Chapter 5
FIVE
CALLIE
I felt it before anyone told me.
The compound shifted on a Thursday morning, somewhere between breakfast and noon, and the change was so subtle that if I hadn't spent the last week learning the rhythms of this place I'd have missed it entirely.
But I had learned them. I'd learned the sound of the workshop when things were normal, the easy clang of metal and the low hum of conversation drifting through the bay doors.
I'd learned the way the brothers moved around the compound, unhurried, loose, men comfortable in their own territory.
I'd learned the sound of Angel's boots on the porch and the specific weight of his footsteps pacing when he was thinking versus when he was relaxed.
None of it sounded right today.
The workshop was quiet. The brothers who were usually scattered across the compound were clustered instead, talking in low voices that stopped when I came near.
Duke, who always had a joke and a grin, looked at me and his smile was careful.
Measured. The kind of smile people give you when they're trying not to scare you.
And Angel.
Angel had gone quiet. A different kind of quiet from any I'd learned so far.
The working silence, focused and calm. The thinking silence, heavier, the one that came over him when something was turning behind his eyes.
The soft silence, rare, precious, and the one that settled over him when it was just us and his guard came down.
This silence was none of those. This one had teeth. This one lived in the set of his jaw and the tension in his shoulders and the way his eyes kept moving to the road, the gate, the treeline. He was a man assessing a perimeter, and whatever he was seeing in his head, he didn't like it.
I found out at lunch. Not because anyone sat me down and told me, but because I walked into the lodge and heard Hawk's voice coming from the back room, low and flat and utterly without emotion, which was somehow worse than if he'd been shouting.
"Two riders. Came through Main Street this morning. Parked outside Rosie's for twenty minutes, asking questions. Hank called it in."
I stopped in the hallway. My hand on the wall, my breath caught somewhere between my lungs and my throat.
"Patches?" Angel's voice.
"Iron Jackals."
The floor tilted under me. Just for a second, just enough to make me grab the doorframe.
Then it steadied and I was standing there with my heart slamming against my ribs and the taste of metal in my mouth and the same cold, sick feeling I'd had in the alley behind Grady's when a cop looked up from a dead man and saw my face.
They'd found me.
I walked into the room. Angel looked up and I watched him read my face and know immediately that I'd heard. Something shifted in his expression, something quick and controlled, and then he was on his feet and crossing the room toward me.
"Callie."
"They're here." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "The Jackals. They found me."
"They found Forsaken. They haven't found you."
"Because there's a difference?"
"There's a significant difference." His voice was calm.
Measured. The commander's voice, the one that gave orders and expected them to be followed.
But his eyes were on mine, searching, and underneath the calm I could see something harder and hotter and more dangerous than anything I'd seen in him before.
"I should leave," I said. "Angel, I should go. I've brought this to your door. Your brothers, your town, the people here who have nothing to do with any of this. If I leave, they'll follow me. They'll leave Forsaken alone."
"You're not leaving."
"If something happens to one of your men because of me..."
"Nothing is going to happen to my men." He said it quietly. The way you'd state a fact that had already been decided. “My brothers are more skilled than any Iron Jackal could plan for. They need to be worried, not you. And you are not leaving this compound."
I stared at him. The intensity of this strong, self assured man hit me in a way it never had before.
My own embarrassment about being hot for a guy fifteen years older than me was gone.
The awkward math I'd been doing in my head for a week was irrelevant.
Because standing in front of me was a man with twenty years of war behind his eyes, a man who'd led soldiers, built a brotherhood and survived things I couldn't imagine, and he was telling me, with absolute certainty, that I was going nowhere.
He was choosing me. And Angel didn't make choices lightly.
This was a man who weighed every decision like it was life and death because for most of his life, it had been. But he'd chosen this. Chosen me.
I believed him. Not because I had to, but because the look in his eyes left no room for doubt.
The rest of the day was taut as a wire.
