Chapter Five
SLOANE
Three Days Later
Every thought keeps circling back to him.
For days, it becomes my mantra threaded through hospital shifts, while I pour coffee I don’t drink, while I stare at my ceiling at three in the morning, unable to sleep because every time I close my eyes, I see him.
Crave.
Dark hair, silver eyes, and a voice steeped in smoke and whiskey that made every word sound like a secret.
The way his gaze stripped me bare down to my bones.
The way my hand burned when our fingers touched.
I tell myself it was nothing—static electricity. Exhaustion is playing tricks on my mind. The result of too many double shifts and not enough sleep.
But I know better.
Something happened when we touched. Something impossible. Something that made my blood sing in a way it never has before, and it terrifies me more than anything I’ve seen in the emergency room.
So, I stay away.
I work my shifts. I go home. I try to pretend I’m not thinking about a biker bar in the worst part of town and the man who owns it.
But I fail spectacularly.
On the fourth day, I cave.
Sins & Spirits looks different in the early evening light.
Less menacing, almost.
The motorcycles are still there, lined up and daring anyone to cross the line, but the setting sun casts them in gold instead of shadow. The neon sign with its red script spelling out the bar’s name isn’t lit yet, but I can feel the pull.
Where darkness drinks.
My heart hammers as I push through the door.
The bar is quieter than it was on Sunday night.
Maybe twenty people are scattered throughout the space.
The woman on stage, I think someone called her Seraphine, is singing something slow and melancholy that makes my chest ache.
A few bikers play pool in the back. Eden, the bartender, polishes glasses behind the bar.
And Crave sits in the same corner booth, watching the room with those ancient-looking eyes.
He sees me the moment I walk in. His gaze brushes over me, warm, heavy, and utterly focused. For a second, I consider turning around and walking right back out, but then he smiles. Just a slight curve of his lips that somehow manages to look both welcoming and dangerous.
I move toward him before I consciously decide to.
“Back so soon?” he says as I slide into the booth across from him. “Don’t you have another early shift tomorrow?”
“I do.” I furrow my brows. “How’d you know that?”
“You had an early shift the other day, guess I was assuming?” he states matter-of-factly with a smirk. “So with an early shift, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a dive like this, at this time of night?”
I glance at his glass, amber liquid, again, and shrug. “Can’t a girl just want a drink?”
“You could get a drink anywhere… but you came here.”
“Maybe I like the atmosphere.”
“Liar.”
The word should offend me. Instead, it makes me laugh. “Are you always this direct with people?”
“Only the ones who can handle it.” He leans back, studying me with an intensity that makes me feel stripped bare. “Why’d you really come back, Sloane?”
Because I can’t stop thinking about you.
Because my hand hasn’t felt right since you touched it.
Because something about this place, about you, feels like coming home after being lost my entire life.
“I’m still figuring that out,” I say instead.
He nods, as if this makes perfect sense. “Want to figure it out over another drink?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
Three Weeks Later
That night turns into two.
Then four.
Then I lose count.
I start coming to Sins & Spirits three, sometimes four times a week. Always in the evening, after my shifts or on my days off. Always to that corner booth where Crave sits, a king surveying his kingdom.
We talk.
God, we talk about everything.
About death, which he seems to have an intimate understanding of, that goes beyond philosophy. About meaning and purpose in a world that seems determined to grind both down to nothing. About loneliness, the kind that comes from being surrounded by people who will never truly understand you.
He never tells me much about himself. Never reveals where he’s from, how old he is, or what he did before the motorcycle club, but he drops hints. Little pieces of a puzzle I’m desperate to solve.
“How long have you owned this place?” I ask one night.
“Long enough to know every crack in the foundation.”
“I thought this place was new?”
Crave shakes his head. “No, we’ve been here a long time. Hex, our resident computer wizard, thought we should advertise to increase business.”
I cast a look around the room, taking in not only the MC members but the public. “Seems like it’s working. How long did you say you’d been here?”
Crave smirks. “I didn’t.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
“Do you have family?”
His expression goes dark. “Not anymore.”
“What happened?”
“I left them a long time ago.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to be something other than what they made me.”
I wait for him to elaborate, but he takes a sip of his drink and changes the subject.
Always changing the subject when I get too close to the truth about him.
But despite his evasiveness, or maybe because of it, I find myself drawn deeper into his orbit.
