Chapter 6
She woke to the sound of diesel engines and Buckshot's side of the bed already cold.
Tamsin pulled on jeans and a work shirt and came through the office into the morning light, and her lot was already being rearranged around her.
Spillway's crew had Sharp's trucks hooked to tow chains and were pulling them out past the dumpster enclosure, and two brothers she hadn't been introduced to were hosing blood off the gravel with a garden hose she kept coiled by the ice machine.
The brass casings were gone. The bodies were gone.
Room eleven's door stood open and empty, the crates vanished like they'd never been there.
Three days ago she'd been stripping beds and worrying about her condenser unit.
Still was waiting on the walkway with coffee in a paper cup and the same patient, unhurried look he'd worn last night. He handed her the cup without being asked.
"The truck that sat in your lot last night," he said. No preamble. "Cottonmouth's watcher clocked it at two-fourteen. Ran the plates this morning. Registered to a holding company out of Springfield that doesn't exist."
"What does that mean?"
"Means the man behind this operation knows exactly where you sleep. And he's not in a hurry about it, which tells me he's not small-time. Small-time panics. This one sent a car to watch."
The coffee was hot and bitter and she drank it anyway. "So what are you saying?"
"I'm saying you can't stay here."
"No."
The word came out before she'd finished thinking it. Flat, hard, absolute. She could hear it land on the walkway between them and she didn't take it back.
"This is my property. I bought it at auction with everything I had. I fixed the plumbing in seven bathrooms. I hung every door and painted every room and replaced every lock, and I did it alone because nobody else was going to do it. I'm not leaving."
Still looked at her the way he'd looked at room eleven—measuring, patient, taking the full shape of a thing before he spoke.
"Nobody's asking you to leave it," he said. "I'm asking you to survive it."
Buckshot came around the corner of the building with his cut on and his shotgun in one hand and a phone in the other, and the way his eyes found her—fast, automatic, checking—made something turn over in her chest. He crossed to the walkway and stood beside her, close enough that his arm pressed against hers.
Not hovering. Not herding. Just there, the way he'd been there outside her door all night and beside her in the lot and in her bed with his name in her mouth.
"Tell her," Still said.
Buckshot looked at her. Those scarred shoulders, those steady hands, those eyes that saw everything in the spread instead of one thing at a time.
"Your motel is the ground," he said. "It's the waypoint this outfit has been running through for three months. It's the property on a highway we control. When they come back—and they will come back—this is where they come."
"Then I should be here."
"You should be alive. And you're more use to this fight behind the compound wall than dead in your own office.
" He paused. "You proved what you can do yesterday.
Nobody's questioning that. But you can't hold eighteen rooms against an operation that spans four states, and neither can I, and we both know it. "
She hated that he was right. Hated it the way she'd hated walking out of the facility three years ago—the same feeling, the same taste in her mouth, the recognition that standing your ground only mattered if you were alive to do it.
"I'm not running," she said.
"I know you're not." His hand found the back of her neck, his fingers warm against her skin, his thumb tracing the line of muscle where her tension lived. "This isn't running. This is choosing the ground where you fight."
She looked down the row of doors. Eighteen rooms. Three years of her life in every lock and pipe and coat of paint. The closed sign she'd bought when she took over the place and never once hung because she'd promised herself she wouldn't need it.
She was going to need it.
"Fine," she said. "But I'm boarding it up myself, and I'm keeping the keys, and when this is over I'm coming back and opening every single one of those doors."
"Wouldn't have it any other way." Buckshot's hand tightened on her neck—brief, possessive, a promise made in pressure instead of words.
She started with room one and worked her way down.
Plywood over the windows. Deadbolts thrown.
She checked each room the way she always checked them—beds stripped, towels pulled, surfaces wiped—even though there was no one coming to stay and the cleaning was pointless and she did it anyway because these were her rooms and she wasn't leaving them dirty.
