Chapter 10
Sunday at the compound meant one thing: cookout.
Karen woke to the smell of charcoal and the sound of children laughing somewhere outside her window. She pulled on jeans and a clean shirt and followed the noise down to the lot, where the Wolves had transformed their fortress into something that almost looked like a neighborhood block party.
Grills lined the fence. Folding tables held coolers and condiments. Kids ran between parked bikes while their mothers called after them not to touch anything with two wheels. Brothers in leather cuts flipped burgers and cracked beers and argued about sports teams Karen had never heard of.
It was chaos. Loud, messy, wonderful chaos.
"There she is!" Stockyard's voice boomed across the lot. "The woman who saved us from our own cooking!"
Karen raised a hand in greeting. "I just reorganized a kitchen. It wasn't surgery."
"Close enough. My stomach thinks you're a miracle worker."
She made her way through the crowd, exchanging nods with brothers she'd fed over the past two days. The old ladies had claimed a shaded corner near the clubhouse door, and Claire waved her over.
"Sleep okay?"
"Better than I have in months." Karen accepted a cup of coffee—someone had brought a proper pot outside. "What is all this?"
"Sunday tradition. The pack gathers, we eat too much, the kids run wild." Claire smiled. "It's the closest thing to normal we've got."
Karen looked around at the bikers and their families, the women laughing together, the children shrieking with joy. Normal wasn't the word she'd use. But there was something here—community, maybe. Belonging.
She'd spent eight years building that at her diner. She recognized it when she saw it.
"Hey." Diesel appeared at her elbow, wearing a grease-stained apron over his cut. "You want to help me with the grill?"
"You need help?"
"I need company. There's a difference."
She followed him to a massive grill near the garage, where an impressive spread of meat was sizzling over the flames. Diesel handed her a spatula and pointed to a cooler.
"Eggs, hash browns, and pancake batter in there. Someone mentioned you make a mean breakfast."
"At a cookout?"
"Breakfast for dinner. The kids love it." He grinned. "So do the brothers. So do I."
Karen opened the cooler and found everything she needed, neatly organized. Someone had planned this. Someone had made sure she'd have what she needed to do what she did best.
She looked at Diesel.
"Was this your idea?"
"Maybe." He turned a row of burgers with studied casualness. "You seemed happiest when you were cooking. Figured we'd give you a reason to keep doing it."
Something warm bloomed in her chest. She didn't have words for it, so she just started cracking eggs.
Within an hour, she'd set up a full breakfast station beside Diesel's grill. Hash browns crisping in a cast-iron pan. Pancakes browning on a portable griddle. Eggs scrambled, fried, whatever people wanted. The line stretched halfway across the lot.
"This is ridiculous," she muttered, flipping three pancakes at once. "It's four in the afternoon."
"And yet." Diesel gestured at the crowd waiting for food. "They're not complaining."
He was right. Brothers came back for seconds and thirds. Kids asked for pancakes shaped like motorcycles (she tried her best). Even Fang appeared at some point, accepted a plate of eggs with a silent nod, and disappeared back into the shadows.
"So there I am," Diesel said, loud enough for the nearby crowd to hear, "stuck at this truck stop outside Bloomington with a blown tire and no spare."
Karen kept cooking, but her ears tuned to his voice. She'd heard him tell stories at the bar, to brothers, to anyone who'd listen. But this was different—this was for an audience of kids and families, cleaned up for young ears.
"And the guy running the place—old man, must've been seventy—he looks at my rig and says, 'Son, you're not going anywhere tonight. But I've got pie.'"
Lakeshore shook his head from across the grill. "Here we go."
"So I figure, okay, pie's not a tire, but it's something. I go inside, and this truck stop has the best coconut cream pie I've ever tasted in my life. I mean life-changing. I ate three slices."
"Three?" one of the kids asked, eyes wide.
"Three. And then the old man tells me his wife makes them fresh every morning, and she's been doing it for forty years, and people drive hundreds of miles just for this pie."
Diesel paused, letting the suspense build. Karen found herself smiling despite herself.
"So I ask him—what's the secret? What makes this pie so good?" He spread his hands. "And he looks me dead in the eye and says, 'I don't know. I've been married to her for forty years, and she still won't tell me.'"
The punchline landed with a wave of laughter. Kids giggled. Adults groaned. Even Fang's mouth twitched from wherever he was lurking.
"Twenty minutes," Lakeshore muttered. "Twenty minutes for a pie joke."
"It's about the journey, brother. Not the destination."
