Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Tindra
The espresso machine screams like it's dying, and the new girl screams right back at it.
"It's fine, Kayla." Both my hands are already on the group head, cranking the portafilter loose before the whole thing floods the counter. "It's not haunted. You just choked the shot. Grind's too fine, it can't breathe, so it backs up and hisses. Watch."
She watches. Wide-eyed, nineteen, two days into her first real job, looking at me like I pulled a rabbit out of the drip tray.
I knock the puck into the bin, wipe the basket, dial the grinder two clicks coarser, and pull a clean double that runs honey-gold into the cup instead of sputtering.
"See? Not possessed. Just hungry." I slide it toward her. "Tamp level next time and you'll never hear that sound again. Go run the register, I've got the bar."
Kayla scurries off, and I catch my reflection warped in the side of the machine, dark hair coming loose from the knot I threw it in at five this morning.
Truthfully, I look exactly like a woman who opened the second location and hasn't had a full night's sleep in any of them.
I look like my mother.
The thought lands warm and sideways, because there are worse things to look like than her behind a counter she built with her own two hands.
Well, not this counter.
My mother brought the first location here to Florida and she technically owns this second location, but I run it.
Mine.
My name on the manager's door in the back.
My schedule taped to the wall.
My grand opening, eleven days back, with a line out to the parking lot and my grandfather standing in the corner in his cut.
He watched the whole thing with his arms crossed and something in his face I'd never seen aimed at me before.
Pride, maybe.
Or as close to it as he gets before he remembers I'm supposed to be breakable and pulls it back in.
"You're making the face again," Sophie says.
She comes around the end of the bar with a bus tub balanced on her hip, apron dusted with cinnamon, a smudge of chocolate on her jaw that she has no idea is there.
Sophie Crockett wandered into Beans and Babes a few months back as a wrecked, cautious thing, and somewhere between then and now she turned into the one person in this town who talks to me like I'm a person instead of club royalty.
"What face?" I keep my eyes on the milk I'm steaming and don't give her the satisfaction of looking up.
"The one where you're thinking about your grandfather and it's making you sad and mad at the same time.
" She sets the tub down and steals the shot I pulled for Kayla, downing it in one go like a woman who hasn't slept either.
"Summer's supposed to be my break, and instead I'm here at seven in the morning watching you brood over a man who loves you so much he can't stand it. "
"He loves me so much he tried to assign me a security detail to run a coffee shop." I bang the steam wand clear harder than it needs.
"That's what I said. Can't stand it." She grins, and the chocolate on her jaw moves with it. "You've got—" I reach over and thumb it off her face before she finishes, and she rolls her eyes. "Thank you. God. I look like a toddler ate me."
"You look like someone who could've stayed home in bed and instead chose to pour oat milk for strangers on her one day off." I toss her a clean rag for the chocolate she doesn't know is still there.
"I get restless," she says, and the joke thins out and lets the truth show through. "You know that. Three months off and I start climbing the walls. At least here I'm useful."
I do know that.
I know it because I know her. Busy hands, so the past can't catch up.
Sophie doesn't talk much about when her hometown turned on her, the fabricated screenshots, the doctored photo, the way strangers looked at a second-grade teacher like she was something scraped off a shoe.
She talks about it the way you talk about weather in another country.
But she picks up shifts she doesn't need the money for, and she shows up on her days off, and she moves through my shop like motion is the only thing that keeps her ahead of it.
As an only child, she's the closest thing I have to a sister.
"Refill the pastry case before the nine o'clock rush," I tell her, because everyone I love in this club shows up with their sleeves already rolled, and I learned it from them. "The lemon things go on the left where people can see them. They're moving twice as fast as the muffins."
"Bossy." She ties her apron string tighter and doesn't move toward the case.
"General manager." I point the steam wand at her like a teacher's ruler.
"Same thing." She hauls the tub toward the back, and over her shoulder, light, the way she says everything that matters, "Your boy's outside, by the way. Been sitting on his bike in the lot for ten minutes not coming in."
My whole body goes still behind the bar.
I don't let it show on my face, because I've spent ages not letting it show on my face, but everything under my skin turns toward the window like a compass finding north.
Bodul.
