Chapter 12 First Kiss, Bad Timing
Ronan
There’s an old mechanic’s shop three blocks off the highway that owes me a favor and asks no questions.
We get to the bike in the few seconds their search widens—voices moving off in opposite directions, flashlight beams cutting farther left, boots crashing through brush where we aren’t anymore, leaving the gap I need.
By the time I get Mara on behind me and tear us through the trees, my side is burning hot and wet again.
Rain started twenty minutes back and never let up. It hammers the city in sheets, washing the streets slick and empty and mean.
Good weather for disappearing.
Bad weather for blood loss.
Worse weather for thinking too much.
Mara stays tight behind me on the bike, arms locked around my middle, knees pressed to my hips, breath ghosting hot through the back of my shirt every time I slow for a turn.
She hasn’t said much since the trees. Since the safehouse.
Since she whispered Silas’s name and looked at me like she’d just realized I’d been fighting a ghost that already had a face.
She wasn’t wrong.
I take us off the main road and into an industrial strip that smells like rain-soaked metal and machine oil.
The buildings here are half dead and half pretending not to be.
Repair shops with rusted fences. Closed garages.
Storage units. One bait-and-tackle place somehow still open, neon buzzing through the rain.
Twice on the ride over, I caught headlights hanging too far back to be random.
Two blocks farther, I kill the headlight and coast us behind a corrugated warehouse with a hand-painted sign that used to say AUTO & DIESEL before weather stripped half the letters away.
The side alley is narrow and full of puddles. On the second garage door, the lock hangs open.
Good.
I cut the engine and listen.
Rain on metal. Water running off gutters. The far hum of highway tires. No voices. No bikes. No crunch of gravel that doesn’t belong to us.
Mara loosens her grip one finger at a time. “Tell me this is a good idea.”
“It’s the best one I’ve got.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“Nothing is tonight.”
I swing off the bike. The world tilts slightly when my boots hit concrete, pain flashing white and fast through my side. I bury it before Mara can read it, but she reads too much anyway.
“You’re fading,” she says.
“I’m standing.”
“That is not the same thing.”
I almost tell her to stay on the bike. Instead I jerk my chin toward the half-open side door tucked behind the roll-up. “Inside.”
The mechanic owes me three favors and a transmission job I never collected on.
More important, he owes the club nothing.
Men like him survive by fixing what rolls in, asking no questions, and forgetting faces on purpose.
His loft over the back bay isn’t luxury, but it’s dry, hidden, and harder to storm than it looks.
I push through the side door first, gun low and ready.
The shop is dark except for one emergency bulb over the back workbench.
Tools hang in orderly shadows. Two gutted engines sit on stands.
Shelves are crowded with parts boxes, antifreeze, belts, oil filters.
The place smells like grease, wet rubber, and old work.
No movement.
A narrow set of back stairs climbs to the storage loft above the office, half hidden by a hanging tarp and stacks of tires. I motion Mara toward it.
“Up.”
She doesn’t argue this time.
That’s how I know how bad she’s hurting.
By the time I get her up the back stairs to the loft, my hands are shaking badly enough that I have to grip the railing harder to hide it.
Mara has argued with bullets in the air. Silence from her means she’s running on fumes.
My wound drags with every step. My shoulder burns with every movement. By the time I get onto the loft, I’m breathing hard enough to hear it.
The space above is mostly storage and old overflow—two battered armchairs, a narrow cot, crates of shop rags, a dorm fridge humming in the corner, and a metal sink bolted to one wall under a small barred window that rain lashes in silver lines. The roof overhead is tin. Every drop hits it loud.
Mara turns in the low light and just looks at me.
She’s soaked through again. Mud dried at the knees. Hair damp and wild around her face. My torn strip of shirt is still wrapped around her palm, now streaked brown-red where the cut seeped through. She looks furious, exhausted, and too damn real for my peace of mind.
I shut the loft hatch behind us and slide the bolt.
That sound matters.
Safe, for the moment.
Not safe enough.
My adrenaline still hasn’t figured out we stopped moving.
I go to the edge of the loft and crouch, checking sightlines through the tarp gap to the shop below. My chest won’t settle. Every nerve in me is still out in the trees, in the safehouse, in the bullet holes, in Jax’s voice, in Silas’s ring glinting on a gun hand like a promise finally kept.
“Ronan.”
I hear her. Don’t answer.
“Ronan.”
“What.”
The word comes out too rough. She lets it pass.
“You’re bleeding through again.”
I stare down into the darkness below us. “Yeah.”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“It’s enough.”
“No,” she says. “It really isn’t.”
I close my eyes once. Open them. Force air in slow.
It catches halfway. My ribs feel banded too tight.
Not panic. Not exactly. Just the crash after too much adrenaline and too little blood, my body trying to decide whether it wants to keep up with me or throw me to the floor and let the night finish the job.
Rain hammers the roof harder.
Mara steps closer. I hear it in the boards. Soft. Careful. The kind of movement people use around wounded dogs and unstable men.
