Chapter 23 Nita
Nita
I expected North Carolina to feel temporary. Like a borrowed sweater, warm enough, but not mine. Instead, it wrapped around me and fit in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
The drive down was quiet, the kind of silence that doesn’t press but allows space to think.
Dante checked the mirrors too often, tension still wired into his shoulders, like he expected the past to catch up to us on the highway.
I watched him from the passenger seat of the moving truck, this man who’d crossed state lines fueled by fear and love and violence to get to me and now worried about something as small as whether I’d hate the humidity.
His bike on a trailer, my house loaded in this box truck we were really making a go of this and it didn’t feel uneasy. Matter of fact, it felt almost perfect.
“You okay?” he asked for the third time.
“I’m not going to disappear,” I said gently.
His jaw flexed. “I know.”
But he didn’t. Not yet. Dreadnought announced itself subtly—no sign, no grand entrance. Just familiar roads to him, unfamiliar to me, lined with trees that looked older than most of the buildings back home. The air felt thicker. Slower. Like the town didn’t rush to prove itself to anyone.
The clubhouse came into view and I felt Dante shift beside me. This was the part he’d been dreading. The collision of worlds. I had tiptoed around his world when he called me about Hampton Stanley, now I was immersing myself into it.
I stepped out of the truck and didn’t flinch. That seemed to surprise him.
The men were already there—Tower leaning against his bike, Gonzo mid-laugh, Dippy perched on the clubhouse steps like he was holding court. They went quiet when they saw me.
Not hostile. Assessing.
I walked forward first.
“Hi,” I greeted. “I’m Nita.”
Gonzo blinked. “Think we already did this before, Ms. Banks.”
“That was a different situation. Now I’m here not as Juanita Banks, investigator. But as Nita so Gonzo, I’m Nita.”
The man grinned. “Well damn. You’re really made for this shit.”
Tower nodded once, respectful. “Ma’am.”
“Please don’t call me that,” I replied. “I’ll start looking for a badge.”
That broke the ice. Someone laughed. Someone else relaxed. Dante’s shoulders dropped a fraction, like he’d been holding his breath without realizing it.
They didn’t treat me like glass. They didn’t test me either. They just accepted me. Like I was another truth they had already folded into their understanding of Dante or as they called him Loco.
The house Dante brought me to wasn’t flashy.
A cabin halfway up a mountain facing the Tennessee state line.
Clean lines. Worn leather couch. The kind of place that felt lived in, not staged.
He hovered as I unpacked, watching me take up space in his space like he was afraid it might trigger an alarm.
I set my books on the shelf. Hung my jacket by the door. Plugged in my laptop on the desk that would become my temporary command center.
“This okay?” I asked.
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I want you comfortable. Make the place your own.”
“I don’t need to erase you to belong here,” I explained and he smiled. “This is gonna work, Dante.”
That night, lying beside him in a bed that no longer felt like borrowed time together, I realized how deeply he had been braced for loss. Every touch still careful. Every kiss like it might be the last because the distance between us would return.
That thought gutted me. So I made up my mind, no matter what I was in this. I planned to stay.
In time, I found my rhythm.
Remote work didn’t feel like exile the way I had feared. If anything, the distance gave me clarity. The senator’s name stopped appearing in official channels, replaced by quiet reassignment memos and sealed indictments that never made headlines.
The case didn’t die.
It dissolved. The way many government cases did.
Dante never asked for details.
He didn’t need to.
Because the club was moving too.
Subtle at first. A few phone calls. Old favors collected. A financial trail rerouted. The kind of pressure that didn’t leave bruises but closed doors.
The senator resigned citing “health concerns.”
No press conference. No defiance.
Just absence. And then a man who no longer existed in the cyber world leading me to wonder if the man existed at all anymore.
I asked Dante about it one night while we cooked dinner together, his hip pressed to mine, my hands steady on the cutting board. “You didn’t do anything illegal,” I said carefully.
He smiled faintly. “Nita, baby, don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to. That’s how this works.”
“But you did something.”
“We reminded people that some problems don’t stay contained,” he said. “That power doesn’t always sit where you think it does.”
“And now?” I asked.
“And now he’s not a problem for you,” he said simply. “and he won’t ever be in the future either.”
The weight I’d been carrying since the basement finally eased. I didn’t realize how much fear I’d stored until it let go.
I started being seen around town. At the diner. At the hardware store. At the small park where the kids played and nobody asked questions they didn’t need answers to.
Women waved. Men nodded.
I wasn’t Dante’s ol’ lady or property or anything. Not in how they called me out, but yes in the way they treated me. More than anything though, they all tried and succeeded at accepting me.
Here in Dreadnought, North Carolina, I was just Nita.
One afternoon, as we sat on the porch watching the sun sink low and gold over the trees, Dante reached for my hand like it was instinct now, not need.
“You’re happy,” he stated. It wasn’t a question.
“I am,” I admitted. “I didn’t expect that.”
He exhaled slowly. “I was scared you’d hate it here. Or worse pretend you didn’t hate it but regret coming here nonetheless.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “I don’t belong less here. I just belong differently.”
His arm tightened around me, solid and sure.
For the first time since DC, he looked like a man who believed the future wasn’t something waiting to take from him.
Just something waiting to be built. And I was right there beside him. Not as a compromise.
As a choice.