Chapter 6
Bruiser
My phone has gone quiet. Two weeks of blocked calls, hang-ups that hit my voicemail at two a.m., four a.m. and six a.m. because Heckland still runs on Langley time.
Then nothing. The screen sits dark on the nightstand, and after eleven years, I know what it means when an agency goes quiet. It means they've found another way in.
Ava sleeps in my bed with one arm thrown across the space where I don't sleep.
The sheets carry both of us now. My scent layered over hers, thick enough that every orc and minotaur in this compound read it the moment Finn opened the kitchen this morning at six and the hallway draft pulled air from under my door.
By breakfast, Garrett will know. Colt will know.
Knox already knows and said what he needed to say days ago.
I stand at the window with a cold coffee and watch her breathe. Her notebook lies closed on the nightstand next to my phone.
The scanner cycles frequencies behind me. Green light sweeping left to right, left to right. Empty channels.
I should let her sleep, and I should handle Heckland, the sedan, the agency cleanup through Church the way I've handled every threat for eight years. Alone, in the dark, with the brothers finding out after the dust clears. The safe play. The useful play.
Instead I pour my cold coffee down the drain, make two fresh cups, and sit at the kitchen table and wait for her to wake up.
She comes out in my t-shirt with her hair knotted on top of her head and pillow lines on her left cheek. She drops into the chair across from me and picks up the mug I left there.
"You're staring."
"I need to tell you something."
She sets her cup down. Her eyes stay level.
"I grew up on a cattle ranch in central Montana.
Twelve hundred acres, no neighbors, and a man named Frank Walker who paid me room and board for fence work starting when I was sixteen.
" The coffee burns my palm through the ceramic but I don't put it down.
"I could carry posts the other hands needed a truck for.
Frank didn't ask questions about where I came from. He just needed the labor."
Ava doesn't move, doesn't reach for her pen.
"CIA recruited me at twenty-two. A man named Heckland drove to the ranch and told me my size and my ability to retain faces made me valuable to national security.
I believed him because nobody had ever called me valuable before.
" I set the mug down. "Five years of operations.
Surveillance, infiltration, asset management.
Then they gave me the Feral Sons assignment.
Infiltrate the club, document the membership, map the compound, and report back so they could dismantle the largest organized monster community on the West Coast."
"And you did it."
"I drove to Nightfall Cove. I sat at Knox's table.
He poured me a drink and asked me where I came from, and for the first time in my life, the question sounded like he wanted to hear the answer.
" My thumb traces the ceramic handle. "Within six months I knew the agency didn't want integration intel.
They wanted a blueprint for dismantling the only people who ever treated me like one of their own. "
"So you went rogue."
"I burned Heckland. Stopped reporting. Destroyed the uplink and the dead drops and everything they gave me except the skills I couldn't unlearn. Eight years ago." I meet her eyes across the table. "Knox is the only one who knows. I told him the day I burned it. He let me stay."
"Five years of operations gave me access to things they can't declassify and can't risk me carrying.
Eight years on my own gave me more." I nod toward the wall behind me.
"My boards map every operational pattern the agency ran through the Pacific Northwest since I went rogue.
They don't know how much I've documented. That's why they can't let me walk."
She holds my gaze for long enough that the coffee goes from hot to warm between us. No follow-up questions. The journalist in her reads the room better than any handler I've worked with, and right now she sees that I'm not finished.
"The agency valued me because I could remember faces and crack channels. The ranch valued me because I could carry fence posts. This club values me because I watch for threats. I've never—" I stop. I can't finish it. "Nobody's ever kept me because they wanted me there."
Ava doesn't look away. "I didn't sleep with you because you're useful, Bruiser." She picks up her mug. "What does that tell you?"
The silence fills the kitchen. I don't have an answer. She drinks, and the quiet between us settles without breaking. She lets the question sit the way a good journalist does. Not because she's patient, but because she recognizes when the answer isn't ready yet.
Church meets at nine. I stand at the head of the table and brief the brothers on everything I gave Ava an hour ago.
The room changes by degrees. Finn goes rigid in his chair, his grip white on the armrest. Rex's boots drop from the seat next to him and hit the floor.
Garrett sits at the far end with his arms crossed over his chest, and the stillness that takes him runs harder and older than his usual quiet.
Chain and Steel trade a look. Diesel, against the wall, keeps his mouth shut for once.
Knox grips his coffee and gives nothing away, because he's known this for eight years.
"Heckland is running operations through a consulting firm called Ridgeline Strategic," I say.
"Same firm that placed David Harlow at Pacific Northwest Monthly six months ago.
Harlow's editorial assignment put Ava at Nightfall Cove.
We're the ones who let her through the gate.
The CIA built her cover story without her knowledge and aimed her at us. "
"One operation, three fronts. The journalist gives them eyes inside the compound — our layout, our routines, our numbers.
Humans First destabilizes from the outside — public pressure, vandalism, makes the town hostile enough that we look like the problem.
And Heckland showing up in person means the quiet approach stopped working. Someone went active."
"How much does she know?" Colt asks.
"Everything I just told you." I let that land. "I told her first."
Nobody speaks. Finn stares at the table, both hands flat, fingers spread.
