked anyway. Not for long. He glanced back at her bare legs, then looked away again.
Something savage uncoiled behind my ribs. I stepped close enough that my shoulder hid her from the room.
Avery looked at me. She’d seen the glance. Worse, she’d seen my reaction to it.
“Coffee?” she asked.
“Clothes.”
“Excuse me?”
“Put more on.”
Mace’s mouth twitched. He gathered the photographs and carried them toward the office before I decided to break his face for being amused. Avery folded her arms, which did nothing helpful to the tank. “These are clothes.”
“Not enough of them.”
“These men have known me most of my life.”
“They’re still men.”
Her gaze sharpened. She stepped close enough that only I could hear. “And you’re worried about what they’re thinking? Or is it because of what you’re thinking?”
There it was. The question we had circled for years and I should have lied. Instead, I looked down the length of her. Slowly. I let myself see the smooth skin beneath the hem of her shorts, the dip of her waist, the bruise I wanted to erase with my mouth and then vengeance.
Color rose over her chest.
“Your room,” I said.
“You’re a bossy asshole, you know that?”
“Now, Avery.”
She walked back down the corridor with my eyes on her ass and full knowledge of it in every step.
I followed her inside and shut the door.
The guest room she was staying in was small: a bed, a dresser, a narrow window facing the yard, and a small bathroom.
She leaned against the footboard rather than reaching for her bag.
I’d spent the hours before dawn building a protection plan that depended on distance I no longer had.
Her meals would come to the officers’ side. Club updates would happen in the small office where I could keep her behind an interior door if trouble reached the gates. Any trip outside required my approval, my vehicle, and my hands on her. Reasonable precautions, but every single one put her closer.
She’d slept badly. I could see it in the shadows beneath her eyes, but exhaustion hadn’t softened her.
Avery had fought two armed men with a lamp and her fingernails.
Anyone who mistook her size for weakness deserved the lesson she gave them.
I had learned that years ago when she beat Rook at pool.
She collected eighty dollars he didn’t have on him, and refused to accept an IOU from her brother, the club president that no one else would dare to question.
“Go on,” she said.
“Go on what?”
“Tell me why my shorts are suddenly a club emergency.”
“You know why.”
“I know what I think, but I want to hear you say it.”
I moved to the window and checked the yard. Havoc rolled through the gates, alone. He’d lost the vehicle near the river road and hadn’t been able to locate it again.
Avery waited behind me, but patience had never been one of her virtues. It was one of the things I loved about her. Loved. I’d carried that word in silence so long it had teeth now.
“Put on jeans or something,” I said.
“Coward.”
I turned. She was closer now. Close enough to touch.
A strip of smooth stomach showed between her tank and shorts.
“You think I haven’t noticed?” she asked.
“The way you watched me at Rook’s thirty-fifth.
The way you nearly broke a glass when a man kissed me on the cheek at the summer run.
The hand on my back at the Christmas party. ”
“You were walking through a crowd.”
“Your hand stayed there long after the crowd was gone.”
“Avery.”
“Then you avoided me for three months.”
“Put some fucking clothes on.”
Her chin lifted. “Why don’t you make me?”
I crossed the room before good sense could catch up. My hand closed around her hip. The other braced against the bedpost beside her. I didn’t touch anywhere I couldn’t justify. That pathetic distinction was all I had left.
“You want the truth?”
“For once, yeah, that would be nice.”
“I notice every goddamn thing you wear.” I kept my voice low because if I let it rise, the compound would hear.
“Every dress. Every pair of jeans. Every little scrap of fabric you call a top. I remember the red one from Rook’s birthday four years ago.
I remember the green dress at Christmas and how many men watched you walk across that fucking room. ”
Her lips parted.
“I hated every one of them,” I said. “Because I hate any man looking at what I want for myself.”
The room went quiet enough for me to hear a wrench hit concrete in the garage outside. Avery’s fingers curled into the front of my shirt.
“Then stop pretending you don’t want it.” And with that, she pulled me down.
I had imagined our first kiss a thousand different ways. None of them had her bruised from an attack, trapped behind club gates with me under orders to protect her.
I should have stopped it, but instead, my mouth opened over hers.
The first taste of her wrecked years of control.
Coffee, toothpaste, heat. Avery made a soft, angry sound as she fisted my shirt and kissed me harder.
I backed her against the door and her legs parted for my thigh.
I caught her hips and lifted just enough to grind her over denim. She gasped into my mouth.
