Chapter 17
Loco
North Carolina hit different after being back in DC.
The air was thicker, slower. Pine and damp earth instead of exhaust and concrete.
Even the sky felt wider, like it had room to breathe.
I rode in under a late afternoon sun, the highway unwinding into back roads I could’ve navigated blindfolded.
The mountains came into view easing the tension in my body.
Home.
And still, my chest felt unsettled. Because home wasn’t fully home without her.
Home had felt like her apartment. Her couch. Her laugh in the kitchen when I said something smart just to see if she would smile. It had felt like waking up to quiet that wasn’t lonely, the kind of quiet that meant someone was there even if they weren’t talking.
I rolled up to the clubhouse with the familiar crunch of gravel under my tires, killed the engine, and sat for a beat with my hands on the grips. The building looked the same as ever, brick and steel and stubbornness. Men posted outside, heads turning as I pulled in.
A nod here. A lift of a chin there.
I was back.
My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket before I even swung my leg off the bike.
I already knew.
I didn’t look at the screen right away, didn’t want to seem hungry for it, but my body betrayed me. My mouth went dry. My heartbeat hitched.
Nita.
I answered on the second ring. “Yeah.”
Her voice came through like a hand settling on my chest. “You make it?”
“Just pulled in.”
“Be careful,” she said, like she could see the building behind me and knew exactly the kind of trouble it could breed.
“I always am.”
There was a pause, the softest sound of her breathing. “That’s not what I mean.”
I stepped away from the guys lingering out front, pushing through the door, letting the dim interior swallow me. The clubhouse smelled like beer, sweat, leather, and history. Same old ghosts, same old rules.
“I know what you mean,” I murmured. “I’m good.”
“You better be,” she said.
I smiled without meaning to.
And that was the thing that kept knocking me sideways, how relaxed I felt hearing her. How something inside me unclenched just because she existed on the other end of a line.
I ended the call, pocketed my phone, and went straight to Dippy.
He was in the back room where he always was when he wasn’t riding, laptop open, fingers flying, a cigarette burning down in an ashtray like it was an afterthought.
The glow from the screen made him look younger than he was, but his eyes were the same as they’d always been—sharp, restless, always searching for the angle.
He didn’t look up when I walked in. “You’re late.”
“I’m not on your schedule.”
He smirked. “Everybody’s on my schedule, old man. They just don’t know it.”
I shut the door behind me. “I need something.” That got his attention.
He glanced up, eyes narrowing. “That’s not ominous at all.”
I took my phone out and set it on the table. “Her.”
He didn’t ask who. Didn’t need to. Dippy leaned back in his chair, studying me like I had grown a second head. “You know you’re going down bad, right? First Gonzo, now you. If Tower shacks up, we’re all done for.”
I stared him down.
He held up both hands. “Okay, okay. What do you want?”
I exhaled, slow. This part made my jaw tighten because I already knew what it was, control. Habit. The ugly part of me that didn’t trust peace. “She lives in DC,” I shared. “Apartment in the suburbs but not far out of the city limits. Secure building. But secure doesn’t mean untouchable.”
Dippy’s smile faded into something more serious. “You’re worried.”
“I don’t like not seeing what’s around her,” I admitted, and the words tasted like rust in my mouth.
He tilted his head. “Does she know you’re like this?”
“No,” I stated flatly.
Dippy tapped ash into the tray. “You want me to install cameras in her apartment?”
“No,” I snapped, then tempered my voice. “Nothing inside.”
He watched me a moment longer. “Outside?”
I didn’t answer right away. Because the truth was this wasn’t about outside. Not really. It was about my chest tightening at the thought of her alone, of her walking through her building with someone watching her, of some threat I couldn’t put a beat on because I was hundreds of miles away.
“I want eyes on her door,” I stated carefully.
“Her entry. Her hallway. The garage, if you can get it. Building cams if there are any accessible feeds loop in and if we need to send out a company to set them up, call the property managers and get it worked out where she doesn’t know it’s on her specifically. I want all angles.”
Dippy whistled low. “You know how that sounds, right?”
“I know how it sounds,” I corrected. “And it is exactly what it sounds like. A man protecting his woman until shit can be sorted that we aren’t hundreds of miles apart.”
He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “Is she in danger?”
“I don’t know,” I shared. “And that’s the problem.”