Buckshot helped without being asked. He held plywood while she drove screws.
He carried her toolkit and handed her what she needed before she asked for it, and he didn't try to take over, didn't suggest a faster way, didn't do anything except work beside her in the July heat with his sleeves rolled up and the sweat darkening his shirt across his scarred shoulders.
At room nine—the one with the crates, the one that smelled like diesel and strangers—she stopped in the doorway and looked at the stripped mattress and the scuff marks on the floor where men she'd never met had used her space for something she'd never agreed to.
"I cleaned this room two hundred times," she said quietly.
Buckshot stood behind her. His hand settled on her hip, heavy, warm. Not a comfort touch. A claiming touch—his fingers curving over the bone, his thumb hooked in her belt loop, his body close enough that she could feel the heat of his chest against her back.
"You'll clean it again," he said.
She boarded it up and moved on.
Room eighteen was the last one. She screwed the plywood in, turned the deadbolt, and stood in the gravel lot looking at a row of closed doors and dark windows.
The Pines, shut down for the first time since she'd bought it.
The vending machine still hummed in the alcove, the one thing she couldn't turn off without crawling under the building to pull the breaker, and the sound of it in the empty lot was the loneliest thing she'd ever heard.
She hung the closed sign on the office door.
Then she went back inside and packed. It didn't take long. A duffel with clothes, her boots, the ledger pages she'd smoothed and put back in order. Her keys on her belt loop. The master key for eighteen rooms she wasn't going to use.
Buckshot was leaning against her truck in the lot when she came out.
"I'm driving myself," she said.
"I know."
"And I'm not riding behind you on that thing."
"Didn't ask you to." But the corner of his mouth moved, and his eyes ran down her body—the duffel on her shoulder, the keys on her hip, the work shirt with the sleeves rolled past her forearms—with a heat that had nothing to do with the conversation and everything to do with the fact that she was leaving her own ground to come to his.
"My woman drives herself," he said, and it came out low and rough and proud, and she felt it land in her chest like a fist.
She threw the duffel in the truck bed and got behind the wheel.
Buckshot kicked his bike to life and pulled out ahead of her. Two brothers fell in behind—an escort she hadn't asked for and wouldn't have refused—and they rolled out onto the highway in formation, the rumble of the V-twins filling the hollow and echoing off the limestone bluffs.
She watched The Pines shrink in her rearview mirror. Eighteen boarded windows. An empty lot. A closed sign on a door she'd never locked during business hours.
She didn't look back again.
The compound sat on a private cove off the lake, behind a gate that two men opened when Buckshot's bike came down the gravel road.
Tamsin rolled through behind him and the gate closed, and the world she'd been living in for three years—quiet highway, empty rooms, the sound of her own footsteps on the walkway—was replaced by something else entirely.
Seventy bikes in a gravel lot. A clubhouse that had been a fishing lodge once, knotty pine and motorcycle memorabilia and a bar running the length of the great room.
Cabins on the hillside. A dock stretching out into a cove where the water caught the last of the daylight and turned it gold.
Smoke from somewhere—a grill, a fire pit.
Men in leather moving through the property with the easy, territorial confidence of people who owned every inch of what they walked on.
Buckshot killed his engine and swung off the bike and looked at her through the windshield of her truck, and the expression on his face—open, possessive, something close to pride—hit her harder than all of it.
He came around to her door and opened it. Held out his hand.
She took it. Stepped down into the gravel of a compound that belonged to a motorcycle club she'd known for three days, with a duffel over her shoulder and the keys to a boarded-up motel on her belt and the taste of a man on her lips who'd looked at her across a wrecked office and decided she was his.
The lake went gold. The cicadas started up in the trees. Somewhere inside the clubhouse, someone laughed, and the sound of it carried across the cove like it belonged there.
Tamsin stood in the gravel with Buckshot's hand around hers and looked at the life she'd walked into, and didn't let go.