The brothers moved with purpose, quiet conversations I wasn't part of, phone calls, Hawk disappearing down the private road on his bike and coming back an hour later with a face that gave nothing away.
Rook was in his room working. Ghost appeared and disappeared like smoke, there one moment and gone the next, which would have been unsettling if I hadn't already learned that Ghost being invisible was Ghost doing his job.
Angel stayed close. Not hovering, but close.
I was scared. I could admit that now, here, in this place where admitting it didn't mean being alone with it.
But the fear had shifted. I wasn't scared for myself anymore, not really.
I was scared for him. For what he would do to protect me and what it might cost him.
I'd seen the way the compound moved when there was a threat, the quiet efficiency of men who'd trained for exactly this, and I understood now that these men would put themselves between me and danger without hesitation.
Because Angel had told them to and because I was his to keep safe.
That word. His. It should have bothered me.
A week ago, it would have. But nothing about Angel felt like ownership.
It felt like a man planting himself between me and the world and saying you'll have to come through me.
It felt like safety in the shape of a person.
It felt like the opposite of everything I'd been running from.
That night, I couldn't sit still. The compound was locked down, the brothers on rotation, the road watched.
Everything that could be done was being done and I was useless in the middle of it, vibrating with fear, adrenaline and something else, something hotter, something that had been building all day every time Angel moved through a room and I felt the controlled violence running under his skin.
He found me in his room. I'd gone there without thinking about it, without making a conscious decision. My feet had just carried me there because his room was where I felt safest and I was done pretending otherwise.
He came through the door and saw me sitting on the edge of his bed and stopped.
For a second, he just looked at me. I looked back, and something passed between us that was bigger than words, heavier, the accumulated weight of a week of fear, a day of threat and the knowledge that the world outside these walls wanted to tear us apart.
I stood up. Crossed the room to him. Put my hands flat on his chest and felt his heartbeat under my palms, steady, strong, the heartbeat of a man who was not afraid of what was coming.
"Be here with me," I said. "Tonight. Just be here."
He kissed me.
It was different from previous times. The tenderness was still there, somewhere underneath, but something else had taken the front.
He kissed me hard, his hand in my hair, tilting my head back, his mouth hot and demanding on mine.
I could feel the tension of the day in the way he held me, the fear he'd been carrying for hours channelled into the press of his body against mine, the grip of his fingers, the way he kissed me like he was trying to convince himself I was real and solid and here.
I grabbed his shirt and pulled it over his head.
My hands ran across his chest, his stomach, the ridges of muscle and scars that mapped a life I was only beginning to understand.
He was so warm. The heat of his skin under my fingers made something in my belly tighten, low and insistent, and when I pressed my mouth to the center of his chest and felt his breath catch, the power of it shot through me.
He undressed me fast. Faster than last time.
His hands weren't tentative now. They were sure, deliberate, a man who knew exactly what he wanted and was done waiting for it.
My shirt went first, then my bra, his fingers working the clasp without fumbling because this was a man who knew his way around a woman's body and the confidence of that, the certainty in his hands, made my skin feel like it was on fire.
He pulled me against him, chest to chest, and the contact of bare skin was electric. I could feel every inch of him, the hard planes of muscle against my breasts, the heat radiating off him, his hands spread wide across my back, holding me so close I could feel his heartbeat against mine.
He walked me backward to the bed. I sat, then lay back, and he followed me down. The weight of him over me, pressing me into the mattress, his hips between my thighs. I could feel him, hard against me through the denim, and the pressure of it made me arch up into him, instinctive, wanting.
"Off," I said, pulling at his belt. "I want these off."
Something shifted in his face. A look that was all heat and intent, a look that made me feel like I was the only thing in his world.
He stood long enough to strip off the rest of his clothes and mine, and when he came back down over me, skin against skin, the full length of him pressed against me, I made a sound that I'd have been embarrassed about if I could think clearly enough to feel embarrassment.