Chapter Eleven
The roses were fighting her.
Laura sat at the compound bar with a five-gallon bucket between her knees, stripping thorns from two dozen long-stems she'd grabbed from the shop cooler on her way out.
She hadn't planned it—hadn't thought about it at all.
Just saw the bucket near the register, grabbed it, and carried it to her van like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Because sitting still made her hands shake. And shaking hands meant thinking. And thinking meant imagining all the ways tonight could have gone wrong.
The compound was quiet at this hour. A few brothers moving through the main room—Static at the pool table, Trooper reviewing something on his phone near the chapel door. Normal rhythms. The kind of calm that settled over men who'd done violence and come home from it.
Laura's hands weren't calm.
She stripped another thorn and felt it gouge her thumb. Blood welled—a bright bead against her skin. She wiped it on her jeans and kept working.
He's fine. Legion said he's fine. They're all fine.
But fine was a word, not a fact. And words meant nothing until she saw him walk through that gate.
She'd been at the compound since ten, when Cipher had texted her to come and wait.
Three words: Come to compound. No explanation.
No details. Just a summons she'd obeyed without hesitation because the alternative was sitting alone in her apartment above the shop, listening for sounds that might be motorcycle engines or might be her own heartbeat trying to shake itself loose.
The roses bled green sap as she worked. Trim. Strip. Stack. The rhythm was supposed to be soothing. Tonight it felt like holding herself together with wire and foam, the way she held arrangements together—functional, presentable, one hard bump from falling apart.
The gate rumbled.
Laura's hands froze on the stem she was holding. She heard the engines before she saw the headlights—two bikes rolling through the compound entrance, gravel popping under tires. Then two more. Then the rest.
She set down the roses and stood.
They came in formation. Legion first, then Ghost, then Cargo and Forge flanking the rear. And there—third in line, his bike unmistakable even in the dark—Cipher.
Riding. Upright. Moving under his own power.
Laura's knees almost buckled.
She gripped the edge of the bar and watched them park. Brothers dismounting, cutting engines, the controlled decompression of men transitioning from combat to compound. Forge clapped Static on the shoulder as he passed. Ghost disappeared toward the chapel without a word.
Cipher swung off his bike and pulled his helmet.
Even from across the lot, she could see it—the cut across his knuckles, dark with dried blood. His left hand, the one that had wired roses into foam bases three days ago with surgical precision.
He was scanning the compound. Checking exits. Counting threats.
Then his eyes found her.
Something detonated in Laura's chest. Not relief—that was too small a word. Something seismic. Something that cracked the careful architecture of calm she'd been building all night with rose thorns and repetition.
She crossed the lot.
He met her halfway. His hands caught her waist and she grabbed his cut, fisting the leather, pulling him down to her.
He smelled like gunpowder and sweat and the sharp copper tang of someone else's blood, and she didn't care.
She buried her face against his neck and breathed him in—alive, warm, here.
"You're hurt," she said against his skin.
"Scraped my knuckles on a door frame."
"Let me see."
She pulled back enough to take his hand, turning it under the lot's floodlights. The cut ran across three knuckles—deep enough to bleed freely, shallow enough that it wouldn't need stitches. She'd seen worse on her own hands from stem cutters.
But these weren't her hands. These were his. And the blood wasn't from flowers.
"Inside," she said. "Now."
She led him to the bar and sat him on a stool. The first-aid kit lived under the counter—she'd learned that her first night at the compound, when Forge had sliced his palm opening a beer bottle and acted like it was a papercut.
Laura opened the kit and pulled gauze, antiseptic, tape. Her hands were steady now. Working hands. The hands that stripped thorns and wired stems and built things from pieces.
She cleaned the wound with antiseptic. Cipher held steady, watching her work with that focused intensity she'd come to recognize—the look he gave anything he deemed worth examining.
"Devane?" she asked without looking up.
"Done."
"The records?"
"Recovered. Laptops, hard drives, ledger pages. Everything he didn't shred."
Laura dabbed the cut dry and started wrapping gauze. Careful. Precise. The same way she'd wrap a wired stem to protect the foam underneath.
"How many people were in the building?"
"Eight crew. Two civilians. Civilians walked out untouched."
