Chapter 4 Valentina
VALENTINA
I wake to a creeping cold. The kind that tells you someone else’s warmth was here… and left.
My fingers slide over the sheet automatically, searching for heat the way a starving person searches for crumbs.
The indentation beside me is deep, shaped by a body heavier than mine, the faintest outline of a shoulder, a ribcage, a thigh.
The sheet is still warm at the center. Not fresh-warm.
Fading-warm. Like Asher got up minutes ago.
His scent lingers in the room, in the bed, in the air I’m forced to breathe.
Soap, pine, cold outside air seeping through a cracked window, and the metallic whisper of gun oil under it.
The combination is stupidly clean for a biker.
It makes my chest tighten without permission, so I sit up too fast just to have another reason for my heart to pound.
I swing my legs off the bed; the floorboards press cold against my bare feet, sharp and grounding, but the minute I make eye contact with myself in the mirror the memories of yesterday come flashing back to me.
Asher covered in Xavier’s blood. The vote that named me leader.
Me wearing Xavier’s shirt. Me crawling into bed with Asher. The safety of him being so close.
I know he held me last night, but I don’t know if he noticed I was crying in my sleep? I haven’t done that since my father died. I should find escape in my dreams, but I have never dreamed much. My entire life is controlled by nightmares.
There’s a folded pile of clothes on the chair near the door: black jeans, a black Raiders tee, and a worn leather belt.
The stack is neat, squared like someone measured the edges with a ruler.
That has Asher stamped all over it—precise, controlled, suffocatingly composed.
He could have tossed me any random shit they give hang-arounds, but he didn’t.
He picked sizes, thought about it, laid them out.
The consideration needles me in a way that pure cruelty never could.
I grab the jeans and shirt and dress quickly, testing the stiffness in my muscles.
My body complains but obeys. The jeans are a little big in the waist but fit well enough in the thighs; the belt pulls everything together.
The shirt fits snug across my chest. When I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I don’t recognize myself.
It looks like I have been through hell. Asher would say that’s great, because that means everyone will buy that I am mourning my man.
My stomach twists. I shove the feeling down, because isn’t it fucked up to believe you are someone’s and they already gave their heart to another?
Voices seep under the door—male, low, threaded with tension.
Boot steps thud, a door slams, someone laughs a little too hard.
The house sounds awake, but no one has come to drag me out to parade around, so that’s something.
I run my hands through my hair, push it back into a messy knot at the nape of my neck, and cross the room.
The hallway outside is long and narrow, lined with old photographs and newer patch-covered leather cuts hanging off hooks.
The smell of coffee and grease rises from below, layered with cigarettes and the sour tang of too many bodies sharing stale air.
My hand curls around the bannister as I start down the stairs. That’s when I hear his voice clearly.
“—they’re going to start circling if we don’t give them something else to care about,” Asher says. His tone is flat, almost bored, but I remember enough to know that means he’s thinking ten steps ahead.
A muffled response crackles through a phone speaker. Zay’s voice—faster, rougher, coated in nicotine and sleeplessness. I can’t make out the words, only the cadence. Agitated. Irritated. Clinging to nerves that are already worn thin.
“Then keep them busy,” Asher replies. “No, she’s not going anywhere.”
I reach the bottom of the stairs just as he shifts his weight, broad back to me, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the phone to his ear.
He’s in a black tee and jeans, hair slicked back with a bandanna tied on the top of his head.
Even from behind, he radiates the kind of stillness you don’t see in normal people, kind of like a Greek statue, and just as hot as one.
He must sense movement behind him, because his shoulders tighten almost imperceptibly. He doesn’t turn yet, but I see his head tilt a fraction, listening.
“Zay,” he says, voice dropping, “I’ll call you back.”
The words snap off cleanly. He lowers the phone and finally looks over his shoulder at me.
For a second neither of us says anything. His eyes sweep from my face down to the Raiders shirt and jeans, taking stock without lingering anywhere long enough to feel like a leer.
My mouth moves before I can stop it. “How’s Xavier?”
The question comes out too quickly, too raw. I hear the thread of anxiety in it and want to snatch it back, but it hangs between us anyway.
