Chapter 10 #2
"Listen carefully," the tall one says. He's close now.
Too close. I can smell cigarettes and cheap cologne and something metallic underneath.
"We don't give a fuck about how big and bad this biker club is.
Your boyfriend owes our employer two hundred thousand dollars, and he's been playing games instead of paying up. That stops now."
The short one pins me against the car with his forearm across my collarbone.
Not my throat—my collarbone.
Hard enough that I can feel the bone flexing.
Hard enough that I know he could move that forearm up six inches and it would be a very different conversation.
"Let go of me." My voice is steady.
How it's steady, I have no idea.
My whole body is shaking, but my voice is steady, because I am a Mercer and Mercers don't break.
Not out loud. Not where anyone can see.
"We're delivering a message," the tall one says. "Consider yourself an envelope." He leans in. Close enough that I can feel his breath on my face. "Two hundred thousand. Or next time, it won't be a conversation."
The short one shoves me sideways.
I stumble, catch myself on the hood of the sedan, and by the time I've straightened up, they're walking away.
Casual. Unhurried.
Like they just had a chat with a coworker and not like they just assaulted a woman in a parking garage.
I stand there.
I stand there, breathing hard as I press my hand against my collarbone where the forearm was. I feel the bruise already forming under the skin, and I wait for the shaking to stop.
It doesn't stop.
My knees give out.
I slide down the side of the sedan and sit on the concrete floor of the parking garage, my back against the tire and my knees pulled to my chest and my hands shaking so hard I can barely hold my own arms.
The fluorescent light above me buzzes and flickers.
Somewhere in the garage, a car alarm goes off and then stops.
The mundane sounds of a world that doesn't know what just happened two minutes ago.
I should call 911.
That's the logical thing—I'm a nurse, I was just assaulted, there are protocols.
Call 911. File a report. Follow the chain of command.
I don't call 911.
Instead, I call Coin.
He answers on the first ring. "Leah?"
"I'm—I'm at the hospital. In the parking garage.
Third level." My voice cracks. After everything…
after holding it together through Angelica, through the attack, through sitting on this floor, the sound of his voice is what breaks me.
"Coin, they—two men. They grabbed me. They know my name, they know about us, they said—"
"Are you hurt?"
"I'm okay. Bruised, but I'm okay."
"Don't move. I'm coming." A pause. The sound of keys. A door slamming. An engine starting. "Leah. Stay on the phone with me."
"Okay."
"I'm ten minutes away. Garrett's closer—I'm calling him from the truck. Stay on the phone."
"Okay."
"Are you somewhere safe?"
"I'm sitting on the floor next to a Honda Civic."
"Can anyone see you?"
"I don't—I don't think so."
"Good. Stay down. Stay on the phone. I'm coming."
I stay down. I stay on the phone.
I listen to the sound of his truck engine and his breathing and the click of him dialing Garrett on another line, and I press my phone against my ear like a lifeline because right now it is one.
Garrett gets there first.
Six minutes.
He comes around the corner of the third level at a dead run—six-two, leather, fury—and when he sees me on the ground, something in his face goes past anger into a place I've never seen before.
A place I don't have a name for.
The place where Bloodhound lives, the part of him that killed Virgil in a basement and didn't apologize for it.
"Leah." He's on his knees beside me. His hands on my face, checking me over the way I check patients—clinically, thoroughly, looking for damage. "Where are you hurt?"
"Collarbone. He pinned me with his forearm. It's not broken. I can tell. Just bruised."
"What did they look like?"
"One tall, shaved head, neck tattoos. The other shorter, stocky."
He pulls me to my feet and wraps his arm around me.
I let him.
My knees aren't going to hold, and he's my brother, and right now that's the only thing in the world that matters.
He smells the same as he always has.
For a second I'm four years old and he's pulling me out of the fire and nothing can hurt me.
"I'm going to kill them," he says. Not loud. Not angry. Just a statement of fact, the way you'd say the sky is blue or water is wet. "I'm going to find them and I'm going to kill them."
"Garrett."
"They put their hands on my sister."
"I know. I was there."
Coin arrives four minutes later.
I hear his truck before I see it—tires squealing on the concrete ramp, engine echoing off the garage walls.
