Mine To Protect
Fuse
The room goes quiet when Crew walks in and locks the door. Always does. Chairs stop scraping. Someone kills the radio in the back without being told.
Bishop's already at the table, Holt beside him with a laptop open, Ash leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. The room smells like stale coffee and gun oil, and nobody's touched the pot in the corner in an hour.
"Here’s what I know," Crew says, no preamble. "Lucas Wilhouse. Vipers' Prez. Butch's brother."
The name lands heavy in the room. I feel it settle over the table.
"Same Butch?" Holt asks, though he already knows the answer. He's confirming it out loud, for the record, the way he confirms everything.
"Same Butch." I sit down across from Crew. "Nora's late husband. Lucas blames her for his brother going legit. Blames her harder for him dying on a job Lucas talked him into."
"And now she's with you." Bishop says it flat, not a question. "Gravel King. Salt in an old wound."
"That's the read."
Iris turns her laptop around so the table can see it. Numbers, routes, a stack of financial records that mean nothing to me and everything to her.
"Viper accounts have been moving funds through some new shell companies the last two months," she says. "Right around when Lucas would've started hearing chatter about Nora and a Gravel King. Probably why that Vipers prospect got sent out to snoop around."
"Funding what?"
"Don't know yet. But it's organized. Somebody's building toward something real, not just running their mouth."
Ash pushes off the wall. "I'll run watch. Shop during the day, her place at night. Rotate brothers through so nobody burns out watching an empty street."
"You don't have to ask twice."
"Wasn't asking." He looks at me, steady. "She's good people. Kid's better. We're not letting anything happen to either of them."
I look around the table. Crew, Bishop, Holt, Ash. Every one of them already treating this like it's settled, like there was never a question of whether the club would step in. My hands are flat on the table and I don't remember putting them there.
I didn't ask for this.
When Crew patched me in, I wasn't looking for a woman. Wasn't looking for a kid. Hell, I wasn't looking for anything except a place to put the parts of me the military didn't know what to do with anymore.
Then Nora walked into her coffee shop every morning pretending she wasn't exhausted. Rose started telling me about unicorns and asking if I'd be back tomorrow. Somewhere between overpriced coffee and innocent conversations, the line moved without me noticing.
This isn't about doing the right thing anymore.
It's about getting home.
I push back from the table.
"I need to say this." I stand, because it feels like the kind of thing you say standing up. "Nora and Rose are mine to protect. Not asking permission. Telling you so everybody's clear."
Nobody argues. Nobody even blinks.
Bishop's the first to move. Stands, crosses to me, presses his fist against his own chest before driving it lightly against mine. Old ritual. I've seen it done for Sunshine, for Lila, for every woman who walked into this club and didn't walk back out alone.
Holt does the same. Then Ash, harder, the kind of hit that says he means it.
Crew watches the whole thing from his seat, arms crossed, eyes unreadable.
When the room settles he finally stands too. Walks over slow, the way he does everything, and looks at me a long moment before he says anything at all.
"Butch was Viper," he says. "But the kid and the woman, they're not Viper business. Not anymore. Not while you're standing between them and it."
"I'm standing between them and it."
He nods once. That's all it takes. Whatever weight that nod carries, every man at this table feels it land.
"Then it's settled," Crew says. "Whatever Lucas is building toward, he's not getting near either of them. Not on our watch."
Ash claps me on the shoulder on his way out the door, already pulling his phone out to set the rotation. Holt and Bishop fall into a conversation about the shell companies, heads bent together over Iris's laptop.
I stay where I am a minute longer. My knuckles ache where Ash's fist caught mine—good ache, the kind that means something happened.
I keep thinking about a version of me from before the coffee shop, the one who'd have handled a threat like this alone.
Cut through it clean, no club, no woman, no kid asleep down the hall of a townhouse that isn't mine yet but feels like it's getting there.
That man wouldn't have known what to do with a room full of brothers willing to bleed for people he'd known a matter of weeks.
I know exactly what to do with it now.
Feels like exactly the kind of trade worth making.