Chapter 6
Jimmy laughed, and Debbie nearly dropped the coffee pot.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd heard that sound—full and real, not the nervous bark he'd been producing for months.
He was sitting cross-legged on the safehouse floor with a deck of cards, trying to replicate something Hollow had just shown him, his tongue poking out in concentration while Hollow leaned back on the couch and watched with the patience of a man who had absolutely nowhere else to be.
"No, flip it under," Hollow said. "Under. You're going over the top like a civilian."
"I am a civilian."
"Not anymore. You're learning outlaw card tricks. This is sacred knowledge. Generations of bikers doing time have perfected this shuffle."
"You learned this in prison?"
"I learned this between deployments when there was nothing to do but play poker and lie about women." Hollow grinned. "The lying part I was already good at."
Jimmy fumbled the card, lost the shuffle, and the deck exploded across the floor. He groaned. Hollow threw his head back and laughed—that big, booming sound that filled every room he was in, the laugh that made strangers in diners look over and smile without knowing why.
Debbie poured her coffee and leaned against the kitchen doorway, watching them.
Twenty-four hours in this safehouse. Twenty-four hours of locked doors and drawn curtains and a man who checked the windows every thirty minutes with a precision that made the rest of his behavior—the jokes, the card tricks, the easy grin—feel like a magic trick.
Like he was running two programs at once: entertainer in the foreground, something much more dangerous in the background.
She'd woken that morning to find him still in the hallway. Not sleeping—sitting against the wall with the blanket around his shoulders and his eyes open, watching the stairs. He'd looked up when her door opened and smiled like it was Christmas morning.
"Coffee's already on," he'd said. "I got bored around four and figured out your machine."
"My machine is a Mr. Coffee from 2009. It has one button."
"Took me three tries. Don't judge."
She'd stepped over his legs—he didn't move them, made her navigate around him, his grin widening when her shin brushed his knee—and gone downstairs to find the kitchen clean, coffee hot, and Jimmy still dead asleep on the couch.
The domesticity of it had thrown her. This wasn't what she'd expected from a motorcycle club vice president.
She'd expected grim men with guns, not a man who made coffee and taught her brother card tricks.
But then Hollow had excused himself for a phone call, stepping onto the back porch and closing the door, and she'd heard his voice change through the glass.
Low, clipped, the warmth stripped out. She'd caught fragments—Sykes, warehouses, Durkin's crew—and remembered that the man making her coffee was the same man who'd thrown someone through her window twelve hours ago.
Both things were true. That was what unsettled her.
"Your turn." Hollow gathered the scattered cards and held the deck out to her. "Come on. Sit down."
"I'm fine."
"You've been standing in that doorway for twenty minutes watching us like a prison guard. Sit down, drink your coffee, and let me teach you something useless."
"I don't need to learn card tricks."
"Nobody needs card tricks. That's what makes them great." He patted the cushion next to him. "Sit."
She sat. Not because he told her to—she'd have to make that clear later—but because her legs were tired and the couch was there and he was warm.
He ran hot, she'd noticed. Standing near him was like standing near a furnace, heat radiating off him in waves, and in the drafty safehouse that warmth kept pulling her closer.
He showed her the shuffle—something with the fingers that looked simple and wasn't. His hands were huge, scarred across the knuckles, but they moved the cards with a dexterity that seemed impossible. She tried it. Failed. Tried again.
"Slower," he said, and his hand covered hers on the deck—adjusting her grip, his fingers guiding hers through the motion. The touch was light, almost casual, but his thumb traced across her wrist and stayed there, resting on her pulse point.
She looked up. He was watching her, not the cards.
"You're not teaching me anything," she said.
"I'm teaching you plenty. You're just not paying attention to the cards." His thumb moved against her wrist, slow and deliberate. "Your pulse is fast."
"I've had a lot of coffee."
"Liar."
She pulled her hand back. He let her go, easy, no pressure—but the grin said he'd felt exactly what he wanted to feel.
Jimmy, mercifully oblivious, was practicing his shuffle on the floor. "I almost got it. Watch—"
"Show me," Hollow said, turning his attention back to Jimmy with the seamless warmth that made him so disorienting.
One second his eyes were on Debbie like she was the only thing in the room; the next he was coaching her brother through a card trick with the enthusiasm of a man who had nothing better to do.
She excused herself to the kitchen and stood at the sink, gripping the counter, willing her pulse to slow down.
This was not happening. She was not developing feelings for a man who solved problems with his fists and called her my woman in front of strangers.
She had a diner to rebuild, a brother to save, a life to put back together.
She did not have time for a six-foot wall of muscle with a grin that made her stupid.
Her pulse disagreed.
The afternoon passed in pieces. Hollow kept Jimmy occupied—cards, then stories about brothers at the compound that had Jimmy laughing until his bruised ribs ached, then a long conversation about motorcycles that Debbie half-listened to while she took inventory of the safehouse kitchen and planned meals from canned goods.