He parks at an angle that blocks the lane and he's out the door before the engine fully dies.
He crosses the garage in strides that eat the distance between us, and when he reaches me, he doesn't speak.
He just takes my face in both hands.
Rough palms, scarred knuckles, gentle as always with things that matter.
And looks at me, looks at me the way he looked at Wrenleigh on the gurney.
Like his whole world just narrowed to one person and nothing else exists.
"Show me," he says.
I pull the neck of my scrub top to the side.
The bruise is already darkening—a long, horizontal line across my collarbone, deep purple shading to black at the edges.
The shape of a man's forearm printed on my skin.
Coin looks at it.
Something happens behind his eyes. Something I've never seen before.
Not the cold, not the freeze, not the controlled shutdown he used on Angelica.
This is different. This is the thing underneath all of it. The thing he's been keeping locked away behind three generations of Adkins self-control and a decade of holding everything together alone.
He's quiet for a long time.
His thumb traces the edge of the bruise without touching it, and his hand is steady—dead steady, not a single tremor—and that scares me more than anything because I know now what Coin's steadiness means.
It means he's already decided what happens next.
"Garrett," he says. His eyes don't leave the bruise. "Church. Tonight. Call everyone."
Garrett nods. His phone is already out.
Coin looks at me. Those blue-gray eyes are made of something else right now. Something ancient and cold and patient and absolutely lethal.
"I'm going to fix this," he says.
"I know you are."
"You're going to stay with me. At the house. Until this is over."
"I know."
He pulls me against his chest, and holds me the way he held me in the hallway the first time.
I'm not in Church.
I've never been in Church, and I wouldn't be welcome even now.
That room belongs to the brothers, and the conversations that happen behind that door stay behind that door.
But I'm at the clubhouse. Sitting in the main room with Vanna and Waylon, a bag of frozen peas pressed against my collarbone because Vanna took one look at the bruise and went full mother hen.
She hasn't said much. She doesn't need to.
She's sitting beside me on the couch with her hand on my knee, and her golden hair piled on top of her head and Waylon asleep in the car seat at her feet, and her presence is enough.
She knows what it feels like to be hurt by men who want to send a message.
She knows this from the inside.
The fact that she's sitting next to me, steady and solid and sober and alive, says more than any words could.
I can hear voices from behind the Church door.
Not words—just the low, rolling thunder of men's voices, rising and falling.
Garrett's voice, louder than the rest.
Then Maddox.
Then a silence that can only be Ruger, because when Ruger speaks, everyone else stops.
Then Coin's voice. Low. Steady. Carrying through the heavy wooden door with a clarity that means he wants to be heard.
I can't make out the words, but I can feel them. The weight of them. The finality.
The door opens. Brothers file out.
Some of them look at me as they pass—Bracken nods, Decorum touches my shoulder, Maddox stops and crouches in front of me and says, "Nobody touches you again.
Nobody." And the way he says it, this mountain of a man, crouching down to my level the way I crouched down to Sadie Jo's in the ER, makes my eyes burn for the first time all night.
Then Coin comes out.
He walks straight to me.
Doesn't stop, doesn't hesitate, doesn't look at anyone else in the room.
He stands in front of me and he holds out his hand, and when I take it, he pulls me to my feet.
"Leah Mercer is my ol' lady," he says. Not to me. To the room. To every brother, every prospect, every person within earshot. His voice carries the way it carried through the Church door—low, steady, absolute. "Anyone who touches her answers to me and this club."
The room goes still.
Every man in it looks at me, and what I see in their faces isn't surprise. It's confirmation. Like they've been waiting for this. Like they knew before he did.
Vanna squeezes my hand from the couch. She's smiling. Crying, but smiling.
Coin looks at me then. Really looks, those blue-gray eyes, searching my face for—what?
Doubt? Hesitation? Fear?
He won't find any.
"You didn't have to do that," I say.
"Yeah," he says. "I did."
And the way he says it—quiet, certain, like it was never even a question—undoes me more than the parking garage, more than Angelica, more than any of it.
Because this man, this quiet, careful, deliberate man who uses words like they cost money, just spent every one he had to tell the world I'm his.
