Chapter Fourteen
Pitfall woke with Nadine curved against him, her head on his chest, her breath warm and even against his skin.
For a long moment, he didn't move. Just lay there in the early morning light, feeling the weight of her, the reality of her, the absolute rightness of waking up exactly like this.
Something settled into place in his chest. Something that had been searching for position his whole life—restless, hungry, never quite fitting anywhere—finally found its home.
This. Her. Whatever they were building together.
He'd been reaching for something like this since he was sixteen years old, climbing out of a hole with fingers that wouldn't stop bleeding. He just hadn't known what it was until now.
Nadine stirred, made a small sound, pressed closer without waking. His arm tightened around her automatically, pulling her in. Mine, something in his brain whispered. Mine, mine, mine.
He let the thought wash over him without fighting it.
She woke slowly, surfacing from sleep in stages.
First the flutter of her eyelashes. Then the stretch of her body against his, languorous and unselfconscious. Then her eyes opening, finding his face, and the smile that spread across her features like sunrise.
"Morning."
"Morning." His voice came out rougher than intended, still raw from sleep and everything that had come before it.
"You're staring at me."
"Getting used to the view."
She laughed—a real laugh, warm and unguarded—and something in his chest cracked open a little wider.
"What time is it?"
"Early. We've got a few hours before anyone expects us."
"A few hours." She propped herself up on one elbow, looking down at him. Her hair was a mess, her face still soft with sleep, and she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. "Whatever will we do with a few hours?"
He pulled her down and kissed her, slow and thorough. Not the desperate heat of last night—something softer. Deeper. The kind of kiss that said I'm here and I'm staying and this matters more than I know how to say .
When they finally broke apart, her eyes were bright.
"We should talk," she said.
"Now?"
"Before the day gets away from us." She settled against him again, her hand tracing patterns on his chest. "About what happens next. After Maggard. After all of this."
The question had been sitting in the back of his mind for days. He'd been avoiding it, afraid that looking too closely at the future would somehow curse it.
But she deserved better than avoidance.
"What do you want to happen?" he asked.
"I want to rebuild the shop. Properly this time, with better security, better systems. I want to get my artisans back to work, prove to them that what happened doesn't mean we're done."
"That's the shop. What about you?"
She was quiet for a moment. "I want to stay. Here, at the compound. With you." Her hand stilled on his chest. "Is that crazy? A week and a half ago, I was a shopkeeper who'd never fired a gun. Now I'm talking about building a life with an outlaw biker in a fortified compound."
"Doesn't sound crazy to me."
"It should."
"Maybe." He covered her hand with his, pressed it flat against his heart. "Or maybe it just sounds like finding where you belong."
"And where do you belong?"
The question hit somewhere deep. He thought about it—really thought, for the first time since Blacklung had pulled him off that bar floor and given him a chance at something more.
"I used to think I didn't belong anywhere," he said slowly. "That I was built wrong somehow. Everyone else seemed to have places they fit—families, communities, lives that made sense. I just had... motion. Moving from one thing to the next, never staying long enough to put down roots."
"And now?"
"Now I think I was just looking in the wrong places." He turned his head to meet her eyes. "I belong with you. Whatever else changes, wherever we end up—that's the foundation. Everything else gets built on top of it."
Her breath caught. "You really mean that."
"I really mean that."
She kissed him, soft and fierce at once. "What about your patch? You're still prospecting. Still earning your place with the club."
"That'll happen when it happens." The words came easier than he expected. "I used to think the patch was everything. The whole point of all the work, all the shit jobs, all the proving myself. Now..."
"Now?"
"Now I think the patch is just recognition of something that's already true." He shrugged one shoulder. "I'm a Reaper. Have been since the night Blacklung found me. The ceremony, the vote—that's just making it official."
"And if they don't vote you in?"
The possibility had occurred to him. Prospects washed out sometimes. Politics happened. Nothing was guaranteed.
