Chapter 2
Ace
She holds on like I’m the only thing keeping her from falling off the edge of the world.
Maybe I am.
Her arms lock around my waist, trembling at first, then tighter when the bike takes the first hard curve. Her cheek presses between my shoulder blades, right against my cut, right over the patch that tells every bastard in these mountains exactly who I am.
Damned Saints MC.
My family.
My warning.
Reina breathes against my back, and every one of those breaths hits harder than the bullet in my shoulder.
That should be what I’m thinking about.
The blood soaking my shirt. The burn digging deep every time I lean into a curve. The two men I left breathing in the dirt because I need information more than corpses. The third man still inside the cabin.
Instead, all I feel is her.
Soft body pressed tight to mine.
Fingers clutching my shirt.
Breath hitching every time the road dips or the trees close in.
There’s blood on her. Blood on me. Gravel dust sharp in my throat and cold air cutting through every breath.
And I still notice her.
The warmth of her against my back.
The small grip of her hands at my stomach.
The way she holds on like I’m safe.
I tighten my grip on the throttle.
She shouldn’t trust me.
She’s young. Too young for the damage in her eyes. Early twenties. Fifteen years younger than me, at least. Soft in ways this world likes to bruise. Curvy in a way that makes my hands remember they were hands before they were weapons.
I got her out.
That’s where this ends.
That’s where it has to end.
And when she looked at me in that clearing, wide hazel eyes blown dark with terror, blood on her scrubs, freckles standing out against pale skin, something inside me moved.
Locked on.
Claimed without permission.
I know better than that.
I know a woman like Reina should be taken somewhere bright and clean, handed to people with badges and clipboards, wrapped in a blanket, and kept far away from men like me.
Men with ghosts.
Men with guns.
Men who know how to kill a threat in under three seconds and sleep afterward.
Except the second I saw her, all I thought was mine to protect.
That word is still sitting in my chest like a live round.
Mine.
I don’t do mine.
I have a cabin in the woods because I like distance.
I have a bed big enough for one because I don’t bring soft things home.
I have a safe full of weapons, a drawer full of old scars that live inside my head, and a coffee mug with a crack down the side because I never remember to replace anything that still works.
That is my life.
Quiet.
Empty on purpose.
Then she wraps around me like she belongs there, and the road under my tires feels like it’s taking me somewhere I was always headed.
Dangerous thought.
I shove it down.
The bike growls beneath us. The mountain road bends around the ridge, dark trees flashing by on both sides. Lovestone Ridge sits somewhere behind us, all sleepy streetlamps and locked doors. Ahead, my cabin waits in the pines, far enough from town that a man can hear trouble coming if he wants to.
I want to.
Always have.
My mother died when I was a kid. Cancer ate her slow, and my father loved her so hard it hollowed him out when she was gone. I remember him sitting in the kitchen after the funeral, one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee gone cold, staring at the chair she used to sit in.
He never said love ruined him.
He didn’t have to.
I watched it happen.
Years later, war took him the rest of the way.
Then it took my brother too.
Different places. Same flag over the coffins. Same folded triangle handed over like that could fill the hole.
I learned the lesson young.
Love gives the world a handle. Something to grab. Something to tear out of your hands while you stand there bleeding and useless.
So I became useful in other ways.
Navy.
SEAL teams.
Extractions.
Night work.
Doors kicked in and bodies pulled out. Sometimes alive. Sometimes too late. I got good at moving through gunfire. Good at knowing which shadows held danger. Good at turning fear into math.
Distance. Angle. Threat. Exit.
That’s all tonight should have been.
Havoc, the Prez, had me running the back roads after word came in about a cartel dispute near the old logging cut. Nothing official. Just noise in the dark. A shipment argument. A crew moving stupid. Men with more bullets than brains.
I was supposed to check the area and report back.
Then I heard the shot.
Then I saw her run.
A man came out of that cabin with a gun aimed at her.
I moved.
Simple.
The bullet punched into my shoulder, shallow enough not to slow me much, deep enough to piss me off. He shot at her. That’s all my head had room for.
He shot at a woman running scared through the dark.
He shot at Reina.
My jaw locks.
Her fingers tighten against my stomach, like she feels the anger move through me.
I cover one of her hands with mine for half a second. I shouldn’t. Both hands belong on the bike. Both hands belong on the mission. Both hands belong anywhere but on her.
I do it anyway.
She stills behind me.
Then she melts closer.
Fuck.
One small touch, and I feel it through my whole body.
She trusts me.
After what those bastards did, after the gun and the cabin and the blood, she presses closer because my hand over hers makes her feel safer.
I don’t deserve that.
I want it anyway.
That is the problem.
My comms buzz in my ear.
I tap the unit clipped under my collar. “Ace.”
Ghost’s voice comes through. “You good?”
Ghost is the club enforcer. Quiet, steady, loyal down to the bone.
“Got a problem,” I say.
“What kind?”
