Chapter 5
Pitt felt her arms tighten around his waist as he leaned the Road King through the turn onto East Carson, and something primitive lit up in his chest like a furnace door swinging open.
Focus.
Danny Strok had a phone and a grudge and a boss who didn't tolerate embarrassment. They had maybe twenty minutes before Victor's crew mobilized—less if Danny called from the sidewalk instead of waiting to get back to base. Pitt needed to think tactically, plan routes, stay three moves ahead.
Hard to do with Maggie Kowalski pressed against his back, her thighs bracketing his hips, her hands fisted in his shirt under his cut. She was warm everywhere they touched, and they touched everywhere.
He took a hard right off Carson onto a side street, cutting south through residential blocks.
The bike's headlight carved through November dark, row houses blurring past on both sides, porches and stoops and chain-link fences.
His territory. His streets. He knew every alley, every cut-through, every dead end.
"Where are we going?" Maggie shouted over the engine.
"Somewhere safe."
"That's not an answer!"
"It's the only one you're getting right now."
Her grip tightened—not fear, frustration.
He could feel it in the way her fingers dug into his stomach, the way she pressed closer like she was trying to argue through body contact.
This woman didn't like being told what to do.
Filed that away alongside everything else he'd learned about her in the last thirty minutes: brave, stubborn, sharp-mouthed, and so goddamn beautiful standing behind that bar with glass in her hair that he'd almost forgotten why he was there.
Almost.
His phone buzzed in his cut pocket. He ignored it, focused on the road, reading intersections for headlights that didn't belong. Two blocks later it buzzed again. Then a third time in rapid succession—Hollow's signal for urgent.
Pitt pulled to the curb on a dark residential street, killed the headlight but kept the engine running. He pulled his phone.
Three texts from Hollow:
Danny called it in. Victor's sending a crew.
Black SUV and a van. Heading south on Carson.
They know the safehouse on Thirty-First. Someone talked.
"Shit," Pitt muttered.
Maggie's chin was on his shoulder, reading his screen. He should've angled it away. Didn't.
"They know where you're taking me," she said. Not a question.
"They know where I was taking you." He was already mapping alternatives, running through the network of safe locations the club maintained across the South Side and beyond. The Thirty-First Street place was burned. The garage in Bloomfield was too close to Victor's territory. That left—
"Lawrenceville," he said. "Secondary location. Off the books."
"And if they know about that one too?"
He turned enough to catch her eyes in the streetlight. Green. He hadn't noticed that before—bright green, sharp with intelligence and adrenaline, no panic in them at all.
"They don't."
"You sound sure."
"I am sure."
"Famous last words."
He almost smiled. In the middle of running from a loan shark's kill crew with a woman he'd known for less than an hour, Maggie Kowalski was giving him shit. Something about that cracked through the ice in his chest in a way he wasn't prepared for.
Headlights swung onto the street two blocks behind them.
Could be anyone. A neighbor coming home, a delivery driver, someone lost. But Pitt hadn't survived this long by assuming the best, and the headlights were moving too fast for residential.
"Hold on," he said, and hit the throttle.
The Road King surged forward, engine roaring through the quiet street, and Maggie's arms clamped around him like a vise.
He cut left through an alley between row houses—tight squeeze, handlebars barely clearing the brick on either side—and came out on a parallel street heading east. Behind them, the headlights overshot the alley entrance and brakes squealed.
"Was that them?" Maggie yelled.
"Maybe."
"You're a terrible liar!"
He was. But he was a hell of a rider. The Road King ate blocks like they were nothing, Pitt weaving through side streets he'd memorized years ago, taking routes that no vehicle wider than a motorcycle could follow.
Right on Sidney, left through the parking lot behind the church on Twenty-Third, straight through the narrow service alley behind the row of shops on Tenth Street.
The cold air bit at his knuckles and stung his eyes, and Maggie held on so tight he could feel her heartbeat against his spine.
Headlights appeared on the cross street ahead. A van—black, windowless, moving with the purposeful speed of men hunting something specific.
Pitt braked hard enough to make the rear tire skip, Maggie gasping against his back, and reversed into a driveway between two houses. He killed the engine. Killed the lights. They sat in the dark, breathing, while the van rolled through the intersection thirty yards away without slowing.
Silence, except for the tick of cooling metal and Maggie's breath warm against his neck.
"You good?" he asked.
"Define good."
"Not falling off."
"Then I'm spectacular." Her voice was steady. Her hands were shaking against his stomach. "You do this a lot? Run from vans in the dark?"
"More than I'd like." He waited thirty seconds, watching the intersection. Nothing. "We move in a minute."
"Pitt."
"Yeah."
"That man—Danny. He was early. I had one more day on his deadline."
"Danny doesn't make the schedule. Victor does. And Victor decided you were done talking."
Her forehead dropped against the back of his shoulder. Just for a second—a moment of something that wasn't quite surrender, more like exhaling after holding her breath for two months. Then she straightened, and her voice came back with its edge intact.
"So what's the plan? Hide me in a safe house until this blows over?"
"This doesn't blow over. Men like Victor don't stop because you hide."
"Then what?"
"We stop him."
"We," she repeated. "You and me?"
"Me and my brothers. You stay safe while we handle it."