Dippy studied me, then sighed like he’d been waiting for me to ask this for years. “Give me her address.”
I hesitated half a beat, because some line still existed in my head, thin and frayed, but there. Then in a split second, I crossed it.
I gave him what he needed.
He typed. Clicked. His screen filled with windows and scrolling lines of things I didn’t understand and didn’t want to.
“You’re not putting anything inside her apartment,” I reminded, voice hard.
Dippy glanced at me like I was adorable.
“You think I need inside? You got a front door cam? A hallway cam? That’s enough.
You want me to get something inside, I got an HVAC guy that can make a service call and make it happen, but without you giving me the word, not doin’ that shit brother.
This woman matters that is clear as day. ”
My stomach tightened.
“Dante,” he spoke, softer, “you sure you want this?”
I stared at the screen, at the flickers of a place that belonged to her, that I had stood in and left. “I want to know she’s safe.”
Dippy nodded once, like that was the only justification he needed. “All right. I can route it through a secure channel. You’ll have a feed on your phone. Alerts if there’s motion at her door. Faces, too, if the resolution’s good.”
“Do it,” I ordered.
He worked fast. Too fast. It made my skin crawl a little, how easy it was for him to reach across distance and touch someone’s world. I knew he did this regularly for club needs, but seeing it firsthand in real time was a different experience.
When he was done, he slid my phone back toward me. “You’ll get a ping if someone lingers. If her door opens at weird hours. If somebody follows her into the garage.”
I picked up the phone, screen showing a still frame of her hallway—clean, bright, empty.
Relief hit first. Then guilt tried to crawl up behind it. I shoved the guilt down.
“This stays between us,” I told him not that I needed to.
Dippy’s mouth twisted. “Nothing to it, brother.”
I left him there and walked out into the main room where the club noise swallowed all thoughts. Men talking. Laughter. A pool ball cracking. The smell of whiskey and bodies.
Gonzo was at the bar, big shoulders taking up space like always. IvaLeigh standing in front of him between his legs as he sat on the stool. He looked up when he saw me, nodded once, then jerked his chin toward the back. I took the cue and headed back.
We talked business for an hour, territory, a dispute that needed smoothing, a supply line that had gone shaky.
As the treasurer, my absence left gaps in information hitting him quickly so we needed a debrief of the club shit.
These were the kind of things that kept a club alive and got men buried if they handled it wrong.
But even while I talked, my phone felt like a weight in my pocket.
Not because of the feeds.
Because of her. I hated that a phone was my life line to her, our only connection right now.
Three days went by like that—club chaos layered over the quiet pulse of something new. Nita and I talked at night.
Sometimes it was ten minutes. Sometimes it was an hour.
She would sit on her couch, I could hear the city through her window, distant sirens and the low hum of traffic.
I would sit on the porch of my small cabin the quiet of the night around me.
And every time her voice hit my ear, something in me unclenched.
On the third night, she laughed at something I said, an actual laugh, not the polite kind, and I found myself smiling at the dark like an idiot.
“What?” she asked.
“I feel,” I started, then stopped.
“Feel what?” she pressed.
I exhaled. “Relaxed.”
Silence. Then softer, “You? Relaxed? That’s new.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “I didn’t realize how tight I’ve been living until,” I paused. “Until you.”
Her breath came through the phone, slow. “That scares me.”
“Me too,” I shared honestly.
She didn’t tease me for it. Didn’t make it into a joke. She just let it be true. And that, that shit did something to me.
Two nights later, Gonzo told me there was a run to Arkansas.
Club business. A meet that needed muscle just by showing up, a reminder to some people out there that Saints didn’t move light.
We were taking Wrath’s back and since the man ran a tight club, we needed to be there.
It was reciprocated. Anytime we needed something Wrath and the Bella Vista chapter would drop everything for us.
This was the kind of thing you didn’t turn down. I called her before we left, leaning against my bike while men loaded up.
“Arkansas?” she repeated. “That’s a ride.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be careful.”
“I always am,” I stated, and then added, because I’d learned she needed the truth, not the script, “But I’ll stay in touch. Whenever I can.”
“I don’t need constant check-ins,” she shared. “You’re a grown man. Do what you do, Dante. I’ll be here. I don’t have to talk to you every day, even though I do like it.”
I smiled. “I do. I need the check-in because I don’t want you to slip away.”
She huffed softly. “Of course you do.”