"And the crew?"
Silence.
Laura finished the wrap and secured it with tape. She held his hand for a moment longer than necessary, her thumb pressing against his pulse point. Steady. Strong. The heartbeat of a man who'd just killed people and ridden home through the dark like it was any other Sunday.
She didn't let go.
"Laura."
She looked up. His eyes were dark—not with guilt, not with regret. With something hotter. Something that burned behind the stillness like a signal waiting to transmit.
"I need—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "I need to not be here right now."
"Where?"
"Anywhere that doesn't have brothers watching."
Laura understood. The adrenaline was still in him—she could feel it in the fine tremor beneath his skin, the coiled tension in his forearm under her fingers. The same energy that had carried him through the warehouse was still running, still searching for an outlet, still demanding release.
She knew that energy. She'd felt it herself—the night she'd found her father's lockbox, the morning she'd discovered the tracker on her van. The desperate, electric need to do something with the fear and rage before they ate you alive.
"Your room," she said. "Take me there."
Something ignited behind his eyes.
He stood, and she followed him down the corridor past the chapel, past the common room where brothers were settling into post-operation routines, past the row of doors that led to private quarters.
His room was at the end—she'd been there once before, the night he'd moved her from her apartment.
She remembered the narrow bed, the communications equipment on the desk, the scanner that blinked green in the darkness.
He pushed the door open and she walked through it.
The lock clicked behind them.
Laura turned to face him and found he was already there—close, so close his breath moved her hair. His hands found her hips with a grip that wasn't gentle. Not rough, either. Urgent. The hands of a man who'd just spent hours holding weapons and needed to hold something that was alive.
"I almost didn't come back to you first," he said, his voice low and raw. "Almost went straight to the tech room to start processing the drives. Because that's what I do—I process signals. I analyze. I control the data."
"But?"
"But you were sitting at the bar with a bucket of roses and blood on your thumb, and I couldn't walk past you." His grip tightened. "I physically could not make myself walk past you."
Laura grabbed his cut and pulled him down to her mouth.
This kiss was nothing like their first.
Their first had been slow. Exploratory. Two people finding each other in the dark of a flower shop, learning shapes and tastes and the particular rhythm of someone new.
This was a collision.
His mouth hit hers and Laura tasted adrenaline—chemical and sharp, the flavor of a man still vibrating with combat energy that had nowhere to go.
She bit his lower lip and felt him growl against her teeth.
His hands left her hips and slid up her back, pulling her flush against him, eliminating every inch of distance.
"Mine," he said against her mouth. The word came out like a detonation—fierce, absolute, a claim staked in blood and gunpowder. "You're mine, Laura."
"Prove it."
He made a sound—half groan, half snarl—and lifted her off the ground. Her back hit the door and she gasped, wrapping her legs around him, her fingers raking into his hair. He pinned her there with his body and his mouth found her throat, teeth and tongue and heat that made her spine arch.
"Tommy." She said his name like a demand. Like a dare.
He shuddered against her. The sound of his real name in her mouth did something to him—cracked something open, released something feral. His hips ground into hers and Laura felt every inch of what the adrenaline was doing to him.
"Again," he rasped. "Say it again."
"Tommy. Take what you need."
He carried her from the door to the bed—three steps, maybe four, she couldn't count because his mouth was on hers and his hands were under her shirt and the room was spinning in a way that had nothing to do with vertigo.
They hit the mattress together and Laura pulled him down on top of her, needing his weight, his heat, the solid proof that he was here and breathing.
Clothes came off like they were in the way of survival.
His shirt—she yanked it over his head and mapped his chest with desperate hands, finding scars she'd memorized and new bruises she hadn't.
A dark bloom on his ribs from something that had connected during the breach.
She pressed her mouth to it and he hissed through his teeth.
"Don't stop," he said when she hesitated.
She didn't stop.
Her shirt followed his. Then everything else—stripped away with combat efficiency, no patience for buttons or clasps or anything that slowed the collision. Laura pulled him against her and felt skin meet skin, the shock of full contact after hours of fear and distance.
"I sat at that bar for three hours," she breathed against his shoulder. "Stripping thorns. Pretending I wasn't terrified."
"I know."