He's straddling his bike at the edge of the lot, helmet off, forearms on the tank, watching the front door like it's a decision he hasn't made yet.
Even from here I can see he's holding himself wrong.
Not the body, the body's the same, all that lean muscle he pretends he doesn't have.
It's the set of him. Shoulders up around his ears, jaw locked.
A man braced for something instead of a man swinging by to see his girl.
Sophie's still watching me, and she's too smart.
The corner of her mouth does a thing that tells me she's clocked exactly how fast I turned.
"I don't know what you're implying," I say.
"I'm not implying anything." She lifts the tub. "I'm just saying a prospect's been sitting in our parking lot for ten minutes, and the second I mentioned him you looked like someone plugged you into a wall. But sure. Nothing there."
"Refill the case, Sophie." I flick the rag at her hip and miss on purpose.
"Refilling the case." She goes, and she's laughing.
I hate that she's right and I love that she never says it where anyone else can hear.
Because no one else can hear it.
That's the whole design of my life, if I'm honest with the early-morning version of myself, the one who hasn't got her armor all the way buckled yet.
Everyone in my family loves me so hard they've built a cage out of it, and the cage is made of good intentions, which is the sort you can't kick your way out of without looking like the ungrateful little princess they've decided I am.
My father, Tor, who missed the first fifteen years of my life and has spent the last ten trying to pour all of it back in at once.
He looks at me and sees a kid he didn't get to protect and overcorrects so hard I can't cross a parking lot without someone clocking my exits.
My grandfather, who built the Raiders of Valhalla MC out of nothing and rules it like weather and cannot, will not, wrap his head around the idea that the club is mine too.
That being born in this family means the kingdom runs in my blood the same as it runs in my father’s.
I don't want to be kept safe from it, I want to be trusted inside it.
Then there’s my mother.
My mother, who knows exactly what I'm doing with Bodul, and pretends with her whole heart that she doesn't.
That one I can't figure out, and I've stopped trying.
They all think they're protecting me.
Not one of them has worked out that I've spent the last nine months protecting him from them.
The bell over the door goes, and he fills the frame of it.
Every thought I was having about my family walks straight out the back of my head.
Bodul ducks under the doorframe the way tall men do without thinking, and half my regulars forget their coffee to look at him.
He finds me behind the bar before the door's even shut.
His eyes hit mine and hold, and for half a second the brace in his shoulders lets go, just for me, just where nobody's looking.
Then it comes back.
"Coffee's for paying customers," I tell him, because we do this, because the club thinks he's here on punch-list work and the two of us have gotten very good at performing a man and a woman who barely know each other. "You paying today, or you here to stare at my grout again?"
"Grout's uneven by the far booth." His voice is low and even, and that's the tell, because the more level he sounds, the more he's hiding. "Came to fix it before you get a review that says so."
"My grout is flawless." I plant a fist on my hip and dare him to argue.
"Your grout is a lawsuit." He crosses to the bar, and up close it's worse, the tightness around his eyes, the way he's looking at me like he's memorizing instead of greeting. "Meghan around?"
"Original location till noon." Which he knows.
It means he's asking so we've got a window, and my stomach does a slow, uneasy turn, because Bodul doesn't engineer windows unless there's something he needs to say inside one. "Booth's all yours. I'll bring you a coffee you're not paying for."
I make it myself.
Cortado, the way he likes it, two ounces and no fuss, and I carry it to the far booth where he's already crouched with his fingers on the grout line that is, infuriatingly, a little uneven.
I set the cup down and slide into the seat across from him, and I keep my voice light and bright, and carry the customer voice in case Kayla's got ears.
"What's wrong?" I lean in close over the table, keeping the words low.
He doesn't look up from the floor. "Nothing's wrong."
"You sat in my parking lot for ten minutes.
Sophie timed you." I wrap both hands around the warmth of the cup I brought him and didn't bring myself.
"You've got the look on your face. The one from before you tell me something I'm not going to like.
So. Out with it, before the rush walks in and I have to pretend to argue with you about something. "
Now he looks up.
And whatever's in his face, it's not the usual weight, the club, my father, the exhausting arithmetic of loving each other in the dark.
This is heavier. This has a bottom I can't see.