Chapter 3
THREE
CALLIE
I'd been at the compound for four days and I was going out of my mind.
The room they'd given me was clean, warm, quiet.
The bed was the most comfortable thing I'd slept on in years.
There was a lock on the inside of the door that I'd used the first night and hadn't touched since, because somewhere between day one and day three I'd stopped feeling like I needed it.
The compound was safe. I knew that in my bones, the way you know the ground is solid under your feet.
The problem was that safe meant still. And still meant thinking.
And thinking meant the alley, the gunshot, the cop's face, the knife in my pillow, the life I'd left behind that wasn't much of a life but was mine.
My apartment, my job and the regulars at Grady's who left decent tips.
All of it, gone, because I'd taken the trash out on a Tuesday night and saw something I shouldn’t have.
So I kept busy. Made coffee in the mornings before anyone was up, learned where they kept things in the big lodge kitchen, wiped down counters that were already clean. I found the broom and swept the porch until Hawk looked at me like I'd lost my mind. I offered to help wherever I could.
I was earning my keep. Or at least, trying to.
It was the only thing I knew how to do. If you're staying somewhere you don't belong, you make yourself useful.
You prove you're worth the space you're taking up.
I'd been doing it my whole life. After Ryan died, after the funeral and the folded flag and the unbearable silence that followed, I'd done it with work.
Double shifts, extra tables, volunteering for the closes nobody wanted.
It was better than being alone with my own thoughts and grief.
The grief subsided with time, but old habits die hard.
The brothers were kind. That was the part I didn't know what to do with.
Doc checked on me every morning, casual, like he just happened to be passing through the kitchen when I was making coffee.
He'd ask how I slept, and wander off before it could feel clinical. Rook didn’t speak much, but I'd come downstairs one morning to find a phone charger on the kitchen counter with a sticky note that said heard you needed this.
Duke told terrible jokes to try and make me smile, and they did, even the ones that were genuinely awful.
They were testing me, too. I could feel it, the way you feel someone watching you from across a room. Figuring out who I was, whether I was what I said I was, whether I was a threat to their brother, to their MC. I didn't blame them. I'd have done the same.
But it was Angel I couldn't stop watching.
He was everywhere and nowhere. He didn't hover, didn't check on me the way Doc did, didn't make conversation the way Duke did.
But he was always there. In the kitchen when I came down, already on his second coffee, reading something on his phone.
On the porch when I stepped outside, leaning against the railing with his eyes on the treeline.
In the workshop when I walked past, his back to me, the white cotton of his t-shirt pulled tight across his shoulders while he worked on something I couldn't see.
I noticed things about him that I had no business noticing.
His hands, the size of them, the way they wrapped around a coffee mug and made it look like a toy.
The way he listened when someone talked to him, completely focused, his whole body angled toward whoever had his attention.
The low sound of his voice when he was talking to Ghost on the porch and didn't know I was sitting by the window inside, close enough to hear the rumble of it but not the words.
The way he moved through a room, unhurried, deliberate, like every step was a decision he'd already made.
He was older. I kept circling back to that, prodding at it, embarrassed by how little it mattered to me and how much it should.
This man had served with my brother. He'd been Ryan's commanding officer, his friend, his brother in every way that counted.
He was almost old enough to be... I wouldn't let myself finish that sentence.
The math was silly and the fact that I'd done the math at all was worse.
Because I doubted he was seeing me the way I was starting to see him.
When he looked at me, I thought I could read exactly what was behind it.
Duty. Obligation. The weight of a promise made to a dead man.
I was Ryan's sister, a responsibility he'd accepted without hesitation, and whatever warmth I thought I saw in his eyes when they landed on me was probably just the ghost of his grief for my brother.
He saw Ryan when he looked at me. I was sure of it.
Which made the heat that rolled through my stomach every time he walked into a room deeply, thoroughly mortifying.
On the fourth afternoon, I was in the kitchen again. Cleaning. The counter was already spotless but I was scrubbing it anyway, because the alternative was sitting on my bed staring at the ceiling and replaying the sound of a gunshot.
"You don't have to earn your place here."
His voice, behind me. I hadn't heard him come in, which was insane given that he was six foot three and built like a wall. But he moved quietly for a big man. Like sound was something he could choose to make or not.
I turned around. He was standing in the doorway, shoulder against the frame, arms folded. The afternoon light was coming in through the window behind me and catching him from the side, and I could see the way his mouth was set in that expression I was learning to read. Calm. Watchful. Patient.
"I'm not," I said. "I'm just cleaning."
"You've cleaned that counter three times today."
"It's a dirty counter."
Something flickered in his face. If I didn't know better, I'd have called it amusement. But it was gone before I could be sure, and his expression settled back into that steady, unreadable thing he wore like armor.
"You're not a guest here, Callie. You're not earning a stay. You're here because your brother trusted me to take care of you if you needed it. You don't owe us anything."
The words landed somewhere in my chest and just sat there, heavy and warm. I'd been trying to keep myself busy for so long that hearing someone say stop felt like being told to breathe underwater. I didn't know how. I didn't know what I was supposed to do with myself if I wasn't doing something.
"Okay," I said. Because I didn't trust myself to say anything else.
He held my eyes for a second longer than he needed to, then pushed off the doorframe and left. I stood there with a wet cloth in my hand and a feeling in my ribs I was trying very hard to ignore.