Karen watched Diesel bask in the reaction—the grins, the rolled eyes, the grudging appreciation. He lived for this. The attention, the laughter, the feeling of a room wrapped around his words.
But then she watched him with the kids.
A little girl—maybe five or six—tugged on his apron and asked for a story about wolves.
Diesel crouched down to her level and spun a tale about a wolf who got lost in Chicago and had to find his way home by following the L train.
His voice was gentle, his gestures small, his whole demeanor softened in a way she hadn't seen before.
The girl listened with rapt attention. When the story ended, she hugged his leg and ran off to find her mother.
Diesel straightened up and caught Karen staring.
"What?"
"Nothing." She turned back to her pancakes. "You're good with kids."
"They're easy. Just tell them stories and don't talk down to them."
"Not everyone thinks that's easy."
He was quiet for a moment. "My trucking days, I'd stop at a lot of places with families. Kids at diners, rest stops, wherever. Got used to talking to them." A pause. "You mentioned you have kids."
"Two boys. Grown now. Matthew is twenty-two, works construction. David's twenty, learning to be an electrician." Pride crept into her voice despite herself. "Put them both through trade school on diner tips."
"That's impressive."
"That's just what you do." She plated a stack of pancakes for a waiting brother. "You work, you save, you give them what you can. They turned out good. That's all that matters."
"They know what's going on? With Dale, with—all this?"
Karen shook her head. "They know I'm staying with friends for a while. They don't need the details. They'd just worry, and there's nothing they can do."
"Protective."
"Always." She met his eyes. "You'd have liked them. They'd have liked you. Matthew especially—he loves a good story."
Something flickered across Diesel's face. She'd meant it as a simple observation, but it had come out sounding like something more. Like she'd been imagining introductions. Family dinners. A future.
The thought hit her hard enough to steal her breath.
She looked away, focusing on the grill, on the food, on anything except the man beside her and the feelings she wasn't ready to name.
The cookout wound down as the sun set over Back of the Yards.
Kids were rounded up and loaded into cars. Brothers drifted toward the clubhouse or their own quarters. The old ladies organized cleanup with the efficiency of women who'd done this a hundred times.
Karen helped where she could, packing up her breakfast station, washing pans, breaking down the griddle. By the time she finished, her whole body ached with the good kind of tired—the kind that came from honest work.
Scout found her near the coolers, loading the last of the supplies.
"Here." He pressed a cold beer into her hand. "You earned it."
"Thanks." She cracked it open and took a long drink. "Hell of a party."
"It's like this every Sunday. Pack needs to blow off steam, and the families need to feel connected." Scout leaned against the fence, watching the last of the cleanup. "Diesel's been talking about you, you know."
"Has he?"
"Non-stop since the safehouse. Your cooking, mostly. But other things too." Scout's eyes were sharp, assessing. "He doesn't usually talk this much about women. Or anything, really, that isn't trucks or highways or whatever story he's telling."
Karen didn't know what to say to that. So she just drank her beer and watched the compound settle into evening quiet.
"He's a good man," Scout said finally. "Better than he thinks he is. Just—be careful with him, yeah? He acts like nothing gets to him, but that's not true. The easy-going thing is real, but it's also armor."
"I know something about armor."
Scout nodded. "Figured you might."
He pushed off the fence and headed toward the clubhouse, leaving Karen alone with her beer and her thoughts.
Inside, the common room was warm and low-lit. Brothers had claimed their usual spots—bar stools, pool tables, the cluster of couches near the jukebox. The noise was comfortable, familiar. Like the diner at three a.m., when the only people left were the ones who had nowhere else to be.
Karen sank onto one of the couches, exhaustion finally catching up with her. She should go to her room. Should sleep in an actual bed instead of passing out in the common room like some kind of—
"—and the guy looks at me and says, 'That's not a wolf, that's my ex-wife.'"
Laughter erupted from the bar. Karen smiled without opening her eyes.
Diesel's voice washed over her, warm and rambling, building toward another punchline she'd probably miss because sleep was pulling her down like a tide. But it didn't matter. The sound of it was enough.
For four months, every background noise had been a threat. Every engine could be Dale's trucks. Every voice could be Wade's crew. Every silence could be the moment before everything went wrong.
But this—the laughter, the stories, the rumble of conversation and clink of glasses—this was different.
This sounded like safety.
Karen let her eyes close all the way. Let her body sink into the couch cushions. Let Diesel's voice carry her down into sleep.
And for the first time in months, the background noise didn't sound like danger.
It sounded like home.