17. Diesel
DIESEL
The station lot’s got exactly one car in it by the time I roll up, and it’s hers.
I’ve been driving past this building for two days, timing it, telling myself I’m just running errands that happen to route me down Main at eleven at night.
Bullshit, obviously. Ace would call it stalking if I said it out loud, which is exactly why I haven’t said it out loud to anybody.
I kill the engine outside the police station with a stolen bike report I wrote up an hour ago sitting on my passenger seat like it’s the most natural thing in the world for a man like me to walk through that door.
Wyatt’s bike really did get lifted off the lot behind the garage where he keeps it.
That part’s true. Whether it needed reporting to the actual police instead of me putting the word out and letting the club handle it the way we always handle things is a different question, one I decided not to ask myself too hard on the drive over.
I grab the folder, get out, and walk toward the glass doors like I’ve got every right in the world to be here.
The lobby’s dead quiet. Fluorescent lights humming that flat, sick hum they always do, a bulletin board plastered with missing pet flyers and a wanted poster gone yellow at the edges.
Nobody’s behind the front counter. I stand there a second, listening, and catch the low murmur of a radio scanner somewhere down the hall, and under that, softer, the sound of a keyboard.
I follow it.
She’s alone at her desk, hair scraped back tight, uniform creased after eleven hours on shift, a mug of coffee that looks stale at her elbow. She doesn’t look up right away. She doesn’t hear me, or she hears me and decides not to react, which would be exactly like her.
“Kind of late for a filing,” I say.
Her head comes up fast, and something flashes across her face before she gets it locked down—surprise, then something else, something that heats up under the surprise before she buries that too.
“You can’t be back here.” She’s already standing, hand going to the edge of her desk as if she needs it for balance. “This isn’t visiting hours, Evan.”
“Not visiting.” I hold up the folder. “Reporting a theft. Prospect’s bike got lifted off the garage lot two nights back.”
“There’s a night desk for that.”
“Night desk’s empty. Found you instead.”
Her jaw works. She glances past me toward the lobby, toward the empty hallway, and I watch her run the math—who’s here, who’s not, how much noise carries, how fast this could go wrong for her if anybody walked in and found the Vice President of Wicked Sinners standing beside her desk at eleven at night with nobody else in sight.
“You could’ve called it in,” she says, quieter now.
“Could’ve.” I set the folder on her desk, carefully, like it’s an offering instead of a pretext. “Wanted to see you.”
“That’s not how any of this works.”
“Feels like it’s working fine so far.”
Her eyes narrow, but there’s no real heat behind it, not the kind that would send me back out the door.
She looks tired in a way that’s got nothing to do with the shift—shadows under her eyes, a tightness around her mouth I recognize from every mirror I’ve avoided since Bone laid it out plain in the clubhouse.
She’s a liability with a badge and a gun.
Maybe. Maybe I’m one to her too. Standing here in her building, in her territory, I don’t feel like the dangerous one.
I feel like a man who drove into town just to watch a woman push hair out of her face.
“You look wrecked,” I say.
“I had a missing kid today.”
That lands differently than I expect. My chest tightens. “They find her?”
“Not yet.” She rubs a hand over her face, and she looks too tired to keep pretending she’s fine. “I’ve still got three reports to finish before I can go home.”
“Then finish them tomorrow.”
“That’s not how paperwork works, Evan.”
“Everything’s got a tomorrow, Penny.” I step closer, and she doesn’t step back. “Even paperwork.”
She looks up at me, and whatever’s sitting behind her eyes isn’t the careful cop stillness she wears at crime scenes.
It’s something rawer, something that’s been building since I walked out her front door two days ago and she hasn’t called and I haven’t called and both of us have been lying to ourselves about why.
“I need to get the bike details into the system,” she says, nodding at the folder, voice gone thin. “I need the intake form.”
“Lead the way, Officer.”