She cooked dinner from what was available—canned chicken, rice, some spices she found in the back of a cabinet. It wasn't diner quality, but it was hot and filling, and Hollow ate three plates and declared it the second-best meal he'd ever had.
"Second-best?" she said.
"Your meatloaf's still number one. I'm loyal."
"To meatloaf."
"To you. The meatloaf is a bonus."
Jimmy looked between them with the expression of a man watching something he wasn't sure he wanted to see. "Are you two—"
"No," Debbie said.
"Not yet," Hollow said at the same time.
Jimmy wisely decided to do the dishes.
The evening settled in quiet and heavy, the safehouse growing dark as the sun dropped behind the Lawrenceville rooftops.
Hollow checked windows in his circuit—front, back, upstairs, down—and Debbie watched him move through the house and tried to reconcile the contradictions.
The man who'd made her brother laugh for the first time in months.
The man who'd beaten Ray Durkin unconscious without breaking a sweat.
The man who checked her pulse with his thumb and looked at her like she was something precious.
She found herself near him again without meaning to—standing in the front room while he peered through the curtain at the street, close enough to feel his heat.
"Tell me about you," she said. "Not the club stuff. You."
He let the curtain fall and turned. "What do you want to know?"
"Why Hollow?"
His grin shifted—still there, but with something behind it. "My crew. The helicopter. I was the only one who walked away." He said it simply, no drama, no bid for sympathy. "Hollow because that's what was left after. The guys at the club thought it fit."
"Does it?"
"Used to. Less now."
"What changed?"
He looked at her, and the joking was gone. Just him, raw and real, standing in a dark room with the streetlight cutting across his face.
"Found things to fill it up," he said. "Brothers. The club. Meatloaf on Thursday nights."
"And now?"
"Now there's you."
She should have deflected. Should have rolled her eyes, called him a headache, done any of the things she'd been doing for two years to keep this man at arm's length.
But his voice was quiet and his eyes were steady and he wasn't performing—wasn't flirting, wasn't pushing, just telling her something true.
"I've been carrying alone for a long time," she said. "Since I was twenty-two. My dad died, my mom got sick, Jimmy was twelve and somebody had to keep everything running. So I did. The diner, the bills, Jimmy, all of it. Fourteen years."
"I know."
"You don't know what it's like to—"
"I know what it's like to be the one who's left standing." His voice was gentle. "Different war, same weight."
The silence between them was warm. Not charged, not electric—just warm. Two people standing in the dark, carrying things they'd been carrying alone, and for one moment letting someone else see the load.
"I'm scared," she said. The words came out before she could stop them, and she hated them, hated the vulnerability, hated that he was the one hearing it. "Not of Sykes. Of what happens after. If my diner's destroyed, if Jimmy can't—"
"Hey." He stepped close, cupped her face in one big hand, his thumb tracing her cheekbone. "Your diner's going to be fine. Jimmy's going to be fine. I'm going to make sure of it."
"You can't promise that."
"Watch me."
His phone rang.
He pulled it from his pocket without stepping back, his hand still on her face, and answered with his eyes on hers. "Yeah."
She couldn't hear the other end, but she watched his expression change—the warmth draining out, the switch flipping, the man who'd been touching her cheek becoming something harder and colder in the space of a heartbeat.
"How many?" His hand dropped from her face. "When? ... Yeah. Yeah, we're ready."
He hung up and looked at her, and the man looking back wasn't the one who'd been holding her face ten seconds ago.
"That was Ash. Sykes traced us through his network contacts—someone in the neighborhood saw Parkway's truck." His jaw set. "He's sending a crew tonight. Durkin and whoever he can pull together."
"How many?"
"Enough." Hollow was already moving, pulling out his phone, texting fast. "Get Jimmy. Put him in the upstairs bathroom—no windows, one door. Stay with him."
"Hollow—"
"Debbie." He caught her arm as she turned, pulled her close, his hand on her hip, his mouth near her ear. "I need you safe. That's not negotiable. Please."
The please undid her. Not the command—she could fight commands all day. But the please, low and rough, from a man who didn't ask for things.
"Okay," she said.
She got Jimmy. He didn't argue—one look at her face and he was moving, following her upstairs, folding himself into the bathroom with the blank acceptance of a kid who'd been living in crisis mode for months.
She sat on the edge of the tub with her arm around his shoulders and listened to the house below them come alive with quiet, purposeful sound.
Boots on hardwood. The click of locks being tested. Hollow's voice, low and steady, and then Parkway's, and then others she didn't recognize—brothers arriving, filing in, taking positions.
Jimmy's breathing was shallow against her shoulder. She held him tighter.
Somewhere downstairs, Hollow laughed—short, sharp, nothing funny about it—and said something she couldn't make out. Another voice answered. The front door opened and closed.
Then silence.
Debbie pressed her back against the bathroom wall, her brother's head on her shoulder, and waited for whatever came next.