Chapter 4
Elliot
Elliot was falling for the detective, and he was doing everything in his considerable, patient power to stop it, because the line between them wasn't a suggestion. It was real, with real stakes on both sides of it.
She had a job to do. If anything happened between them while she was assigned to his club, it would compromise the one thing she had left after the scandal that gutted her old career — her integrity.
He would not be the reason she lost that, not after watching her rebuild an entire life around never compromising it again.
And his loyalty to his brothers meant he couldn't let his own feelings put any of them at risk, especially Dominic, whose past made law enforcement attention a genuine hazard rather than an inconvenience.
He turned the problem over for days, the way he turned over any position on a chessboard, looking for the move that protected everyone without costing him the one thing he actually wanted.
He didn't find a clean one. There wasn't a clean one. Some situations, he was slowly discovering, didn't have a version where nobody had to sacrifice something.
So Elliot did the hardest thing a man in his position could do. He named it, out loud, and set it down between them like a card laid face-up on a table, because hiding it felt like exactly the kind of dishonesty he'd spent ten years teaching his club to avoid.
They were at the grove, dusk settling gold through the branches the way it did most evenings now, both of them arriving separately and sitting together like it had never once been a coincidence.
"I'm going to be honest," he said, "because it's the only way I know how to be, and I think you'd see through anything else anyway."
Simone went very still beside him.
"There's something here," he said. "We both know it.
And it's a problem — for your investigation, for your integrity, for my club.
So I'm not going to act on it. Not while you're assigned to us.
I just didn't want to insult you by pretending it wasn't real, because I think we're both tired of people pretending things aren't real. "
For a long moment, she didn't say anything, watching the last light fade over the mountains like she needed somewhere else to put her eyes.
"Most people would've just pretended," she said finally. "Or tried something and called it an accident afterward."
"I'm not most people."
"No," she said, quiet, almost reluctant. "You really aren't."
She agreed with him, in the end. It couldn't happen — not now, not like this, not while there was a case number attached to his club and her name signed at the bottom of an active file. Naming it out loud should have made it easier to set aside.
It made it worse.
Now it sat between them, acknowledged, mutual, and deliberately, achingly restrained, the way a held breath gets harder to hold the longer you know you're holding it.
Every grove meeting after that carried a current neither of them touched directly, though Elliot suspected they were both painfully aware of it running underneath every conversation like water under ice.
He found himself memorizing things he had no earthly business memorizing.
The way she pushed her hair back when she was thinking hard about a discrepancy in a ledger.
The exact, rare sound of her real laugh, which she gave out sparingly, like it cost her something she wasn't sure she could afford to spend.
The way she still, every single time, said she was leaving in twenty minutes and then stayed for two hours.
He started making an unreasonable number of chess metaphors, mostly just to have an excuse to keep talking to her.
"Everything's chess with you," she said one night, not quite hiding a smile.
"It's a good game. Patient. Rewards the long view over the quick win."
"Do you ever just say things directly? No metaphor, no long view, just the actual thought?"
"I just told you, at length, that I'm attracted to you and then explained in detail why I'm not going to act on it. That's about as direct as I get, Detective."
She'd laughed at that — the real one, the rare one — and then looked immediately annoyed with herself for laughing, which was rapidly becoming Elliot's favorite expression in her entire, admittedly limited, repertoire.
"You're impossible," she said.
"I'm patient. There's a difference, though I understand the confusion."
"Patient people don't make my job this hard."
"I'm not making your job hard. I'm making it honest. Those aren't the same thing, even if they feel similar right now."
She didn't have an answer for that, and the silence that followed wasn't uncomfortable so much as loaded, both of them aware of exactly how close they were sitting, exactly how little distance there actually was between the wall they were perched on and the line they'd both agreed not to cross.
"Can I ask you something," Simone said eventually, breaking it.
"Always."
"Does it bother you? Waiting like this. Naming something and then just—" she gestured, frustrated, "—sitting on it."