I step into him and put my hands on his chest.
I feel his heart beating under my palms, steady and strong, the same rhythm I fell asleep to last night and the night before.
"Okay," I say. "Then I'm yours."
He wraps his arms around me, holds me in the middle of the clubhouse, in front of his brothers, with his chin on top of my head and his hands spread wide across my back.
Not hiding. Not careful. Not worried about who's watching.
I press my face against his cut and I breathe in leather and cedar and him, and I think about a night in the ER when I watched a quiet man carry his daughter through a hospital and thought, Those girls don't know how lucky they are.
I think maybe I'm starting to understand.
Garrett is standing by the hallway to Church. Arms crossed. Watching us.
His face is unreadable. That Mercer mask, the one that hides everything and says nothing and holds the whole world at arm's length.
Then he nods. One nod. The same nod he gave Coin when Coin said I know exactly what she is.
After Coin is finished with Church we head over to his house and keep busy with the girls.
Once we get them to bed, the guard shift changes and Maddox is on the porch watching over us.
I sit on the bathroom floor in my underwear and look at the bruise.
It's ugly. Long and dark, stretching from the curve of my shoulder to the center of my collarbone.
Tomorrow it'll be worse. Deeper purple, wider spread, the kind of bruise that takes weeks to fully fade.
I'll have to wear high-necked scrubs to work.
I'll have to lie about it if anyone asks, and people will ask, because nurses notice things.
Coin appears in the doorway.
He sees me looking at it, and something moves across his face that hurts to watch—guilt, fury, tenderness, all braided together into something that doesn't have a name.
He sits down on the bathroom floor next to me.
Doesn't say anything.
Just sits, his back against the tub, his shoulder touching mine.
"I'm okay," I say.
"I know."
"It looks worse than it feels."
"I know that too."
"Coin."
"Yeah."
"What does it mean to you?" I ask. "Being your ol' lady. What does that actually look like?"
He's quiet for a moment and turns the coin between his fingers.
I can hear the soft metal sound of it even though I can't see it.
"It means you're mine," he says. "And I'm yours.
In front of the club, in front of anyone who's watching, in front of anyone who might think about coming at me through the people I love.
" A pause. "It means they don't just answer to me anymore.
They answer to everyone. Every brother, every patch, every man who was in that room tonight.
You're family now. Not by blood—by my choice, my vow. "
I let that settle. The weight of it. The enormity.
"Did you ask me first?" I say, and there's a trace of humor in it because I need the humor right now, need something lighter than bruises and loan sharks and declarations made in front of rooms full of dangerous men.
"No," he says. And the almost-smile is there—small, private, the one that's only for me. "Would you have said no?"
"No."
"Then I don't regret not asking."
I lean my head against his shoulder and he puts his arm around me.
We sit on the bathroom floor together, my bruise and his guilt and the coin turning between his fingers, and the house breathes around us—Wrenleigh's music playing low through her closed door, Sadie Jo's light still on, Maddox's steady presence on the porch.
"I'm scared," I say.
It’s the first time I've said it out loud. First time I've let the word exist outside my own head.
"I know. Me too."
"You don't seem scared."
"That's because I'm terrified. There's a difference.
" The coin turns. "Scared is something you feel.
Terrified is something you are. I've been terrified since the day those men showed up on my porch, and I'll be terrified until this is over.
But I don't have the luxury of letting it show, because I've got two girls upstairs and a woman sitting next to me on a bathroom floor who all need me to hold it together. "
"You don't always have to hold it together. Not with me."
"I know." He kisses the top of my head. "I'm working on it."
I close my eyes. Let the silence settle. Let his heartbeat under my ear be the only sound in the world for a minute.
Tomorrow, the weight comes back.
The loan sharks, the pipeline, Angelica, all of it.
Tomorrow, the bruise will be darker and the danger will be closer and the clock will keep ticking.
But right now, I'm sitting on a bathroom floor with a man who called me his in front of a room full of people who would die for each other, and he's holding me, and his daughters are sleeping down the hall, and for the first time in my life, being needed and being wanted are the same thing.
I press my face into his shoulder and I breathe, and for once, I let that be enough.