Rex looks at his boots. Colt adjusts his glasses.
But none of them miss what I said, and none of them miss what it means.
A man who's kept every secret this club has gave his biggest one to a woman before he brought it to the table.
Knox nods once. The conversation moves to logistics.
A motorcycle rolls through the gate at eleven.
I hear it before I see it—a custom build, heavy in the low end, exhaust tuned for mountain roads.
Not a brother's bike. Wrong engine signature, wrong weight distribution.
I pull the gate camera and watch a rider come through the compound entrance at idle speed, and the orc who swings off the saddle stands Knox's height with braids shot through gray and knuckles scarred white from sparring pits.
Knox meets him in the lot. The two of them stand face to face for a breath, and then Knox grips the man's forearm and pulls him in, tight and brief, the grip of a man who hasn't seen his closest friend in years and didn't expect to again.
"Dravik," Knox says, and the word lands heavy enough to reach the porch.
I run the name through my boards while they talk. Nothing in my files. Nothing in the agency databases. An orc who doesn't exist in any system I've built, which means he comes from the mountains, from the life Knox left when he walked down and never went back.
They move inside. I follow.
Dravik sits in the common room with a glass of water and tells Knox what he rode ahead to deliver. His cousin. Torgan, the one holding the clans together while the old king weakened, was killed in a dispute with the eastern faction two months ago. His father—Drogmar still breathes, though barely.
"Torgan's death ripped it open," Dravik says.
His voice runs low, rough from the road.
"Three factions fighting for the seat he kept.
Thousands will die if nobody unites them.
The scouts your brothers spotted last fall, the ones east of the county line—they weren't hunting.
They came to confirm you're alive. To confirm you have a son. "
Knox's hand tightens on his mug.
"They don't just want you back, Knox. They need you. You're the only one with a legitimate claim all three factions will accept." Dravik leans forward. "Gar'than asked nicely two years ago. This isn't a request anymore. Your people are killing each other, Knox."
I watch Knox's shoulders take the weight the way a man lifts a load he set down years ago and finds heavier for the rest.
Sarah stands in the doorway with Reeve on her hip. She doesn't interrupt. She waits until Knox turns and finds her there, and what passes between them needs no words. She told an emissary's face two years ago that where her mate goes, she goes.
"You told Gar'than not now." Her voice stays even. "You never said never. You have a choice. You've always had one. And you already know mine."
Knox leaves without answering. Sarah falls into step beside him. Dravik watches them go and doesn't try to call him back.
The call from Finn comes at noon.
"Somebody hit the garage downtown overnight." His voice comes flat. "Smashed the bay windows. Stripped the engine parts off the workbench. Left a message."
I drive over with Rex. Finn opened the shop on Second Street three months ago to catch tourist trade during festival season—oil changes, brake jobs, the kind of work that keeps the lights on between custom builds.
MONSTER LOVERS covers the bay doors in red spray paint, letters two feet high, dripping at the edges where the paint ran before it dried.
Glass from the shattered windows glitters across the concrete floor. The air reeks of aerosol.
Jess stands near the ruined bay with a baby balanced on her hip, surveying the damage with the eye of a woman who ran triage in a combat zone. She doesn't flinch.
Finn hasn't moved from the middle of his gutted shop. His hands hang at his sides. The engine he rebuilt last week—a '68 Mustang block, forty hours of work—lies in pieces across the floor.
"Rickman's getting bold," Rex says.
Colt's voice comes through the radio, steady and dry. "Rickman's getting funded. I've been tracing their money for two months. The trail leads somewhere federal."
Rex looks at me. I look at the spray paint.
Federal funding, a consulting firm in Virginia, a reporter steered into town without knowing why, and a hate group escalating in the same zip code.
The threads run parallel. The place where they cross is obvious to anyone willing to follow them far enough.
Nobody says what I'm thinking.
Ava sits on the bed with her notebook open, pen moving across the page. She doesn't ask where I went.
I sit at the desk and open the drawer where I keep the carving tool. Tungsten-tipped, fine point, the handle wrapped in electrical tape for grip.
The tip finds my left horn. The watchtower mark sits at the base, deep and old, the first symbol I carved when I went rogue. Above it: eight years of closed circles, one for every year I've kept my seat. Crossed lines for threats identified. Open eyes for the ones I saw coming.
The new symbol forms under the blade. A closed eye.
They found me. The tool scrapes against living bone and the sound fills the apartment, a high thin note that vibrates through my skull and down my spine.
I've carved every mark on these horns alone.
The minotaur's autobiography, cut into the only surface nobody else can reach.
The scrape registers in my chest. Every new mark changes the weight I carry. The horns tell the truth. They've told it longer than I have.
The tool finishes the line. I blow the dust from the groove and run my thumb across the raised edge, clean and permanent. The closed eye rests above the others, and when the brothers see it tomorrow they'll know what it means without asking.
Ava leans against the doorframe. Her pen hangs loose in her hand, her notebook pressed against her chest. She watches me hold the carving tool against my horn, metal against bone, a man writing his life into his body.
She doesn't say anything. She looks at the horn, at the fresh mark, at me. And the way she looks at me holds no pity.