Chapter 4 Motel Rules #2
The sudden spasm pulls in my side. The pain flares, a hot, jagged reminder of the knife wound, but it barely registers against the aftershocks. The physical hurt is just another sensation to be processed, filed away alongside the shame and the fading heat.
For one second, I just sit there, breathing hard in the dim motel light. The air smells of stale smoke, dust, and the faint, metallic tang of my own blood. Disgust and relief are tangled together so tightly I can’t separate them.
I look down at the darkening fabric of my jeans, the wet spot spreading against the denim, and the revulsion rises in my throat.
I feel weak, exposed, like an addict who just needed a fix to get through the hour.
I wiped my hand on the bedspread, a rough, careless motion, trying to scrub away the evidence of my lack of control.
The shower cuts off in the bathroom.
The bathroom door opens on a burst of steam and motel soap.
I look up too fast.
Mara stands in the doorway in a towel that barely reaches mid-thigh, damp hair dark against her shoulders, skin flushed from heat and scrubbed raw enough to look newly made. For one ugly second, my body forgets everything I just told it. Blood loss. Pain. Better judgment. All of it.
Then her eyes hit my face.
Whatever she sees there makes her lock up.
Not fear exactly. Readiness. Like she’ll bolt, bite, or break the cheap ceramic lamp over my head if I move wrong.
Good.
She should keep that instinct.
I push off the bed slow, hands visible, and toss her a motel towel I found folded over the cracked vanity. “Put that over your hair. Don’t drip on the floor.”
Her expression turns murderous. “That’s what you’re going with?”
“It’s what I’ve got.”
She catches the towel one-handed without dropping the one around her body. Efficient. Controlled. Fury has steadied her.
The room feels smaller now. One bed. One chair. One deadbolt. Her clothes are spread over the bathroom sink where she’s clearly tried to rinse warehouse blood and alley grime out of them.
It’s my turn, it’ll be the fastest shower of my life—door open, gun on the sink, one ear on the pipes and the other on the room. Clean enough to think. Not enough to relax.
When I step back out, a towel is wrapped low around my waist, water still tracking down my skin.
Her gaze drops to my skin, where blood is already trickling through the last of the shower water, then away again so fast it almost doesn’t register.
I take the chair and turn it to face both the door and the bathroom. “We need rules.”
She laughs once, sharp and humorless. “Do we.”
“Yes.”
Her chin lifts. Defensive. Beautiful. A problem I don’t need and can’t stop noticing.
I keep my voice flat. “You don’t leave this room.”
Her eyes flash. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
“I do tonight.”
“Because you have a gun?”
“Because men are hunting us and you don’t know this terrain.”
She opens her mouth, but I keep going before she can cut across me.
“You don’t call anyone,” I say. “No cops. No friends. No family. No clever little message to somebody you think can help.”
Her laugh comes again, rougher this time. “That’s not a rule. That’s kidnapping with bullet points.”
“Call it what you want.”
“Oh, I will.” She steps farther into the room, towel clutched tight at her chest. “You stole my phone, dragged me across half the industrial district, locked me in a motel room, and now you’re laying down rules. You are a criminal.”
I let that sit.
Because she’s not wrong.
Finally I say, “And you’re a witness. That makes you vulnerable and inconvenient. So until morning, you stay where I can see you.”
That lands.
Hard.
Her whole body stills, then tightens. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s not negotiable.”
Her stare could cut glass. “You want me in your line of sight all night?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Because if you vanish, I lose the only civilian who saw enough to matter.
Because if you panic and run, Silas gets you first. Because if you die, I lose whatever chance I have left of proving I didn’t kill Eli.
Because every instinct I’ve got says letting you out of my sight for one second is how this gets worse.
Instead I say, “Because that’s how you stay alive.”
Her nostrils flare. “You keep talking like you’re protecting me.”
“I am.”
She actually takes a step toward me at that, furious enough to override caution. “You don’t get to act like some brooding guardian after threatening me with a gun in a warehouse.”
Fair.
I hold her gaze. “You still breathing?”
She hates that answer so much I can see it burn through her.
Then her voice drops, low and shaking with anger. “If you touch me again without permission, I’ll scream.”
I believe her.
More than that, I believe she’d make it loud enough to bring every meth cook, trucker, and drifter in this motel row to the door.
I lean back in the chair, wounded side throbbing, and nod once. “Then don’t make me need to.”
For one suspended second, all that exists is the deadbolt, the bed between us, and the war neither of us chose.
Then Mara says, ice-cold and crystal clear, “You don’t get to scare me and call it protection.”
The room goes quiet after that.
Not real quiet. Motel quiet.
The air conditioner rattles in the window. Water ticks somewhere in the walls. Highway noise rolls past in long, low waves. Outside, the vacancy sign throws a weak red pulse through the gap in the curtains, staining the room the color of an old bruise.
I stay in the chair by the door.
Mara stays as far from me as the room allows, which in a place this small is not far enough.
That’s the problem with cheap motel rooms and women who look at you like they’d rather bleed than need you. There’s nowhere for either of you to forget the other one is there.
My forearm is braced across my ribs, more to keep pressure on the wound than because it helps. My side is still leaking slow and hot, my shoulder stiffening by the minute. Pain keeps trying to climb higher. I keep forcing it back down.
Mara notices.
She notices everything.
That’s half the reason we’re in this room.
The other half is that every time I look at her, some part of me that should know better keeps waking up anyway.
She moves toward the bathroom sink and reaches for her jeans where they’re draped damp across the edge beside the basin. They’re still wet, but less soaked than before. Her hand slides automatically into the back pocket.
Empty.
I watch the realization hit.
Sharp. Fresh. Ugly.
Her phone is still with me. Her notes too—if she kept more, I haven’t found them yet. Her proof. Her leverage. Her last clean link to the life she had before I dragged her into this.
She looks up. “Give it back.”
I don’t pretend not to know what she means. “No.”
“I need it.”
“You need to stay alive.”
“That is not your decision.”
My gaze lifts to hers, steady and flat. “Tonight it is.”
She hates the certainty in that. I can see it. Hates that I don’t soften it, don’t apologize, don’t offer her anything that sounds like comfort. But comfort is useless here. Comfort gets people sloppy.
She stands and takes two steps toward me before she catches herself. “You cannot hold me in this room and expect me to just—what? Accept it?”
“No.”
“Then what exactly is your plan?”
My jaw tightens. “Make it to morning.”
That answer lands between us like a threat because that’s what survival sounds like when there’s nothing else left to offer.
She opens her mouth, fury lining up behind her teeth.
Then something vibrates.
I go still.
So does she.
The sound comes again—small, unmistakable, wrong.
A phone.
For one second my brain refuses to place it. Then I track it to the dresser. And there, half-hidden under the edge of my black shirt—
Her phone.
Lighting up.
I’m on my feet before she moves.
Still too late.
Mara lunges and snatches it first.
I catch her wrist at the exact moment the screen flares bright between us.
Unknown Number.
Every muscle in my body locks.
She sees it. I see it. The room changes shape around the glow of that screen.
The air goes thin. Mean. My mind is already moving ahead, counting possibilities I don’t like any better than the truth.
I get dressed fast while I do it, dragging clothes back on with one eye on the screen and the other on the door.
The phone vibrates again.
A message preview slides across the screen.
I KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.
For one breathless second, neither of us says a word.
Then my grip on her wrist goes brutally tight.
Because there are only three possibilities.
She called someone.
We were followed.
Or the leak is inside the club and closer than I thought.
And from somewhere outside, in the motel parking lot, a motorcycle engine starts.