11. CHAPTER ELEVEN #3
“You good?” he asked.
I nodded. My voice was somewhere beneath the knot in my throat, and nodding was still all I had.
He crossed the room in two strides, crouched in front of me with his forearms on his knees, and his hand came up to my face, callused palm against my cheek, thumb moving once across my jawline in a gesture so gentle it felt like it belonged to a different man than the one with blood on his knuckles.
“Two down,” he said. His voice was low, meant for me alone, the words delivered with the same plain conviction he used for everything.
“One caught. Loch took a graze. Prospect’s shoulder is messier but he’ll live.
” His thumb moved again, a single pass, and then his hand dropped back to his knee.
“They came for the shop because they knew we’d be there.
Not because they knew about you. Not yet. ”
I found my voice somewhere beneath the knot. “Did they—”
“Talk? No.” Something moved across his face — not quite a smile, nothing that gentle. The hard line of a man who’d asked a question and hadn’t liked the answer. “Man spat blood on my boots and called me a name his mother would be ashamed of. Doesn’t matter. We know who sent them.”
Outside the door, the compound had settled into a different kind of quiet — not peaceful, purposeful, the sound of men regrouping, tending wounds, securing perimeters.
Through the gap where the door hadn’t quite closed, I caught fragments of conversation — Loch’s voice, thick with something that might have been pain or might have been fury, muttering about concrete pillars and insufficient cover.
Ace’s measured tones, lower, discussing something with Socket that involved coordinates and timestamps.
Mustang’s phone buzzed against his hip. He pulled it out, looked at the screen, and something in his expression shifted — not much, a fractional softening around the eyes that I wouldn’t have caught thirteen days ago but caught now because I’d spent thirteen days learning the geography of his face.
J.D.’s text, displayed in stark white against black: She’s good. Asking about you.
Mustang read it once. Pocketed the phone. Looked at me for a beat longer than he needed to, and then he was on his feet, moving toward the door with that same unhurried stride that covered ground faster than it had any right to.
In the common area, Ace was waiting. Blood on his left forearm where he’d wrapped it with a shop rag, his expression set in the focus of a man who was already three steps ahead of whatever came next.
Mustang crossed to him, glass crunching under his boots.
I hadn’t noticed the glass before, fragments of the shop’s front window clinging to his treads, catching the overhead light in dull gleams.
“This ends now,” Mustang said. His voice carried across the common area without him raising it, the way certain sounds carried in certain rooms. “All of it.”
Ace nodded once, sharp. “Church. Tonight.”
Behind them, near the bar, Loch was winding a fresh rag around his forearm where the graze had split the skin open.
Blood had soaked through the first bandage and was working its way into the second, and his mouth was moving around words I couldn’t hear until the common area quieted enough that his voice carried.
“Told you women complicate things,” Loch muttered, the words directed at the ceiling beams or the row of patches or the empty air between himself and whatever god might be listening. “Every damn time.”
The room held the statement. Screwball, wiping down the bar with a cloth that was doing more harm than good to the blood on the oak, didn’t laugh.
Socket, bent over his laptop at the nearest table, didn’t look up.
Torque, who had appeared from somewhere with a first-aid kit in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other, set both down on the bar without comment.
Mustang stood in the center of the common area with glass under his boots and his brothers bleeding around him and the weight of whatever came next already settling across his shoulders, and for the first time since I’d known him, his mouth pulled into a hard line that wasn’t quite a smile — because for the first time, he didn’t argue with it.
I stayed where I was, pressed against the doorframe of the back room with Mustang’s jacket hanging off my shoulders and the dried herbs still pressed against my ribs, and I watched the man I loved stand in the wreckage of something he’d built and decide, with the same certainty he brought to everything, that he would build it again.
The common area held us all. The patches on the wall.
The blood on the floor. The taut silence of men who had survived something and were already calculating what came next, and in that silence, beneath the fluorescent lights and the smell of gunpowder and the distant wail of sirens that nobody in the room seemed especially concerned about, I understood what it meant to belong to something that would burn the world down before it let you go.