She doesn’t answer that, just picks up the folder and walks, and I follow her down a hallway lit worse than the lobby, past a break room with a coffee pot burning something black and bitter, to a door with a keypad and a sign that says:
RESTRICTED — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“You can’t come in here,” she says, punching the code.
“Then don’t let me.”
She doesn’t answer that either. The door clicks open, and she walks through, and I follow anyway, because we both already know how this goes.
The evidence room’s colder than the rest of the building, air conditioning cranked to keep whatever’s stored back here from rotting, and it smells like dust and old paper and something metallic underneath that I don’t let myself think too hard about.
Steel shelves line the room, boxes stacked in careful, labeled rows, everything cataloged and numbered and sealed in plastic.
Penny sets the folder on a counter near the door and starts pulling out forms, movements fast and clipped, the kind of busy that’s really just a woman trying not to look at the man standing four feet behind her.
“You need to go back out front,” she says, not turning around. “This room’s logged. Cameras.”
“Camera’s dead. Has been for a month. Morris keeps saying he’ll get it fixed.”
Her hand stills on the form. “How do you know that?”
“I know a lot of things.” I close the distance, slowly, giving her every chance to say stop. She doesn’t say it. “Nobody’s watching, Penny.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what’s the point?”
She turns around finally, and there it is.
“The point is I work here,” she says, voice low, edged. “This is my job. My career. Everything I built since I left.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you standing in my evidence room at eleven at night?”
“Because I don’t care.” It comes out rougher than I mean it to, honest in a way I haven’t let myself be with her since I walked out her door with my pride intact and nothing else.
“I told myself I’d give you space. Told myself I’d let you call when you were ready.
Lasted two days, Penny. Two days, and I’m driving past this building multiple times a day like some kind of—”
“Stalker,” she finishes, but there’s no real venom in it.
“Something like that.”
She doesn’t move away. I take that for what it is—not permission exactly, but not refusal either, the same crack in the door she left me at that lunch table, the same I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no.
“This is insane,” she whispers. “You know that, right? We’re standing in an evidence room. There are shelves full of—”
“I know what’s in it.”
“Do you?” Something flickers across her face, fast, gone before I can chase it down. “There’s a case file three shelves over with your club’s name written all over it in ways you don’t even know about.”
“Then let’s not talk about the shelves.”
I close the last of the distance, and she doesn’t step back this time, back already against the steel edge of the rack behind her, boxes rattling faintly when her shoulder brushes them. Close enough now that I can hear her breath catch, see the pulse going hard at the base of her throat.
“Evan.” Barely a whisper. “Someone could walk in.”
“Then we’ll be quick.”
“That’s not—” Her hands come up, fist in the front of my shirt, and I can’t tell if she’s pulling me closer or bracing to shove me back, and neither can she, from the look on her face. “This is my job.”
“I know.” I get a hand in her hair, careful of the tight bun, working it loose one pin at a time because I want it down, want it the way it was at the wedding, gold and soft between my fingers instead of scraped back into armor. “Tell me to stop.”
She doesn’t.
I kiss her instead, slow at first, giving her the exit she keeps saying she wants and never takes, and she makes a sound against my mouth that isn’t a protest, isn’t anything close to one, and her hands slide up into my hair and pull me down harder like she’s the one who can’t wait anymore.
“We can’t,” she breathes, even as her hips roll into mine.
“We’re already doing it.”
“Evan—”
“Say stop.” I drag my mouth along her jaw, down her throat, feel her pulse jump under my lips. “One word, and I walk out that door right now.”
She doesn’t say it. Her fingers find my belt instead.
“If anybody finds out—” she starts.
“Nobody’s finding out.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Don’t care.” I get her belt undone, pull the zipper on her uniform pants down and she’s already breathing hard, head tipping back against the shelf hard enough that a box shifts. “Missed this too much to care.”
“This is completely unprofessional.”
“So’s what you’re about to let me do to you against a shelf full of evidence.” I get my hand inside her waistband, and the sound she makes when I find her already soaked cuts off whatever argument she was building. “You want me to stop talking about it, or you want me to stop doing it?”