She laughed—a short, sharp bark that had zero humor in it. "Stay safe. Right. Like I've been doing such a great job of that on my own."
He wanted to turn around. Wanted to see her face when she said things like that, read the expression behind the words. Instead he felt her—the tension in her arms, the press of her body, the stubborn set of her jaw against his shoulder.
"You've been doing it alone," he said. "That's done."
"I don't even know you."
"You know I threw a man through a window for putting his hands on you. That's enough for tonight."
She was quiet for a beat. Two. He could practically hear her processing, weighing options, calculating risk the way a woman who'd been surviving on her own for three years calculated risk—carefully, constantly, because nobody else was going to do it for her.
"Okay," she said. "Lawrenceville. But I have questions."
"I know you do."
"And you're going to answer them."
"Some of them."
"All of them."
He turned the key, and the engine rumbled to life beneath them. "We'll negotiate."
The rest of the ride was fast and dark, Pitt sticking to back roads through the Strip District, past closed warehouses and empty loading docks, the Allegheny River glinting black to their right.
No headlights followed. Either they'd lost Victor's crew or the crew was searching the wrong grid—either way, Pitt would take it.
The Lawrenceville safehouse was a second-floor apartment above a closed tattoo parlor on Butler Street, accessible through a steel door in the alley that looked like it hadn't been opened in years.
It had. Ash kept it maintained—fresh locks, stocked supplies, clean sight lines from every window.
One way in, easy to defend, impossible to find unless you already knew it was there.
Pitt parked the bike behind a dumpster, positioning it for a fast exit, and led Maggie up the narrow stairs with his hand on the small of her back.
The touch had become automatic—some part of his brain had designated her as his to protect the second Danny's fingers closed around her wrist, and now his body was enforcing the designation without consulting him.
The apartment was small. Two rooms, a bathroom, a kitchen that was really just a counter with a hot plate.
But it was clean, warm once he hit the space heater, and stocked with the basics—canned food, water, first aid kit, a change of clothes that wouldn't fit her, ammunition that he hoped she wouldn't notice.
She noticed.
"That's a lot of bullets for a safe house," she said, standing in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed.
"We're a motorcycle club, not a book group."
"No kidding." Her eyes moved around the apartment—assessing, cataloging, the same quick intelligence he'd watched her use behind the bar. "How long am I here?"
"Until I know it's safe to move you."
"Move me where?"
"Somewhere more permanent. The compound."
"Your clubhouse."
"My home." He said it without thinking, and the word landed heavier than he'd intended. His home. The place where his brothers lived, where the club's heart beat, where he'd built something worth defending. And he was ready to bring her there after knowing her for an hour.
That should've worried him. It didn't.
Maggie sat on the edge of the couch—a sagging plaid thing that had seen better decades—and looked up at him. Her red hair was wild from the wind, her cheeks flushed from cold, Danny's bruises darkening on her wrist. She looked exhausted, furious, and completely unwilling to admit either.
"Okay," she said. "Talk. What am I in the middle of?"
Pitt pulled a chair from the kitchen, set it across from her, and sat with his forearms on his knees. Close enough to touch. Close enough that her eyes dropped to his hands, then back to his face with something she was trying to hide.
"Victor Petrak runs a predatory lending operation that's been bleeding the South Side for twenty years.
He wants your bar as a front. Your father's debt is his leverage, and he's done asking nicely.
" Pitt held her gaze. "My club protects this neighborhood.
We protect the businesses and the people in our territory.
Your bar is in our territory. Which means you're under our protection. "
"Just like that."
"Just like that."
"And what does protection cost? Because I've heard that pitch before, and it usually comes with a payment plan."
The question should've pissed him off. It didn't, because she was right to ask it. She'd been dealing with a predator for two months, and now another group of dangerous men was offering to save her. Trust wasn't something Maggie Kowalski gave away.
"Not a dime," he said. "That's not what we do."
"Then what do you get out of it?"
Pitt leaned forward. The space between them shrank to something electric, charged with the adrenaline still buzzing in both their systems and something underneath that was slower, hotter, more dangerous.
"Victor Petrak is a predator operating in my territory, hurting my people. I don't need a reason beyond that." He paused. "But if I'm being honest, Maggie—watching you tell Danny Strok to go fuck himself while standing in a pile of broken glass gave me one anyway."
Her breath hitched. Barely—a tiny hitch that most people would've missed. Pitt didn't miss it.
His phone buzzed. Hollow.
Compound secured. Brothers en route to your position. ETA twenty.
Pitt pocketed the phone and stood. "My brothers are coming. We'll have this place covered tonight. Tomorrow we figure out next steps."
"And tonight?"
"Tonight you sleep. I'll be right here."
Maggie looked at the chair, then at him, then at the door he was positioning himself between her and. "You're going to sit in a chair all night watching the door."
"Yeah."
"That's insane."
"That's the job."
She shook her head slowly, but something in her expression had shifted—the suspicion cracking just enough to let something warmer bleed through. Not trust. Not yet. But the beginning of believing that maybe, for the first time in two months, she wasn't alone in this.
"Pitt," she said.
"Yeah."
"Thank you. For the window thing."
His mouth twitched. "Danny had it coming."