Chapter 2
TWO
HAWK
Lena called on a Wednesday night.
I was in the workshop, elbows deep in a transmission rebuild that had been fighting me since Monday, a job that required patience I didn't naturally possess and focus I was grateful for because it kept my brain from wandering.
My phone buzzed on the bench. Lena's name on the screen.
I wiped my hands on a rag and picked up.
"Hey, little sister."
"Hey, big brother. I need a favour."
She never called without a reason, which I respected. She said what she needed, I said yes or no, we moved on. I’d never been great with small talk.
"Bree needs a job," she said.
The name landed in a place I didn't want it to land. I let it sit there for a beat, then shoved it somewhere it couldn't do any damage.
Bree. Lena's best friend since they were teenagers.
The bright one, the loud one, the girl who'd been underfoot at every family dinner and holiday since Lena was sixteen.
Always laughing, always warm, always filling whatever room she was in with a noise that should have been annoying but wasn't. She had a way of looking at you that made you feel like the only person in the room, and she'd been looking at me that way since she was old enough to know what it meant.
I'd pretended not to notice. For fifteen years, I'd pretended not to notice, because she was younger, then she was Lena’s friend, and she was just a civilian who didn't belong anywhere near the world I lived in. The unpredictable military life where I could get called away at a moment’s notice.
The reasons shifted over the years, but the distance stayed the same.
I hadn't seen her in a while and I'd noticed that too.
"What kind of job?" I asked, keeping my voice flat, practical.
"Bartending, waitressing, anything. She lost her temp gig and she's struggling. Is there anything going at Angel's Rest?"
There was, actually. One of the girls had quit last week, something about a boyfriend in Billings, and the shifts hadn't been covered yet. I could talk to Marcy, the woman who managed the day-to-day. Easy. Done.
"I'll sort it," I said.
"Thank you. She's good, Hawk. She's really good with people. She'll be an asset."
"I said I'll sort it, you don’t need to sell me on it.”
Lena laughed. "You're such a conversationalist. Love you."
"Love you too."
I hung up. Stood there with the phone in my hand, the rag in the other, oil on my fingers and something restless turning over in my chest that I hadn't felt in a long time.
Bree. Behind my club's bar. Every shift, every night, right there in my space where I couldn't look away from her the way I'd spent fifteen years learning to do.
I remembered the first time she'd looked at me and I'd known it wasn't casual.
She'd been nineteen, maybe twenty, sitting cross-legged on Lena's couch at some birthday thing, laughing at something with her head thrown back.
She'd caught me watching and the laugh had died on her lips and her eyes had gone soft, open, and the heat that passed between us had been so sudden, so specific, that I'd turned around and walked out of the room.
She was still technically a teenager and I'd been twenty-eight with a dishonorable discharge looming and blood on my hands and no business looking at my sister's friend like that.
She wasn’t that anymore though and hadn't been for years.
I called Marcy, vouched for Bree, and she told Bree to start as soon as she could. Then I went back to the transmission and stayed there for three hours, my hands were busy but my brain refusing to cooperate.
Angel's Rest on a Friday night was the closest thing Forsaken had to a pulse.
The bar was built onto the front of the compound, facing the private road where it opened onto the highway.
Public entrance at the front, a low timber building with a tin roof, neon in the window, a porch that wrapped around two sides.
The kind of place that looked like any roadside bar in Montana if you didn't know what was behind it.
Inside, it was dark wood, low light, a jukebox in the corner that played whatever someone had fed it quarters for.
The crack of pool balls from the back table, the clink of glasses, the hum of conversation layered over all of it.
It wasn't fancy. It wasn't trying to be.
It was a place where you came in dirty from work and nobody looked twice, where the stools had grooves worn into them from years of the same bodies in the same spots.
Behind the bar, a heavy door marked STAFF ONLY opened into a corridor that connected to the lodge. The public never saw that door open. Brothers walked through it all night, between drinks and church, between the face they showed the world and the business we kept behind it.
