6. MYLA
Chapter six
MYLA
By the time darkness settled over the house, sleeping with Gunner had somehow become the least complicated part of my day.
That probably should have concerned me more than it did.
I stood in the bedroom pulling on the clean jeans Ben had unknowingly supplied in one of his grocery bags while Gunner prepared to leave, the sounds carrying through the old house: cupboards opening, magazines clicking into place, the occasional low curse whenever Ray’s supplies failed to meet his standards.
Grant had disappeared somewhere between the couch and sunset.
Gunner was back.
I understood the difference now. Grant was the man who had given me his real name before touching me as though I was something he wanted rather than something he owned.
Gunner was the man standing at the kitchen table when I joined him, three weapons laid neatly in front of him beside my flash drive.
“You planning on invading somewhere?”
He glanced up while checking a magazine. “Depends how the night goes, sweetheart.”
There was barely a change in his expression, but I knew him well enough now to hear the humor beneath the words.
The old Jeep in Ray’s barn was going to take us out by a service track, leaving Gunner’s truck behind so anyone watching the main road had one less thing to follow. Once we had the recording, we weren’t coming back.
Before we left, Gunner noticed the prepaid phone I had kept powered off inside my bag.
His expression darkened immediately.
“It’s off,” I said.
“Battery still in?”
“Yes.”
“Then it ain’t off enough.”
I handed it over before the lecture could grow. He stripped out the battery and SIM and separated the pieces between his pockets, ignoring my comment about paranoia while pushing the pistol he’d given me earlier across the table.
“You’re trusting me with this again?”
“I’m trusting myself to stay outta your line of fire.”
I smiled as I checked it. “You really know how to make a woman feel special.”
His gaze moved over me slowly enough to bring back a vivid memory of the couch.
“Sweetheart, I fucked you and gave you my government name. Don’t get greedy.”
Heat climbed straight into my face.
Gunner’s mouth finally curved. “There she is.”
Some things, apparently, had not changed.
The Jeep looked like it had been parked in the barn since the invention of reliable transportation, but after Gunner connected the battery and threatened it under his breath, the engine eventually coughed to life.
We took the service road without headlights until the trees had swallowed the house behind us, and only then did he turn them on.
I watched his profile in the weak dashboard glow.
“Grant was nicer.”
His hands tightened slightly around the wheel.
I stopped teasing.
“Do you mind when I call you that?”
He was quiet for a moment before shaking his head. “No.”
The answer was rough enough to make something warm settle beneath my ribs.
I looked out the window before he caught me smiling.
The storage facility sat thirty miles east behind a half-empty strip mall. I had chosen it because nobody had any reason to notice it, paying months in advance with cash under a name that didn’t exist and taking a unit near the back where the cameras barely reached.
At the time, I had believed that made it safe.
Sitting beside Gunner while he drove past the entrance twice before parking at a convenience store across the road, I began to understand how often I had confused not found yet with secure.
He watched a silver sedan near the office and a pickup parked behind the fence for several minutes before deciding neither had moved enough to matter.
“You don’t have to come inside,” I said.
Gunner turned slowly toward me.
“I’ve been doing this alone for eight months,” I continued. “One person is less obvious than two.”
His expression softened slightly, although his voice stayed rough. “You don’t have to do it alone anymore.”
That shut down whatever argument I had prepared.
He looked back toward the facility as if he hadn’t just said something that landed directly in the center of my chest, so I reached across the console and briefly curled my fingers around his hand.
His thumb moved once over mine.
“Careful. Keep doing that and Grant might show up again.”
“Maybe I like him.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m still deciding.”
The faint smile stayed on his mouth until we crossed the road.
At the gate, I gave him the code.
The keypad flashed red.
I frowned and gave it to him again, slower this time, but the gate remained locked.
“That’s not right.”
Gunner was already shifting into reverse.
“What are you doing?”
“Leaving.”
“The recording is in there.”
“And somebody changed your access.”
Panic rose quickly enough that my voice sharpened. “Grant, that recording might be the only thing we have that can identify Ghost. I’m not walking away from it now.”
He stared at me for several seconds, clearly weighing every reason this was a terrible idea against the certainty that I would come back alone if he refused.
Finally he swore and backed away from the entrance.
“We find another way in, you stay behind me, and if I tell you to run, you run. No arguments.”
I nodded.
His eyes narrowed. “That easy?”
“Don’t ruin it.”
The rear of the property backed onto an overgrown service road. Gunner parked the Jeep behind an abandoned warehouse before we climbed a section of fence hidden by trees, his hands settling around my waist as he helped me down carefully enough to protect my healing side.
We moved along the back row with the flashlight off.
The facility was almost completely silent, all damp concrete, rusting doors and narrow lanes disappearing into shadow.
My unit was exactly where I had left it.
Relief barely had time to settle before Gunner crouched beside the lock.
“What?”
He ran a thumb beside the housing. “Scratches. Fresh enough.”
My stomach dropped.
I would never have noticed them.
“Somebody tried to get in?”
“Looks that way.”
The lock itself was still intact, which was the only reason he agreed to open the unit instead of dragging me straight back over the fence.
Inside, everything looked untouched.
Two boxes. An old suitcase. A plastic storage bin and the stack of blankets hiding the lockbox beneath them.
I dropped to my knees, pulled it free and punched in the code.
Documents.
Cash.
Two burner phones.
And the little plastic memory-card case tucked beneath an envelope.
“It’s here.”
“Grab it. We’re gone.”
I slid the card into my pocket.
Then Gunner went completely still.
His head tilted slightly.
I heard it a second later.
A car door closing somewhere toward the front row.