That night, I couldn't sleep.
I'd been managing four hours a night since I got here, which was better than the car but still not enough.
The nightmares were the problem. The alley, the cop, the sound of the shot.
Sometimes my brain remixed it, put Ryan in the alley instead, put me on the ground, put Angel standing twenty feet away unable to move.
The variations were creative and none of them were fun.
I gave up around midnight and went downstairs.
The lodge was quiet, the kind of deep silence that only happens when you're miles from anywhere.
I padded into the kitchen in bare feet and an oversized t-shirt, planning to make tea, or maybe just sit somewhere that wasn't the room where I kept having nightmares.
Angel was there.
Just sitting at the kitchen table in the near-dark, just the light above the stove casting a low glow.
A glass of something amber in front of him, barely touched.
He looked up when I came in and for a second, before he had time to arrange his face, I saw something unguarded in his expression.
Tired. Sad. Human, in a way he never let himself be during the day.
"Couldn't sleep?" he asked.
"Bad dreams."
He nodded. Like that was a language he spoke fluently.
He tipped his chin toward the chair across from him and I sat down, pulling my knees up to my chest and my t-shirt over them to keep my legs warm.
Somehow his presence felt warm. It shouldn't have been comforting, sitting in the dark with a man I barely knew, but for some reason it was.
We sat in silence for a while. He didn't try to fill it and neither did I. That was the thing about Angel. His silences weren't empty. They were full, deliberate, spaces he held open for you to fill or not as you chose.
"Ryan used to do this," I said. The words came out before I could stop them.
"Sit up in the middle of the night when he couldn't sleep.
He'd make coffee at two in the morning and sit at the kitchen table in our parents' house and just..
. be there. I'd come down and find him and we'd sit together.
He never talked about what woke him up. I never asked. "
Angel didn't say anything. But I felt the change in him, the way the air shifted when I said my brother's name. Like something tightened in the room.
"I miss him." My voice was quieter now. "I miss him all the time, but it's worse here.
Because he sent me here. He should be here too, but he's not, and I keep thinking.
.. I keep thinking about how alone I've been since he died.
How I just kept moving and working and staying busy so I didn't have to feel it.
And now I'm here, in this place, with some people who actually knew him, and I can't run anymore. I can't keep busy enough to outrun it."
My throat was tight. My eyes were burning. I blinked hard because I was not going to cry in front of this man, I was not, but the words had opened something up and I couldn't shove it back down.
Angel was looking at me. And in the low light of the kitchen, with his face stripped of the armor he wore during the day, I saw something that made me forget to breathe.
It wasn't duty. It wasn't obligation. It wasn't the steady, protective watchfulness I'd been reading as you are my dead friend's sister and I will keep you safe.
It was hunger.
Raw, undisguised, furious hunger. He was looking at me like I was something he wanted so badly it was tearing him apart, and the horror of that wanting was written right beside it on his face.
He was appalled at himself, and right now he couldn't hide it.
He hadn't expected me to walk into his kitchen and start bleeding out the truth when he was least expecting it.
It was more than I could bear and I kissed him.
I didn't decide to. There was no thought involved, no calculation, no weighing of consequences. I just moved. Closed the space between us, put my hands on his jaw, and pressed my mouth to his.
For a fraction of a second, he didn't move. Every muscle in his body locked. I could feel the tension in his jaw under my palms, the rigidity of a man fighting himself with everything he had.
Then he broke.
His hands came up to my waist and pulled me into him, and he kissed me back with a force that made my head swim.
His mouth was hot, demanding, nothing like the careful, controlled man I'd been watching for four days.
His hands were enormous on my waist, fingers digging in, holding me against him like I might disappear if he let go.
I could feel the strength in them, and how deliberately gentle he was being.
He held me tight and kissed me like he'd been starving for weeks and I was the only thing that could fill him.
The contradiction between the gentleness of his grip and the ferocity of his mouth made me dizzy.
I was small against him. The sheer size of him surrounded me, the width of his chest, the span of his shoulders, the heat pouring off his body.
I could feel his heartbeat under my palm, hard and fast, completely at odds with the controlled man who ran this compound and commanded these men.
He wasn't controlled now. He was unravelling, right here, right against my mouth.
He pulled away.
One second his mouth was on mine, his hands on my waist, his whole body angled into me. The next he was pulling back, putting space between us, and I could see the war on his face as clearly as if he'd spoken it out loud.
His breath was ragged. His hands were shaking. And his eyes, those dark, steady eyes that never gave anything away, were giving away everything.
I could name the pieces now. The age difference between us. My brother, his best friend. The duty, and the brotherhood of the military. All of it, right there on the surface, fighting with the thing underneath that I'd just tasted on his mouth.
He wanted me and he hated himself for it. And he was going to walk away because he thought it was the right thing to do.
“Callie…" My name in his mouth, rough, wrecked. A warning and an apology at the same time.
I didn't push. I didn't reach for him again, didn't try to argue or convince or close the gap he'd put between us. I just looked at him, this man who'd been a mountain every second since I'd arrived, steady and immovable and sure, and watched him come apart at the seams.
"Goodnight, Angel," I said.
I walked past him, out of the kitchen, up the stairs. I could feel his eyes on my back the whole way. I didn't turn around.
In my room, I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my fingers to my lips and tried to breathe.
That wasn't a man doing his job. That was a man falling apart.
And I was the reason.