22. Jade
Jade
The cabin looks like a different place than the one I woke up in over a week ago.
The kitchen table that used to hold coffee mugs and burner phones and Razor’s legal pads is now a different kind of workspace entirely, with two rifles broken down and laid out on a canvas cloth, three handguns cleaned and reassembled, a row of loaded magazines lined up with the precision of someone who does this the way other people set a dinner table.
Maps are spread across the far end, marked in Razor’s tight handwriting. A radio scanner on the counter is cycling through frequencies, its red light blinking in the quiet like a slow pulse.
Shadow’s on the phone near the window, his voice low and clipped, the easy charm stripped out of it entirely.
He’s been on and off calls since they got back from the clubhouse this morning, working through a list on his notepad, checking things off with a pen.
Outside, I can hear Hawk’s bike in the driveway, the engine cutting and boots on gravel.
I took stock of myself in the small bathroom mirror before I came downstairs.
Pale, still. The bruising under my eyes from days of broken sleep.
The bandage on my shoulder is thick under my shirt, the arm moving with a stiffness I’ve stopped fighting because fighting it costs more than it’s worth.
I look like someone who’s been through something.
I also look like someone still standing.
That’s enough.
Razor’s at the table, reassembling the second rifle with focused economy. He glances up when I appear on the stairs, reads the way I’m holding my arm, and goes back to what he’s doing without comment.
“What can I do?” I ask.
He nods at the far end of the table. “Magazines need checking. Any that feel light, set them aside.”
I pull out a chair and sit down across from him and start working through the row of magazines, pressing each one to test the spring tension, checking the feed lips, and setting two aside that don’t feel right.
The work is straightforward and physical and requires just enough focus to keep my mind from running ahead to tonight.
My shoulder protests the repetitive motion, but I don’t stop.
The scanner cycles. Shadow’s voice rises briefly, then drops again.
“You’ve done this before,” Razor says.
“Tyler cleaned guns at the kitchen table.” I set a magazine aside. “I watched enough times.”
He makes a sound that isn’t quite a response, and goes back to the rifle.
Hawk comes through the front door at half past one, bringing cold air and the smell of exhaust with him.
He takes in the table, takes in me sitting at it, takes in Razor across from me, and says nothing.
Pours himself coffee from the pot Shadow made two hours ago, cold by now, but Hawk drinks it anyway, leaning against the counter with his eyes moving over the maps.
“Viper confirmed Mason’s secure,” he says. “Reaper’s safe house. Two members on the door, nobody knows the location except the four of us and Reaper.”
“And Linda?” I ask.
“With him. She’s not happy about the situation, but she’s not leaving him either.”
That sits in my chest the way it always does—the ache of knowing Mason is safe but not with me, the distance between us a physical thing I carry around. I press it down and keep working.
Shadow ends his call and comes to the table, pulling out the chair beside me and dropping into it. He picks up one of the set-aside magazines and turns it over in his hands.
“Danny confirmed Tyler’s still in the city,” he says.
“Hasn’t left since Thursday night. He’s been making calls, trying to pull bodies together, but the Ruthless Saints have frozen him out.
Their president put the word out after the files went to the right people this morning.
” He sets the magazine down. “He’s got maybe three loyalists left willing to move with him. Everyone else cut him loose.”
“Three is enough to do damage,” Razor says.
“Three is manageable,” Hawk says.
It’s the same conversation men like these have been having since before I arrived in their lives. The calculation of threat versus resource, the cold arithmetic of violence.
I work through the last of the magazines and push the rejected ones to the side. “What’s the position tonight?”
Hawk looks at me over his coffee. “You’re inside with me. Shadow covers the back. Razor’s on the roof with the rifle.”
“And Tyler comes to us.”
“Tyler comes to us,” he confirms.
I nod. The plan has been explained in pieces over the past twenty-four hours, built up layer by layer until I can see the whole shape of it.
The safe house that isn’t safe anymore because we want him to find it, the trap built out of the thing Tyler can’t resist, which is me. Using my existence as bait one last time, except this time I’m the one who decided to do it.
That difference matters more than I can explain.