Asher turns fully to face me. Whatever was on his face before he saw me is gone; what’s left is stripped down and spare. Those pale gray eyes of his meet mine, and for a moment I see the faintest flicker there, a fracture line beneath the surface.
“In a coma,” he says.
My stomach jumps into a free fall. The floor seems to shift under my boots.
I grip the bannister a little tighter to hide it.
Xavier deserves a lot of things, like my foot up his ass, or to be cussed out for his domineering personality, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss him.
Doesn’t mean I don’t want him to be alive and okay, telling me that despite everything I say, I am his.
The idea of him lying in a hospital bed somewhere, life dangling on a thread, doesn’t sit right.
Not because he doesn’t deserve bad things, but because he’s the spine of this whole rotten beast. And because right now I can’t trust myself not to feel guilty.
My mind races to how he dragged me through the woods like a misbehaving dog, called me bottom bitch in front of his whole club, and made me want to carve his face up out of spite.
He did all those things when the easier option would have been to kill me, and if I was fluent in asshole I would have known that meant he liked me.
He likes me. I can’t start thinking in past tense.
“Did you hear from Jackie? Do we know who shot him yet?” I ask.
“Jackie says Vipers got a sniper.” Asher’s gaze doesn’t leave my face. “They were waiting for him to come out. They hit him in the chest, but the one next to his spine was tricky during surgery so we won’t know anything until he wakes up.”
My throat feels dry. I swallow around it. “Is he going to live?”
“We think so, but we don’t know what the quality of his life will be.” The slightest tightening around his mouth. “The doctors think he has a good chance.”
We stand there facing each other at the bottom of the stairs, silence stretching between us, thick with everything those three words don’t say.
The Vipers made their move. The man who was supposed to be my jailer might die.
And the entire club is floating in a moment where the wrong tilt can drown them all.
“I don’t believe he would want me to be the leader of the club.
” I press, knowing that my refusal to call to action must piss him off, but the guilt is eating me alive.
It’s not that I don’t think I could do it.
I can. I just can’t stomach being Xavier’s legacy.
He deserves more than me. “I thought Xavier wanted me as leverage for the cartel. You could leverage me right now to get the cartel to retaliate against the Vipers.”
“We don’t know if your brother will react the way we want him to. He may decide while Xavier’s out to eradicate us just for thinking we could take you.” Asher crosses his arms over his chest, and looks me over. “And Zay is in love with you, so we can’t risk something happening to you.”
“Only Zay?” I question, my heart beating rapidly in my chest.
“I wouldn’t call what Xavier feels for you love, killer,” Asher scoffs.
“And you?”
Something dangerous edges into his gaze as he looks me over, before clearing his throat. “What about me, killer?”
“Am I only here for Zay and Xavier? You don’t have a reason for fighting for me to be leader, knowing you would do it better.” I take a small step forward, my eyes locked with his icy grey ones. I want to drown in them.
“I can’t admit anything to you right now, because Xav said that he felt--”
I arch a brow, moving closer. “Before he got shot?”
“Nothing,” Asher says, voice even, “what he feels is most important, and until I know he will make it out of this coma, I will not admit to anything until I know for sure he’s okay.”
I blink. “He just wanted me to be at the bottom of the club, Ash. He didn’t want me, but you--.”
“Xavier’s an asshole,” Asher says. “But he’s not stupid. He wants you. But in order for him to come out of this coma and not find out you’re dead, you need to be protected, and it's easiest if you are in front of us, rather than behind.”
I don’t want to ask the next question, but it pushes its way out anyway. “What does sitting at the head of the table mean, exactly?”
“It means you walk into that breakfast room with me,” Asher says, nodding subtly toward the hallway where the smell of bacon and burnt toast hangs in the air, “and you sit in Xavier’s chair in front of all of them—the council, the patched members, the prospects, the hang-arounds.
And you make it clear you’re not terrified. ”
“I’m not terrified,” I lie.
His smirks. “Then act like it.”
He doesn’t offer his arm or guide me with a hand at my back. He just falls into step beside me, half a stride behind, a silent shadow with a pulse. No fanfare, no announcement—just the murmur of voices drifting from the breakfast room as we approach.