Maybe she’s not wrong on either count.
“There’s a sink,” she says quietly. “Sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
She actually makes a disgusted sound. “You have got to stop saying that like it isn’t obviously a lie.”
I should snap at her.
I should tell her to back off, to stay away, to stop looking at me like she can see through the skin and scar tissue to the parts I don’t show people unless I’m putting a bullet in them or patching them up after somebody else failed.
Instead I sink into one of the chairs because standing suddenly feels optional.
Mara doesn’t comment on the fact that I gave in. She just goes to the sink, runs water until it clears from rusty to cold, and starts rinsing the blood off her hands.
The sight hits me harder than it should. Red diluted pink under the tap. Her knuckles. Her wrists. The heel of her palm where I grabbed too hard. The bandage around her cut, dark and ugly against her skin.
She scrubs once, then slows. Watches the red wash down the drain. The loft is quiet except for the rain, the sink, and both of us breathing.
When she lifts her head, her eyes catch mine for one unguarded second.
Soft.
Not pity.
Something worse.
Something gentler than I deserve.
It ruins me.
Maybe it’s the blood loss. Maybe it’s the rain on the roof making the whole world feel narrowed to this one room.
Maybe it’s the fact that she said Silas’s name and handed me a truth I’d been circling without proof long enough to grow sick on it.
Maybe it’s because she’s standing there with my blood on her skin and still choosing not to run the second I stop physically preventing her.
Whatever it is, it breaks something loose.
I get up.
Mara watches me come toward her, and for once she doesn’t step back right away. Her mouth parts on a breath like she might say my name, or tell me to stop, or do something smarter than what either of us is about to do.
I stop in front of her, close enough to smell rain, soap, blood, and the clean edge that is just Mara under all of it.
My hand lifts before I think better of it.
Knuckles skim her cheek.
Warm skin. Damp hair. A tremor I don’t expect in my own fingers.
She goes very still.
There’s a bruise forming low along her jaw from the safehouse floor or the crawlspace or the first warehouse—I don’t even know anymore.
My thumb hovers over it and doesn’t quite touch.
I have wanted this since the warehouse and hated myself for it since the motel.
Since before that, maybe. Since the alley where she looked at me like I was a monster and the only thing between her and death.
Since she kept saying no and kept moving with me anyway because the world had left us worse options.
“Mara,” I say, and the name comes out wrecked.
Her eyes flash with something raw and furious and too bright. “Don’t.”
It should stop me.
It almost does.
Then she catches my wrist.
Not to pull it away.
To hold it there.
The breath goes out of both of us at once.
“You keep doing that,” she whispers.
“Doing what.”
“Looking at me like…” Her voice catches. She swallows hard, angry at herself for it.
I don’t have an answer for that. Or maybe I have too many.
So I say the only true thing I can find in time.
“You should stay away from me.”
A bitter laugh ghosts out of her. “That ship sank somewhere around the drainage tunnel.”
Then she kisses me.
Not gentle. Not hesitant. Angry and desperate and fast, like she’s stealing something before the night takes it away. Like if she thinks too hard, she won’t do it, and she would rather regret it afterward than not know what it feels like.
For one stunned second, I don’t move.
Then instinct takes over.
My hand slides into her damp hair. I kiss her back like something in me has been starved long enough to forget restraint. The chair knocks into the wall behind me. The sink rattles. Mara makes a broken sound against my mouth that is half anger, half relief, and all heat.
It is not sweet.
It is not careful.
It is everything this night has been—violent, breathless, overdue, and edged with the certainty that it can’t last.
Her hands fist in my shirt. Mine span her waist, then stop, because even now some ragged piece of me remembers every no she’s thrown at me and how much I deserved them.
She feels the stop.
Feels the question.
When she kisses me again, slower this time but no less fierce, it is answer enough.
I drag air into my lungs and rest my forehead against hers.
Rain pounds the roof.
Both of us are breathing too hard.
This close, I can see the fury still alive under her skin, the fear, the exhaustion, the impossible wanting that makes us both look half-ruined.
“This is a bad idea,” she whispers.
“Yeah.”
“You say that like you’re not about to do it again.”
“I’m trying not to.”
Her laugh comes out shaky. “You’re doing a terrible job.”
I touch her cheek again, gentler this time. “Mara—”
A car door slams outside.
Everything in me goes cold.
Mara jerks back.
I already have the gun in my hand by the time the second door shuts.
The loft goes silent except for the rain.
Of course.
I felt it on the ride over. Headlights lingering too long in the mirror. A pressure at my back that didn’t belong to the road. But I wrote it off as blood loss, nerves, too many hours without sleep. Paranoia makes you stupid if you listen to all of it.
The garage is old instinct. Old habit. Which means it isn’t hidden enough. Not from someone who knows me.
Then a voice drifts up from the dark shop below.
Calm.
Male.
Too familiar.
“Ronan,” it says. “I know you’re in there.”