I glance in the mirror. Reina’s face is tucked against my back. Her eyes are closed, but she isn’t sleeping. Her hands are still locked tight around me.
“Found a nurse running from two armed men. Third man inside with a gunshot wound. They forced her to treat him.”
The arms around me tighten.
“I got her out,” I add.
“Where?”
“Old hunter’s cabin north of Miller Creek. About two miles off Ridge Road.”
“Got it,” Ghost says. “We’ll handle it.”
“She hurt?”
“Shaken. Blood on her isn’t hers.”
I need to check her properly. Need better light. Need my hands on her skin only for injuries, because anything else would make me the worst kind of bastard.
Ghost says, “You hit?”
I look down at the dark wet spreading under my cut.
“Barely.”
Reina lifts her head.
I feel it more than see it.
Ghost exhales, short and sharp. “Your barely usually means bleeding.”
“Shoulder. Through meat. I’m riding.”
“I’ll send Viper and Blade,” Ghost says. “We’ll clean it up.”
“Copy. And Ghost?”
“Yeah.”
“The nurse is under my protection.”
Silence.
Then, “Figured.”
The line clicks off.
Reina’s voice comes soft behind me, barely loud enough over the wind. “You’re hurt.”
First words since we left the cabin.
My chest tightens around them.
“Barely,” I say.
Her arms tense. “That’s what you told him.”
“That’s because it’s true.”
“You were shot.”
“Had worse.”
She goes quiet.
Wrong answer.
I know it the second the words leave my mouth. She isn’t one of my brothers. She isn’t Ghost or Havoc or Blade, trained to measure injury by whether I can still stand. She’s a nurse. A woman who was taken at gunpoint and still tried to save the man bleeding on a table.
Soft heart.
Steel spine.
Dangerous combination.
I ease off the throttle as my turn comes up, gravel crunching under the tires when I leave the main road.
“My place is close,” I tell her. “I’ll let you look at it there.”
“Let me?” she asks, and there’s the faintest tremble of fire in her voice.
My mouth twitches.
There she is.
Scared out of her mind, still bristling because I phrased medical care like a favor.
“Bad wording, sweetheart.”
She doesn’t answer, but her grip changes. Loosens a little. Then settles again.
Sweetheart.
I called her that without thinking, and now the word is burned into me.
I should stop.
I won’t.
The cabin appears through the trees, porch light glowing over old wood and stone.
The place is nothing fancy. One room with a small kitchen along one wall, a bed tucked in the corner, two chairs near the fireplace, and a bathroom behind the only inside door.
Weapons locked where they belong. Medical kit stocked because men like me are always pretending blood is an inconvenience.
It’s built for solitude.
Reina behind me makes that solitude feel thin.
I roll the bike to a stop near the porch and kill the engine. The sudden silence lands heavy. Crickets. Wind in the pines. Her breath, too close and too unsteady.
For a second, neither of us moves.
Her arms are still around me.
I give myself one heartbeat to feel it.
One.
Then I cover her hands and loosen them gently.
“We’re here.”
She pulls back, and the cold hits where her warmth was.
I get off first, ignoring the hot pull in my shoulder. When I turn, she’s sitting on my bike with blood on her scrubs and the kind of eyes that make a man want to burn down the whole world for scaring her.
Too young.
Too sweet.
Too damn good for my hands.
I reach for her anyway.
“Come on, Reina.”
She looks at my hand, then at the cabin, then back at me.
Trust is a fragile thing.
I can see the exact second she decides to give me another piece of it.
Her hand slips into mine.
I help her down, keeping my grip steady when her legs wobble. She lands close enough that I catch the soft sound she makes when my thumb brushes her wrist.
It hits me low.
Hard.
I step back because I’m not an animal.
Or because I’m trying very hard not to be.
Her bag is tucked in the side compartment. I pull it out and hand it to her.
She hugs it against her chest.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
Those two words do something ugly to me.
Make me want to kneel.
Make me want to rage.
Make me want things I buried years ago because wanting never saved anyone.
I turn toward the cabin before she can read any of that on my face.
“Inside,” I say, softer than I mean to. “Then you can check my shoulder.”
“And then?”
I pause with my hand on the door.
Then I look back at her.
Her hair is a mess. Her eyes are too big. Her freckles are bright across her nose, and there is dried blood on her hands, and I know right then I’m not letting her out of my sight until every man connected to that cabin is handled.
Maybe not even then.
“Then the club handles the rest,” I say. “And we keep you safe.”
She swallows.
“We?”
“The Damned Saints.”
I push the door open, warm light spilling over the porch between us.
“My brothers,” I add. “My family.”
Her gaze flicks past me into the cabin, then returns to my face.
Something in her softens at the word family.
Something in me cracks because I see it.
The hunger.
The hurt.
The hope she probably thinks she’s hiding.
I know that look. Different reasons, same ache.
I step aside, giving her room.
She walks in.
The cabin has never looked smaller. Or warmer. Or more dangerous to everything I thought I knew about myself.
I follow her inside and shut the door behind us.