The Angels Rest owned the club . Brothers drank there most nights, bikes lined up out front, cuts draped over barstools.
Truckers passing through on Route 12 stopped for a cold one and a plate of whatever the kitchen was running.
Hikers wandered in during summer, stayed for the atmosphere, left good tips.
Locals filled the gaps, the same faces in the same seats, week after week.
I was in that booth when Bree walked in for her first shift.
I'd told myself I was there because Friday nights got busy and it was smart to have a brother on-site. I'd told myself that, and almost believed it, right up until the front door opened and she stepped through and every excuse I'd built dissolved on contact.
She wasn't making an entrance. She was just walking into a bar, in jeans and a black t-shirt, her hair pulled back, a bag over her shoulder.
But the room shifted. I couldn't explain it any other way.
The energy of the place changed when she came through the door, the way air changes before a storm, charged, different, waiting.
Marcy met her at the bar, showed her the taps, the till, where the glasses lived, the rhythm of the place.
Bree listened, nodded, asked two questions, tied on an apron.
Within twenty minutes she had old Hank's name and his drink order memorised.
Within an hour she had the regulars at the bar laughing at something I couldn't hear from the booth, their bodies angled toward her, their faces open.
She was good at this. Naturally, effortlessly good with people, the way some people are good with horses or engines, an instinct she didn't have to think about.
I watched her move behind the bar. Confident, easy, no wasted motion.
She poured drinks with one hand and cleared empties with the other, kept three conversations going at once, remembered who was waiting and in what order.
She handled the rough edges of a biker bar without blinking.
When a regular made a joke that was more vulgar than funny, she fired back something sharper and the whole bar laughed, including the man who'd started it.
She wasn't sixteen anymore.
I knew that. I'd known it for years, in the abstract, the way you know that time has passed and people change.
But knowing it as a fact and seeing it standing behind my club's bar in a t-shirt that fitted her in ways I was trying very hard not to notice were different things entirely.
She was a grown woman, and the girl I'd dismissed as my sister's friend had become someone I couldn't stop watching.
The curve of her when she reached for a bottle on the top shelf.
The way her laugh carried across the room, warm, genuine, a laugh that made you want to be the reason for it.
The way she caught my eye once, across the crowded bar, and something passed between us that sat in my chest and burned.
I looked away. Took a drink. Told myself to stop.
She was Lena's best friend. She was off limits. She was bright and warm and good and the world I lived in ate things like that alive. I was the club's enforcer. My hands had done things that a woman like Bree shouldn't be anywhere near.
But I stayed in that back booth for her whole first shift with a whiskey I was barely drinking, watching the room the way I always did.
When a guy at the bar leaned too far over the counter talking to her, my eyes tracked it before I'd made a conscious decision to look.
When she went out back to grab a case of bottles, I was on my feet before I registered I'd moved.
I caught myself and sat back down.
Brothers came and went through the evening.
Duke racked up at the pool table, talked shit to anyone who'd listen, beat two locals and bought them drinks afterwards because that was Duke.
Doc sat at the end of the bar, nursing something clear, reading his phone with the focused intensity of a man who was never fully off-duty.
Rook passed through briefly, spoke to Angel out back for five minutes, left without ordering.
Razor was in the corner with Priest, the two of them doing what they always did, existing in each other's orbit without needing to fill the silence.
Callie was there too, settled at a table near the window with a book and a glass of wine.
She'd become part of the landscape since Angel claimed her, woven into the compound and the town in a way that fit.
When Bree brought her a refill, they talked for a minute.
Callie smiled, said something that made Bree laugh.
Two women meeting for the first time and finding an easy wavelength.
Angel was in his usual spot at the bar, one eye on the room, one on whatever Rook had told him. He caught my eye once across the floor. Held it. I saw the question there, the one he didn't need to ask out loud because Angel and I had been reading each other for twenty years.