By two o’clock, the table is cleared and reset. Hawk’s outside again, walking the property line with Razor, talking through sight lines and entry points with the thoroughness of men who’ve done this kind of preparation before and understand what happens when you don’t.
Shadow is in the kitchen making food that nobody asked for, but everyone needs.
I’m in the small utility room off the kitchen, doing inventory on the medical kit. Antibiotics, wound dressings, a tourniquet still in its packaging, and pain medication. The things you pack when you’re planning for the possibility that someone comes home bleeding.
I hear Hawk’s boots on the back steps before he comes inside.
He fills the doorway of the utility room, which isn’t a large space, and the way he takes up most of it is something I’ve stopped noticing consciously and started just knowing the way you know the dimensions of a room you’ve lived in long enough. He looks at what I’m doing. Then he looks at me.
“How are you?” he says. Not the version of that question people ask when they want a one-word answer. The other version.
“Scared,” I say. “Ready.” I close the kit. “Both at the same time.”
“That’s the right answer.”
“Is it?”
“Means you’re thinking clearly.” He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching my face with that thoroughness that used to make me feel like I was being assessed and now just makes me feel seen. “You don’t have to be in that room tonight. The plan works without you inside.”
“The plan works better with me inside. You know that.”
“I know it.” His jaw tightens. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
I set the medical kit on the shelf and turn to face him fully. The utility room is close quarters, and we are closer than is practical, which is something that keeps happening in this cabin, and neither of us has found a way to engineer around it.
“After tonight,” I say. “You said new life, new identity. Everything.”
“Yes.”
“What does that mean for you?”
He looks at me steadily. “It means you’re safe. You and Mason.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
His jaw does the thing it does—the small tightening that means he’s holding something back, measuring whether to let it out. “I’ll make sure you’re set up. Wherever you land, you’ll have what you need.”
And there it is. The version of the future he’s already written, where he makes sure I’m okay and then removes himself from the picture. I can see the whole architecture of it—the guilt about Tyler, the belief that he’s too much of what he is to be what I need.
I close the distance between us and put my hand on his chest.
He goes very still.
“Don’t decide for me what I can handle,” I say, and then I pull him down and kiss him.
His hand comes up to the back of my neck, and his mouth opens against mine, and he kisses me back.
It’s not gentle or tentative. Just him, fully, the controlled force of a person who knows exactly what he’s capable of and is choosing to bring just enough of it here.
I grip his jacket. He makes a low sound against my mouth that I feel more than hear.
When he pulls back his eyes are dark, and his breathing is uneven, and he looks at me like he’s trying to find the argument he had a minute ago and can’t locate it anymore.
“Jade—”
“Tonight,” I say. “We finish tonight first.”
He looks at me for another long moment. Then he nods, steps back, and takes the careful control back into his hands, where he keeps it.
He goes back outside.
I stay in the utility room for thirty seconds, getting my own breathing back to something normal.
When I come into the kitchen, Shadow is at the stove, and Razor is at the table, and both of them are looking at me with the quality of men who were absolutely not watching through the kitchen window just now.
Shadow’s expression is complicated by his emotional intelligence, working through it in real time, the easy surface of him not quite concealing the thing underneath.
Razor’s expression is simpler. He just looks at me with those dark eyes and says nothing, and doesn’t need to.
I sit down at the table.
Shadow sets a plate in front of me. Sits across from me. Opens his mouth.
“I know what I want,” I say, before he can start. “The question is whether you three do.”
Shadow closes his mouth.
He looks at Razor. Razor looks back at him.
Shadow looks back at me.
“Yeah,” he says. “We do.”
I stand up from the table, the chair scraping back loudly in the sudden quiet.
My pulse is already up, not from fear this time—from the thing that’s been building since the utility room, since I kissed Hawk and felt the crack in his control.
I don’t wait for permission. I don’t ask. Tonight might be the last night any of us are in the same room breathing, and I’m done waiting for someone else to decide what happens next.
I look at Shadow first. He’s still seated, elbows on the table. I cross the space between us in three steps, grab the front of his shirt, and yank him up. He rises without resistance, mouth already curving into the start of a smile that dies the second my lips crash into his.