Chapter 6 #2
He's not mapping the club's movements anymore. He's photographing the people who come to the bar.
Holly's face is in that camera. The orc behind the lens has no idea what she is to me, and it doesn't matter.
She's in the frame. That's enough. Holly, who my blood has been pulling toward for months like a compass needle that won't stop spinning.
She's standing behind a bar ten feet from a lens she doesn't know exists
The fated mate bond hits like a hammer blow to my chest. Not the wanting.
The wanting I can handle. This is the thing underneath it, older and meaner, the protective instinct Knox described the night Sarah's ex showed up at the compound, the one that turns an orc from a man into something that doesn't take no for an answer.
My vision sharpens. My hands curl at my sides.
Every muscle in me coils toward that SUV and the word in my skull changes pitch from mine to protect and the gap between the two narrows to nothing.
I don't engage. Knox's order sits in my head beside the instinct: Track. Don't engage. Two full weeks of data before we move.
Knox's order says stay. The bond says protect. And while those two duke it out, the rest of me is already calculating how far I can get by midnight.
Photographs of the Anchor mean photographs of everyone inside it.
Every regular, every staff member, every orc in a Feral Sons cut who parks his bike out front and sits at the bar nursing bourbon until closing.
Holly lives and works in that building. I've been showing up in my patch for months.
If they're connecting dots, the line between her and the club runs straight through me.
My association with the club puts her in the frame.
My presence at the Anchor puts her in the frame.
Every night I've sat on that stool, every morning I've left her bed, every time I've walked through that front door in my cut with the Feral Sons patch across my back—I've been drawing a line between Holly and the Bloodstone Clan's crosshairs.
It hits me all at once. I want to protect her but I'm the reason she needs protecting.
I want to walk across the street and rip the camera out of the orc's hands and break it on the pavement and put my fist through the passenger window, but I can't do any of it because the moment I reveal what Holly is to me, she becomes a target instead of a bystander.
The SUV pulls out. Heading south the same way they leave every time. I watch until the taillights disappear around the bend by the harbour.
I stand in the alley long enough for the logic to build in pieces.
If I stay, I'm the link. Every night I walk into the Anchor in my cut, I'm drawing a line between Holly and whatever the Bloodstone Clan is planning.
If I disappear, the line breaks. She goes back to being a bartender in a bar, not the woman connected to the club's Road Captain.
The logic is clean and simple and I know it's bullshit even as I build it, but my hands are already reaching for my keys.
I go back inside. Holly is behind the bar pulling a pint for one of the dock workers, her face composed, her hair re-tied, every trace of the stockroom locked away. I wait until the dock worker moves to his table.
"Holly."
She sets the glass down and looks at me, and her eyes are already bracing for it.
"Bloodstone scouts are photographing this building." I keep my voice low. The jukebox covers the rest. "A dark SUV across the street with a camera on the front door. They're not just watching the club anymore. They're watching everyone who comes in and out."
Her hand stills on the tap. "How long?"
"Weeks, on the club. Tonight's the first time they've been this close to the Anchor."
She processes. "What do you need me to do?"
"Stay close to Sal and Griz until I figure out what they want." I hold her gaze. "I have to go."
The steadiness fractures. Her jaw sets and her eyes harden and I watch the fury build behind them, controlled and precise, the anger of a woman who's heard I have to go so many times the words have lost their meaning.
"You have to go," she repeats.
"Holly—"
"You just told me someone is photographing my bar, and your solution is to leave." She leans forward, both palms flat on the rail. "Every time, Rex. Every single time, there's a reason. And every single time, I'm the one standing here watching you walk out."
She's right. I know she's right. But the logic in my head says if I stay, every photograph of me at the Anchor is a photograph of me next to Holly, and that's all the Bloodstone Clan needs.
"I'll fix this," I say.
"You'll run," she says. "That's what you do."
She turns back to the taps. I stand at the bar for another ten seconds with my mouth full of words I can't organise into anything that sounds like the truth, and then I walk out.
I hold it together through the walk to the garage, through packing a bag that takes four minutes because I've never owned enough to fill a duffel. Through strapping the bag to the back of my bike and kickstarting the engine in the cold.
Before I pull out, I send Knox one text. Two words. Protect her.
Knox doesn't reply. He'll know what it means, and he'll make sure Griz or Colt or one of the prospects keeps eyes on the Anchor until further notice.
By midnight, I'm on the coast highway heading north. Dark and the Pacific slamming the rocks below the guardrail and the roar of the engine drowning out everything except the pull in my chest that hasn't stopped since the stockroom.
This time I'm not running from Holly. I'm not fleeing her apartment at three in the morning because the word scared me.
I'm not riding north until the fuel runs out because commitment feels like a locked bedroom door in a foster home I didn't choose.
I'm running because she's in danger and I'm the reason, and every mile I put between us is a mile between her and the Bloodstone Clan.
I tell myself it's the right call. Garrett told himself the same thing when he cut Nina loose in December. I sat on his porch and watched him wreck the best thing that ever happened to him and told him he was an idiot. Now I'm doing the exact same thing.
I'm two hundred miles north and accelerating and I can still smell Holly on my skin.
Finn finds my apartment empty the next morning.
I know because my phone lights up at 7:14 a.m. on the nightstand of a motel in Astoria. His name on the screen. I let it ring.
He calls back at 7:16. Then 7:22. Then 7:31, and by that one I can picture him in the garage, standing in the doorway of my room, looking at the packed-out space and the empty drawer and the bare mattress and the single shelf with nothing on it.
The voicemail comes at 7:33. I don't play it.
At 7:41, Finn calls Knox. I know because Knox calls me at 7:43 and the caller ID reads PREZ and I stare at it until it stops ringing.
My phone buzzes once more. The brothers' group chat.
Finn: Rex packed out. Bike's gone.
Then Knox, thirty seconds later: I know.
I set the phone facedown on the nightstand and lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling and count the miles between me and Nightfall Cove, and every single one of them runs in the wrong direction.