I gave him nothing back. Because there was nothing to give.
Church was brief that night. After closing, the brothers went through the back corridor to the lodge. Angel at the head of the table, Ghost on his right, me on his left.
"Jackals have been busy," Angel said. "Two riders through town last week. Didn't stop, didn't cause trouble, but they were seen. Hank flagged them."
"Scouting?" Duke asked.
"Testing. Seeing what we do, how fast we respond, whether we're paying attention." Angel leaned back. "They've been pushing all quarter. Small moves. Nothing that warrants a full response, but the pattern's there."
"How long do we watch before we do something about it?" Razor asked. Flat, direct.
"Until I say otherwise," Angel said. "Eyes on the roads, ears open. Hawk, I want the compound routes tightened. If someone's riding through our territory, I want to know about it before they hit Main Street."
I nodded. The Jackals had been a low hum of irritation for months, never quite loud enough to demand action, never quite quiet enough to ignore. Angel's instincts were worth trusting. If he said watch, I watched.
Church ended. The brothers scattered. I went back through to the bar, because Bree was still closing up and someone needed to make sure the place was locked down. That was the reason. The only reason, and still I was lying to myself.
Bree was finishing behind the counter. Wiping things down, stacking glasses, the last of the closing routine.
Marcy had left an hour ago, trusting her to handle it, which said something about how fast she'd earned that trust. The bar was empty now, just the two of us and the low hum of the fridge and the smell of spilled beer and old timber.
She looked up when I came through the door. Her face was flushed from the shift, her hair coming loose from whatever she'd tied it back with. She looked tired and alive, and I wanted to turn around and keep walking until whatever I was feeling wore off.
"Good first night," I said. Because I had to say something and that was the safest option.
"Yeah?" She smiled. Not the performance smile, the one she'd been wearing all night for the customers. This one was smaller, warmer, aimed just at me. "Marcy didn't fire me, so I'm counting it as a win."
"Marcy doesn't fire anyone. She just stops putting them on the rota and lets them figure it out."
She laughed. The sound hit me somewhere behind my sternum, a thud I felt all the way down.
"Thanks for getting me in," she said. "I know Lena asked, but you didn't have to."
"It's nothing."
"It's not nothing. Not to me."
She held my gaze for a second too long. I could see it there, the thing she'd been carrying since she was sixteen, the thing I'd been pretending didn't exist because acknowledging it meant doing something about it and I had never been able to figure out what that something should be.
She was looking at me the way she'd always looked at me, open, unguarded, fifteen years of wanting sitting right there on her face where anyone could see it.
I should have said goodnight. I should have grabbed my jacket and walked out.
"Lock up when you're done," I said. "I'll be outside."
I went out to the porch. Leaned against the railing. The night air was cold, sharp with pine and the first bite of mountain autumn. My bike was parked with the others along the side of the building. I lit a cigarette I didn't really want and waited.
Ten minutes later, the lights inside went off. The front door opened. Bree stepped out, bag over her shoulder, keys in her hand.
"You waited," she said.
"Making sure you got to your car safe."
She looked at me. Then at her car, parked twenty feet away in a gravel lot on a compound full of armed ex-military men dotted around behind us.
"Right," she said. "Because I'm in so much danger here."
She was laughing at me. I could hear it, the warmth of it, the affection underneath the teasing, and I wanted to close my hand around the sound and keep it somewhere safe.
"Goodnight, Bree."
"Goodnight, Hawk."
She walked to her car. Got in. The engine turned over, the headlights came on, and she pulled out onto the private road that led back to the highway. I watched the taillights all the way down the gravel, through the trees, until the darkness swallowed them.
I finished the cigarette. Ground it under my boot. Went back inside, through the corridor, up the stairs to my room.
I told myself this was what I'd do for anyone. Any friend of Lena's, any woman closing up alone. I'd have waited. I'd have watched.
The lie followed me all the way to bed.