There’s something about Crave that makes me feel seen in a way I never have before. He seems to understand the weight of carrying too much death on your shoulders. It feels as though he’s walked through his own hell and come out the other side still standing.
Plus, there’s the way he looks at me.
Like, I’m the most fascinating thing he’s encountered in years.
As though he wants to devour me whole.
And terrified to touch me again.
We never touch after that first night. Never shake hands, brush shoulders, or lean too close. There’s always a careful distance between us, as if we’re both aware that contact could be dangerous.
I should probably find that concerning.
Instead, I find it thrilling.
***
A month after my first visit to Sins & Spirits, I begin noticing the changes. It begins small. A paper cut from a patient’s chart that should take days to heal is gone by the next morning. No scab, no scar, just smooth skin as though it never happened.
I chalk it up to being young and healthy.
Then I burn my hand on a hot pot of coffee at work. Second-degree burn, blistering, and painful. I wrap it, take some ibuprofen, and by the end of my shift, eight hours later, it’s healed. Completely. Not even red anymore.
That’s when I start to worry.
But it’s the blood that really freaks me out.
I’m drawing samples in the Emergency Room one night, the needle sliding into a patient’s vein, when I feel it. A warmth spreads up my arm from where my gloved hand steadies the patient’s elbow. Not physical warmth, it’s something else. Emotion bleeds through the barrier of skin and latex.
Fear. Pain. Desperation.
I jerk back, nearly dropping the vial.
“You okay?” the patient asks, an elderly woman with pneumonia.
“Fine. Just a cramped hand.” I finish the draw on autopilot, my mind racing.
It happens again the next day.
And the day after that.
Every time I touch blood, in vials, on gauze, soaking through bandages, I feel something.
Emotions.
Memories.
Echoes of the person it came from.
Am I losing my damn mind?
It’s the only explanation.
Stress-induced psychosis. Hallucinations brought on by too many trauma cases and not enough sleep. I’ve seen it happen to other nurses. The ones who work themselves into breakdowns because they can’t turn off empathy, can’t stop absorbing everyone else’s pain.
I’m not special.
I’m just cracking under pressure.
But why do my hands burn constantly? Heat coils beneath my skin, a contained blaze that never cools, banked and restless, always waiting for air.
Why do I wake up at three a.m. with my palms glowing faintly in the dark?
Why does it only get worse when I’m around Crave?
Six Days Later
Sins & Spirits seems to be my safe haven.
I’m back here again on a Friday night, and it’s my fourth visit this week.
I’m sitting at the bar instead of Crave’s booth tonight.
He’s in a meeting with some of his club members in the back room, and Eden is keeping me company, mixing drinks and making conversation that skirts a little too close to home for comfort.
“You’re becoming a regular,” she observes, her purple eyes glinting in the low light.
Has she always had purple eyes?
“Is that a problem?”
“Not at all. Just interesting.” She slides a whiskey across to me. “You don’t strike me as the biker-bar type.”
“What type do I strike you as?”
“The type who’s running from something. Or toward something. Maybe both.” Eden shrugs.
I take a sip of whiskey to avoid responding. Because she’s right, and I don’t know how she knows that.
That’s when I hear it—loud, boisterous laughter from the pool tables.
I turn to look, and there’s a young guy, he’s mid-twenties, with red hair, a charming smile, and he’s playing against three separate opponents. They’re betting, bills piling up on the edge of the table, and he’s winning. Every. Single. Shot.
Not just winning… dominating.
Impossible shots that shouldn’t connect. Balls that curve around obstacles as if they’re magnetically guided. His opponents’ shots consistently missing by fractions of an inch, their cues slipping at the last second, their balls scratching at the worst moments.
I watch for ten minutes.
He doesn’t lose once.
“That’s Ronan,” Eden says, following my gaze. “He’s got the luck of the Irish. Literally.”
“No one’s that lucky.”
“Ronan is.”
I stand, drawn by curiosity and something else, the same pull that brought me here in the first place. The sense I’m finally seeing something real, something true, even if I don’t understand it.
I approach the pool table as Ronan sinks an eight-ball in a side pocket that should have been physically impossible, given the angle.
“How did you do that?” I ask.
He turns, and his eyes are too green. Unnaturally green. The color of forests that don’t exist anymore.