Chapter 6 Detonation #2
"You're okay." The words came from somewhere outside myself, some autopilot taking over while my brain tried to process what had just happened. "Tyler. You're okay. I've got you."
His breathing was ragged, harsh, each inhale a fight against lungs that had been compressed by the shockwave. But he was breathing. He was alive. We both were.
I became aware of pain—multiple sources, competing for attention.
The shrapnel wound in my shoulder blade, hot and sharp.
Road rash down my right arm where the asphalt had torn through leather and skin.
A dull ache in my hip where I'd landed wrong.
Minor. Survivable. Nothing compared to what would have happened if we'd been closer, if I'd been slower, if Tyler had turned that key.
"Tank." His voice was wrecked, barely a whisper. "You're bleeding."
I looked down at myself, at the dark stain spreading across my jacket sleeve, at the places where debris had found gaps in my armor. Blood was dripping onto the concrete behind me, pooling in the cracks, mixing with the dust and ash that was settling over everything.
"It's nothing. Are you hurt?"
"I don't—" He twisted in my arms, trying to get a look at me, his hands running over his own body. "I don't think so. You—you pushed me—"
"Can you stand?"
He nodded, and I loosened my grip, letting him pull away. The loss of contact felt wrong—a cold space where warmth had been—but I pushed the thought aside and focused on getting my feet under me.
The world swayed when I stood. Blood loss, maybe, or the aftermath of adrenaline, or just the simple fact that I'd been thrown ten feet by an explosion and my body was still trying to understand that it hadn't died.
I braced one hand against the concrete barrier and waited for the dizziness to pass.
Tyler was on his feet beside me, staring at the crater where the Sportster had been. The flames were lower now, the fuel mostly burned away, but the smoke was still rising in a thick black column that would be visible for miles.
"That was meant for me." His voice was flat, distant. Shock settling in, the mind protecting itself from what had almost happened. "I would have—if you hadn't seen it—"
"But I did." I turned to face him, reached out, gripped his shoulder hard enough to feel the muscle and bone beneath his shirt. My hand left a bloody smear on the fabric, but neither of us acknowledged it. "Look at me. Tyler. Look at me."
His eyes found mine. Held. They were dark, dilated, carrying a fear he was trying desperately to contain.
"You're alive. That's what matters. That's the only thing that matters right now."
Something cracked in his expression—the careful control he always maintained, the walls he kept between himself and the world. For just a moment, I saw beneath them to the fear underneath, the raw animal terror of a man who'd just watched his own death unfold in fire and steel.
Then he was moving, closing the distance between us, and his arms were around me and his face was pressed into my shoulder and he was shaking—violent tremors that ran through his whole body like waves crashing against a shore.
I held him.
I didn't think about who might be watching. About what the club would think. About Axel and Hawk and Irish, who were probably staring at us through the smoke. About Blade and his questions and his careful observations. I didn't think about any of it.
I just held him. My arms tight around his back, careful to avoid the wounds I could feel bleeding beneath my jacket.
His heart pounding against my chest, fast and desperate, the rhythm of a man who'd just learned exactly how close death could come.
His breath hot against my neck, ragged with something that might have been sobs if he'd let them out.
"I've got you." The words a low murmur against his hair. "I've got you. You're safe."
His hands fisted in the back of my jacket, pulling me closer, and I let him. Let myself be the thing he held onto while the world burned around us.
We stayed like that until Hawk's voice finally cut through—gentle but firm, telling us the fire was under control, telling us the medics were here, telling us we needed to get checked out.
Tyler pulled back first. His eyes were red but dry, his face pale, his expression already reassembling itself into something more controlled. He looked at me, opened his mouth, closed it again.
"Later. We'll talk later."
He nodded, and we walked toward the clubhouse together, close enough that our shoulders touched with every step.
The next three hours were chaos.
Fire department. Police—the legitimate kind, responding to reports of an explosion.
Hawk talked to them, his face a mask of cooperative concern, spinning a story about a fuel leak and a spark that anyone who knew bikes would see through instantly but that played well enough for cops who wanted an easy explanation.
Paramedics checked everyone for injuries.