"Then I figure out what comes next." He pulled her closer, tucked her against his side. "But I'm not leaving you. Whatever else happens, that part's non-negotiable."
The morning stretched around them, quiet and golden.
They talked about the shop—practical things like insurance and inventory, emotional things like what it meant to watch her life's work get destroyed in fifteen minutes.
She cried a little, the grief she'd been holding back finally finding release.
He held her through it, didn't try to fix it, just let her feel what she needed to feel.
They talked about the club—the hierarchy, the rules, what it meant to be an old lady in a world that ran on violence and loyalty. She had questions. He answered them honestly, even the answers that weren't pretty.
They talked about Maggard. About what came next. About the war that wasn't over, just paused, waiting for the next explosion.
And somewhere in the middle of all that talking, Pitfall told her about the mine shaft.
Not the abbreviated version he'd shared before—the quick facts, the surface details. The real story. The whole three days.
"I thought I was going to die down there." He stared at the ceiling, her warmth pressed against his side. "That first night, when it got dark and I realized no one knew where I was, no one was coming... I thought that was it. End of story. Kid falls in a hole, kid dies in a hole."
"But you didn't."
"No. I got angry instead." A ghost of a smile crossed his face. "Furious, actually. At myself for being stupid enough to walk on a rotted cover. At my mom for never teaching me to watch where I stepped. At the world for building holes that could swallow people and then just... leaving them there."
"Anger kept you alive."
"Anger got me through the first night. After that, it was something else." He paused, searching for words. "Stubbornness, I guess. Or maybe just the refusal to let a hole win."
Nadine's hand tightened on his chest.
"I climbed for three days," he continued. "Slept in crevices barely wide enough to hold me. Drank water that seeped through the rock because it was that or die of thirst. My fingers were shredded by the second day. I couldn't feel them by the third. I just kept going anyway."
"Because reaching wasn't enough."
He turned to look at her. She was watching him with an expression that made his throat tight.
"That's what I learned down there," he said. "Reaching isn't enough. You have to grip. You have to hold on with everything you've got, even when your hands are bleeding and your muscles are screaming and every part of you wants to let go and fall."
"And you gripped."
"I gripped. All the way to the top." He exhaled slowly. "When I finally crawled out—three days later, twenty miles from where I'd started, covered in blood and mud and half-dead from dehydration—I made myself a promise."
"What promise?"
"That I'd never stop climbing. Never stop reaching for whatever came next. That I'd face whatever holes the world threw at me, and I'd climb out of every single one."
Nadine was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was steady.
"You're not climbing alone anymore."
The words hit him like a physical blow. He turned to look at her, found her eyes bright with something he couldn't quite name.
"You've been reaching your whole life," she said. "For a place to belong. For people who'd stand by you. For something that felt like home." Her hand found his face, cupped his jaw. "You don't have to reach anymore. You're already here."
"Nadine—"
"I'm serious." She held his gaze. "Whatever holes come next—we face them together. You climb, I climb. You fall, I catch you. That's how this works now."
He wanted to argue. Wanted to tell her that he didn't know how to be caught, didn't know how to stop reaching, had spent so long climbing that he'd forgotten any other way to move through the world.
But looking at her—at this woman who'd shot a man to save him, who'd stood in the ruins of her shop and promised to fight, who was lying in his arms talking about futures like they were something real—he couldn't find the words to push back.
Because maybe she was right.
Maybe he'd been climbing toward something his whole life, and he'd finally reached it.
"Together," he said. The word felt strange on his tongue—unfamiliar, precious. "I don't know if I know how to do together."
"Neither do I." She smiled. "We'll figure it out as we go."
The truth of it loosened something in his chest.
All those years of reaching, of grasping, of fighting for every inch of ground—it had led here. To this woman. This moment. This feeling of finally, finally having somewhere to land.
He pulled her closer, buried his face in her hair, and let himself believe that maybe the climbing was finally over.
Maybe he'd found his home.