“Saint.”
My road name in that voice nearly put me on my knees. I kissed along her jaw, careful of the bruise. Her pulse jumped beneath my lips. I bit lower, where the mark would hide under her tank, and felt her nails drag over my scalp.
“You have any idea,” I said against her skin, “how many times I’ve wanted to do this?”
“Not enough times, apparently.”
I laughed once, rough and unwilling. She smiled against my mouth, and the warmth of it was more dangerous than the hunger. Her hand slid between us and closed over the hard ridge beneath my jeans.
Every muscle in my body locked.
“Fuck.”
“That’s the general direction I was hoping for.”
I caught her wrist. She stilled immediately. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No.”
“Then why are you?”
Because Rook had trusted me with the person he loved most. Because she was still shaken after last night, even if she hid it well. Because once I got inside her, there would be no going back to the man I’d pretended to be.
I pressed my forehead to hers. My breathing sounded too loud in the small room. “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”
Her gaze didn’t waver. “I’m not some na?ve girl, Saint.”
“Don’t I fucking know that, Avery.”
“And I’m not scared of you either.”
“You should be scared of what happens if I start.”
She freed her wrist, but she didn’t touch me again. That restraint cost her, and I felt the price of it.
“You think you’re the only one who’s been waiting?”
A knock struck the door behind her.
“Church in ten,” Rook called from the corridor. “Bring Avery. She stays where you can see her.”
Her eyes held mine and the bitter edge of guilt cut through the heat. I stepped back. Avery opened her bag and pulled out jeans. She dressed without turning away, making me watch the shorts slide down her legs to her underwear before denim covered them up again.
“This conversation isn’t finished,” she said.
And when she walked past me into the corridor, I knew one more thing with brutal certainty. I was going to break my word to Rook again. The only question was how badly.
Church took place around the scarred table in the locked back meeting room.
Avery sat against the interior wall, close enough that my knee touched hers when I turned.
Rook would normally have kept family out; no one other than a patched brother ever entered church.
But his order that she remain in my sight mattered more than protocol.
Mace laid out what Havoc had found. “Dark van. Plates stolen yesterday. They dumped it past the old weigh station.”
“Blood?” I asked.
“Enough to know one of them needs stitches.”
“My fault,” she said, looking down at her nails. Pride had no place in church, but I felt it anyway.
Riot slid a photograph across the table. “Camera caught the van crossing the river road. Driver wore a Gravewater support shirt.”
“Too clean,” I said.
Rook nodded. “President misses neutral ground meeting. My sister almost gets taken by men practically advertising his club.”
“Pike used Gravewater’s name upstairs,” Avery said. “He said it like a deliberate message.”
Rook’s anger went colder. “We don’t move until we know who’s pulling it.
” That decision kept thirty men from riding east and starting a war.
It also told whoever staged the attack that Rook was harder to manipulate than expected.
When church ended, Avery rose and her thigh brushed mine.
The kiss from earlier still lived between us.
I followed her from the room and watched the curve of her ass in the jeans I had ordered her to wear. Somehow, I wasn’t sure they were better.
At lunch, she sat between me and Rook and that arrangement should have helped. It didn’t, not one bit. Rook argued with Havoc about routes while Avery stole chips from my plate. She did it without even looking, reaching across the six inches between us as if this was our little routine.
I moved the plate closer.
“You hate those,” she said.
“I know.”
“Then why did you take them?”
“Because you like them.” The words left before I could stop them.
Avery looked at me.
Across the table, Riot looked at both of us.
I picked up my coffee. “Kitchen always puts too many on.”
“Sure,” Riot said.
“Got a problem?” I asked him accusingly.
“Not one I’m stupid enough to explain.”
Rook broke off his argument. “What?”
“Saint’s upset about lunch,” Riot said, not taking his eyes off me in that knowing way.
“Then Saint can cook tomorrow.”
The room laughed. I considered killing Riot with the coffee mug.
Avery leaned close. “Very discreet.”
“You stole my food.”
“You selected it for me.”
“Prove it.” She ate another chip while keeping eye contact with me.
The tiny domestic exchange lodged under my ribs.
I knew how to protect Avery from bullets, gates and men with knives.
I didn’t know how to defend myself from learning what she ate first or how her foot nudged mine beneath a table.
Rook trusted me to survive the obvious danger.
But the ordinary moments were the ones that would finish me.
Duty, I discovered, was perfectly capable of also being obscene.