I sat on a crate near the garage while a woman with steady hands cleaned the shrapnel wounds across my back and shoulder.
The largest piece had gone deep—she had to dig for it, her forceps scraping against something that might have been bone, and I held perfectly still while she worked, my jaw locked against the pain.
Tyler sat nearby, a blanket around his shoulders that he didn't seem to notice, watching the medic work on me with an expression I couldn't read.
He had a few scrapes from our roll across the asphalt, nothing that required more than antiseptic and bandages.
The explosion had been designed to kill a man on a bike, not two men behind a concrete barrier.
Ghost had caught a piece of debris on his arm when he'd been running toward the blast instead of away from it, because apparently the kid had no survival instincts whatsoever. Irish had a cut above his eye from flying glass. Minor injuries, all told. We'd been lucky.
Lucky that I'd smelled the fuel. Lucky that the device had been poorly made. Lucky that Cross wasn't as good at killing as he was at intimidation.
The real work started after the officials left.
Rosa found me in the common room, still wearing the paramedic's field dressing, trying to pretend the shrapnel wound wasn't throbbing like a second heartbeat.
She was a compact woman in her fifties, silver-streaked hair pulled back in a no-nonsense braid, with the kind of steady hands and unflappable demeanor that came from twenty years as an Army medic.
She'd seen worse than this—had told me stories about field hospitals in Afghanistan that made motorcycle club violence seem almost quaint.
"Sit." She pointed at a chair she'd already draped with a clean sheet. "Paramedics are fine for the easy stuff, but I want to look at that shoulder myself."
I sat. Arguing with Rosa was pointless; she'd patched up every member of this club at one time or another, and she'd learned early that bikers were worse than soldiers when it came to admitting they needed help.
She peeled away the dressing with practiced efficiency, examining the wound with a penlight. "Deeper than I'd like. The largest fragment's out, but there's still debris in here. I need to clean this properly or you'll get an infection that'll make the shrapnel seem like a paper cut."
"Do what you need to do."
"I always do." She laid out her tools on a sterile tray—forceps, irrigation syringe, suture kit. "This is going to hurt. You want something for it?"
"No."
Rosa didn't argue. She just started working, her fingers quick and sure, and I held perfectly still while she dug fragments of motorcycle out of my back.
The pain was sharp and clean, easier to focus on than the memory of Tyler shaking in my arms, easier than the knowledge that Cross had reached into our home and almost killed someone I—
Someone. Just someone.
Church convened with the smell of smoke still thick in the air.
Hawk stood at the head of the table, his face carved from granite, his hands flat on the wood. Around him, the club gathered in their usual seats, but the energy was different—coiled tighter, vibrating with a fury that had no outlet. Not yet.
"This is an act of war. No more scouting. No more messages. No more walking into our garage like he owns the place. Cross just tried to kill one of ours on our own ground."
"He almost succeeded." Blade's voice was ice. "If Tank hadn't spotted the device—"
"But he did." Hawk's gaze swept the table. "The question now is how we respond."
"We hit them back." Ghost was vibrating with barely contained rage, his bandaged arm cradled against his chest. "We find where they're staging and we burn it to the fucking ground."
"And start an all-out war with federal backing behind them?" Irish shook his head. "They want us to overreact. That bomb was designed to provoke—make us sloppy, make us move without thinking."
"So we just let them try to kill Tyler and do nothing?"
"We don't do nothing." Axel's voice cut through the rising tension, calm and steady, the voice of reason in a room full of rage. "We do something smart. Something that hurts them without giving them the excuse they need to bring the feds down on us."
The room fell silent, waiting.
"Intel suggests the Wolves have a supply operation running out of Henderson." Axel continued, laying it out. "They're moving product—we don't know what yet—through our territory every Wednesday night. Same route, same timing. They think they're invisible."
"A supply run." Hawk nodded slowly. "Not their staging area. Not their warehouse. Just the shipment in transit."
"Exactly. We intercept, we see what they're carrying, and we send a message that Phoenix territory has teeth. But we're not attacking their base. We're not escalating beyond what they started. We're gathering intelligence and protecting our interests."
"And if they resist?" Blade's question hung in the air.
"Then we make sure they regret it."