"Every single day."
"You don't act like it bothers you."
"I've had a lot of practice not acting like things bother me.
Doesn't mean they don't." He looked at her, steady, unhurried, the way he looked at everything.
"For what it's worth, I'd rather want something I can't have yet than have something I got by cutting a corner I'd regret.
I learned that a long time ago, the hard way. "
"That sounds like a very convenient philosophy for a man currently sitting three feet away from something he says he wants."
"Convenient doesn't make it less true."
"Everything you say sounds like it should be embroidered on a pillow."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"It wasn't entirely one."
"I'll take it anyway." He smiled, the small, real one she'd started to recognize as different from the polite one he gave everyone else. "You're allowed to be annoyed at me for being patient, Detective. I annoy myself sometimes too."
"Good. At least we agree on something."
They sat a while longer after that, not talking, the kind of silence that had become, against every rule either of them had set for themselves, one of Elliot's favorite parts of any given week.
Two weeks after that conversation, she closed her investigation with a clean finding.
Elliot heard about it from Knox first, who'd heard it from the sheriff, who'd apparently heard it directly from Simone herself, delivered with the flat, procedural tone of someone determined not to let personal feelings color an official document.
She told him herself that evening, at the grove, holding a printed copy of the report like it was something fragile.
"The Iron Thorn Motorcycle Club," she read aloud, "is a legitimate, community-anchored organization with no evidence of criminal enterprise. Recommend the file be closed."
"That's it? No caveats, no 'further monitoring recommended'?"
"I don't add caveats I don't believe. There's nothing here to caveat."
For one bright, undefended moment, it felt like the line between them might simply dissolve on its own, evaporate the way morning fog burned off the valley once the sun cleared the ridge.
Elliot let himself feel it — the possibility of it, the shape of a future where a closed case file meant the end of the one obstacle actually standing between them.
"So that's it," he said, testing the words out loud like he wasn't sure they'd hold weight. "No more case. No more assignment."
"Once it's officially processed, yes."
"How long does that take?"
"A few days. Maybe a week, depending on how fast my supervisor signs off.
" She looked up at him, something cautiously hopeful in her expression that he hadn't seen from her before, not once, not in all their careful weeks of restraint.
"I keep thinking about what happens after.
I haven't let myself do that in a long time.
Think past the next piece of evidence, I mean. "
"And what does after look like?"
"I don't know yet. I was hoping you might have a theory. You usually do."
"I have several theories. All of them involve you not leaving before I've had a chance to test at least one."
She laughed — the real one — and for a moment neither of them mentioned the line at all, because for the first time in weeks, it looked like it might actually be about to disappear on its own, cleanly, honestly, exactly the way both of them had insisted on doing everything else.
Elliot should have known better than to relax that much, that fast. He'd spent a decade learning that the board rarely gave you the easy win you thought you'd earned.
Then, three days later, that possibility collapsed.
She showed up at the grove looking like something had cracked open in her, jaw tight, eyes bright with a fury she was visibly working to keep contained, and Elliot's whole chest went cold before she'd said a single word.
"He kicked it back," she said, no preamble, no easing into it. "My supervisor. He wants me to dig deeper. He won't take clean for an answer."
"Simone." Elliot stood, every instinct in him wanting to close the distance between them and not sure, yet, if he was allowed. "Tell me everything."
She did, eventually, once she'd stopped pacing long enough to sit, and Elliot listened with the particular, focused patience he brought to a chessboard when the position had suddenly, unexpectedly, gotten a great deal more dangerous than he'd planned for.
Whatever was happening here — with her, with the case, with the county official apparently determined to manufacture a problem where none existed — it was no longer a private matter between the two of them and the trees.
It had just become something he needed his whole club standing behind, and Elliot, watching Simone Adler try to hold herself together on a stone wall in the dark, found he didn't hesitate for even a second about which side of that line he was standing on.