He killed the flashlight and guided me farther into the unit, his hand firm against my shoulder as darkness swallowed us.
“Stay low.”
Footsteps approached.
One set at first.
Then another.
My fingers tightened around the pistol.
A beam of light swept across the concrete beyond the partially raised door, disappearing before a man’s voice drifted toward us.
“She came back.”
My blood went cold.
I knew that voice.
Cole.
The man who had pinned me down while somebody else drove a knife into my side.
My hand closed around Gunner’s arm. I mouthed the name, and his face changed immediately—not into anger, but into the terrifying calm I had started to understand meant he was at his most dangerous.
Another voice came from farther down the row.
“Rafe said alive if possible.”
Gunner leaned close enough that his mouth brushed my ear.
“You stay behind me, sweetheart. They see us, you shoot. Otherwise you let me move first.”
Yesterday I might have argued.
Tonight I nodded.
“Trust me.”
I did.
Gunner stepped into the corridor using the concrete divider as cover, and I followed several feet behind him.
A flashlight appeared around the corner with a man attached to it, and Gunner moved before I had time to register the face, catching his wrist and slamming him into the metal door hard enough to rattle the entire row.
Gunfire exploded behind us.
Gunner shoved me down as a bullet chipped concrete above my head, then returned fire toward the far end of the lane while dragging the first man across the opening for cover.
Another shot punched through the thin metal wall beside me.
I saw the muzzle flash behind a trailer and fired toward it.
Once.
Then again.
A shape dropped out of sight.
I had no idea whether I had hit him.
Gunner did.
“Move, Myla.”
We ran.
Pain tore through my healing side with every stride, but adrenaline kept me moving as bullets struck metal somewhere behind us. Gunner turned once and fired back without breaking pace, buying enough time to reach the rear fence.
I looked up at it and knew immediately my ribs weren’t going to manage the climb.
Gunner knew too.
He holstered his weapon, locked both hands around my waist and lifted me high enough to catch the top.
“Go.”
I dragged myself over and landed hard enough to see stars.
Gunner cleared the fence a second later.
A gunshot cracked through the trees.
His body jerked.
“Grant!”
“I’m good. Move.”
Blood was already spreading across the shoulder of his shirt.
I wanted to stop, but his hand closed around my arm and drove me toward the warehouse until we reached the Jeep.
The engine started on the second attempt.
Gunner threw it into gear one-handed while I twisted toward him and grabbed the medical bag from the back.
“You’ve been shot.”
“Grazed.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Usually comes with it.”
I cut his sleeve open while he drove.
The bullet had torn along the outside of his shoulder rather than going through, ugly enough to make my stomach turn but not immediately life-threatening.
I pressed gauze against it.
“Harder,” he said.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Sweetheart, I already got shot. Little late to worry about hurting me.”
I pushed harder.
He hissed through his teeth but kept the Jeep steady.
The facility disappeared behind us, and only then did the significance of what had happened settle in.
The memory card was safe in my pocket.
Cole had been waiting for me.
“They knew I’d come back.”
“Could’ve been watching the unit.”
“For six weeks?”
Gunner didn’t answer because neither of us believed that.
My stomach twisted.
“Somebody knew.”
His jaw tightened.
Only two people had known we were going there.
Him and me.
“You think I told someone.”
Gunner glanced across at me. “No.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I was with you, Myla.”
“That doesn’t prove—”
“To me it does.”
The certainty in his voice stopped me.
I stared at him while blood soaked slowly into the gauze beneath my hand.
“Why?”
“Because you could’ve handed that recording to Rafe months ago and been done with this. Instead, you got stabbed protecting it.”
His gaze returned to the road.
“You keep secrets, you’re stubborn enough to make me wanna put my head through a wall, and half the time you scare yourself trying to pretend you ain’t scared. But you’re not Ghost.”
Something inside me loosened painfully.
I looked down at my hands.
“I shot someone.”
Gunner’s expression changed.
“I don’t know if I killed him.”
“He was shooting at you.”
“I know, but that doesn’t make it feel better.”
“No.”
His good hand left the wheel long enough to cover mine where I held the gauze against his shoulder.
“It ain’t supposed to feel good. People who enjoy doing what they have to do are usually the ones you oughta worry about.”
The man beside me carried guns as naturally as other men carried keys and had stepped into gunfire without hesitation because I was behind him, yet he understood exactly why my hands were shaking.
That probably should have frightened me.
Instead, I wanted to lean into him.
“Where are we going?”
“Clubhouse.”
The fear returned immediately.
“Ghost could be there.”
“Could.”
“And you’re taking the recording back anyway?”
“I’m taking you to Hawk.”
He glanced toward me.
“If there’s one man in that club besides me I’d bet my life ain’t selling us out, it’s him. Hawk would burn the whole fucking place down before he handed one brother to Rafe.”
I thought about the quiet vice president who had watched more than he spoke the night I arrived.
Then I nodded.
The road ahead disappeared into darkness while Black Thorns men somewhere behind us were already calling Rafe. The safehouse was finished, the recording was finally in my pocket, and Gunner was taking me back toward the place I had been most afraid to trust.
Somehow, trusting him had made that possible.
I looked at his profile, at the tightness around his eyes from pain and the steady hand on the wheel.
“Grant?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad it was you.”
He frowned slightly.
“At the clubhouse, when Grizz decided somebody had to protect me. I’m glad he picked you.”
For several seconds, he didn’t answer.
Then he turned his good hand beneath mine, our fingers locking together over the bloodstained gauze.
His thumb moved slowly across my knuckles.
“Yeah, sweetheart,” he said quietly. “Me too.”