“Don’t stop doing it,” she gasps. “God, don’t stop.”
I don’t. I work her slow at first, feel her hips chase my hand, her breath coming ragged against my ear, one hand fisted white-knuckled in the front of my shirt and the other braced flat against the steel shelf behind her like she needs the anchor.
“Quiet,” I murmur against her throat, though I’m the one who wants to hear every sound she’s biting back. “Building’s not that empty.”
“You started this.”
“I’m gonna finish it too.”
I get her pants shoved down her hips, get my own belt undone with one hand while the other keeps her right where I want her, and she reaches for me, wraps her fingers around me with a kind of desperate, furious hunger that tells me exactly how many nights she’s spent lying awake telling herself this was over.
“Tell me you want this,” I say against her ear. “Say it.”
“I want this.” Her voice breaks on it, quiet and wrecked. “I want you. God help me, I do.”
I lift her up onto the counter beside the rack, boxes rattling, papers sliding, neither one of us caring.
I work her boots and pants off, and when I push into her, slow, watching her face the whole way, her head falls back and her mouth opens on a silent gasp that’s louder to me than any sound she could’ve made out loud.
“Evan,” she breathes.
“Right here.” I still for a second, just to feel her around me, just to remind myself this is real and not something I dreamed up lying alone in my bunk with the club partying through the wall. “Not going anywhere.”
“You have to be quiet,” she manages, even as her hips start moving against mine, chasing a rhythm neither of us is bothering to control anymore.
“You’re the one who’s gonna have trouble with that.”
She proves me right about ninety seconds later, biting down on my shoulder to muffle whatever sound was about to come out of her, nails digging crescents into my back through my shirt, and I drive into her harder, faster, chasing the exact sound I know she’s trying to swallow, wanting it more than I want to be careful, more than I want to remember where we are.
“Right there,” she gasps against my collarbone. “Don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—”
I don’t. I keep the pace punishing, one hand braced against the shelf by her head, the other gripping her hip hard enough to bruise, and when she comes apart around me it’s silent, shaking, her whole body locking up tight while she buries the sound of it in my shoulder, and the feel of her clenching around me drags me right over after her, spilling deep, her name breaking rough out of my mouth before I remember to keep even that quiet.
We stay tangled there a second, breathing hard, foreheads pressed together, boxes of somebody’s worst nights scattered half-crooked around us on the shelf.
“That,” Penny says eventually, voice hoarse, “cannot happen again.”
“Sure it can’t.”
“Evan.”
“Diesel.” I press a kiss to her temple, feel her breath still shaking against my throat. “Come on. Say it. You liked it too much to mean that.”
She laughs, short and helpless, and pulls back just far enough to look at me, hair a wreck around her face, mouth swollen, uniform hanging half off one shoulder where I dragged it loose without either of us noticing.
“You need to leave,” she says. “Before Johnson gets back from his break.”
“In a minute.” I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, slower now, gentler than anything that just happened against a steel shelf full of somebody else’s evidence. “I’m not sorry, Penny. Not for any of it.”
“You should be.”
“I’m really not.” I kiss her again, soft this time, nothing rushed about it, and she lets me, hands coming up to rest against my chest while I catch my breath. “I’ll see you soon.”
“That’s not a promise I asked for.”
“Didn’t say it was a promise.” I pull back, straighten my belt, watch her do the same with hers, both of us moving slower than we should given how close that door is to opening on somebody who isn’t supposed to see any of this. “Just a fact.”
She doesn’t argue that one. Doesn’t tell me not to come back either, and by the time I’m walking back out through the lobby, folder left behind like the flimsy excuse it always was, I’ve got that same stupid grin working its way across my face that got me an earful from Bone and Tank two days ago.
Let them talk. Let the whole club line up and tell me exactly how this ends.
I’m not walking away from her again. Not this time. Not for seventeen more years. Not for a badge, not for anything Bone’s ledger or Tank’s warnings can put a number on.