Chapter 6
Maggie woke to the sound of a gun being taken apart.
She lay still for a few seconds, disoriented—wrong ceiling, wrong light, wrong smell.
Then the last twenty-four hours reassembled themselves in her head like a car wreck played in reverse: Danny's hand on her wrist, a man going through her window, a motorcycle ride through dark streets with her arms around a stranger who didn't feel like a stranger.
She sat up on the sagging couch and found Pitt at the kitchen table, field-stripping a handgun with the easy rhythm of someone who'd done it ten thousand times.
Morning light came through the window behind him, gray and flat, catching the angles of his face and the scars on his hands as they moved.
He'd taken off his cut and hung it over the back of the chair, and in just a black thermal pushed up to his elbows, he looked less like an MC president and more like a very large, very dangerous man who hadn't slept.
"Morning," he said without looking up.
"Did you sleep at all?"
"Enough."
That meant no. Maggie swung her feet to the floor and pushed her hair out of her face, aware that she looked like hell and equally aware that she didn't care. The bruises on her wrist had gone purple overnight, a ring of fingerprints that throbbed when she flexed her hand.
"There's coffee," Pitt said. "Cabinet above the sink."
She found it—instant, which was a crime against coffee but better than nothing.
The kitchen was barely a kitchen: hot plate, mini fridge, a counter with exactly enough room for one person to stand.
She filled a mug from the tap, heated it on the hot plate, and stirred in granules that dissolved into something that technically qualified as caffeine.
When she turned around, Pitt was watching her. Hands still on the gun parts, eyes on her. The intensity of it—the sheer focused weight of his attention—made her skin prickle.
"What?" she said.
"Checking your wrist."
She glanced down at the bruises, then back at him. "Still attached. Still works."
"Let me see."
"You saw it last night."
"Last night it was red. Now it's purple."
"That's how bruises work."
He set down the gun barrel and held out his hand. Not a request—an expectation. Those blue eyes steady, patient, absolutely certain she'd come to him.
The annoying part was that she did.
She crossed the small kitchen and put her wrist in his hand, and his fingers closed around it so gently she almost couldn't feel the contact.
He turned her arm in the light, studying the marks Danny had left, his thumb tracing the edge of the bruise with a touch that sent electricity up her arm and into her chest.
"I'm going to kill him," Pitt said. Conversational. Like he was mentioning the weather.
"That's a little extreme for a bruise."
"It's not about the bruise." His eyes came up to hers, and the look in them was something she'd never seen directed at her before—possessive, protective, barely contained. "Nobody puts their hands on you. Not anymore."
Maggie's mouth went dry. She pulled her wrist back—slowly, not a flinch, just reclaiming her space before she did something stupid like lean into him.
"You don't know me well enough to make promises like that."
"I know enough."
"You know my name and where I work. That's a starting point, not a commitment."
That almost-smile ghosted across his face. "You always argue this much?"
"Only when large men make dramatic declarations in tiny kitchens."
She took her coffee to the couch and sat, pulling her knees up, creating distance she wasn't sure she wanted.
Pitt reassembled the gun—slide, barrel, spring, magazine, all clicking together in seconds—and set it on the table.
Then he poured himself coffee in a chipped mug and sat in the chair across from her, close enough that their knees almost touched.
They drank in silence for a minute. The apartment felt smaller in daylight—two rooms, thin walls, a bathroom she hadn't braved yet. Someone's idea of a hideout, functional and impersonal, like a motel room without the charm.
"Ask," Pitt said.
"Ask what?"
"Whatever's been building behind your eyes since last night. You've got questions stacked up. I can see them."
He could, apparently. She'd been assembling them all night in the dark, listening to him breathe in the chair by the door, aware of him the way you're aware of a fire—constant, warm, impossible to ignore.
"Why me?" she said. "You said you protect the neighborhood, and I believe that. But you're sitting in a safe house drinking bad coffee at seven in the morning with a bartender you met yesterday. That's not standard territory patrol."
Pitt held his mug in both hands, studying the surface of the coffee like it had answers. "You told Danny Strok to go to hell. Three times. Every other business owner Petrak squeezed either paid or folded. You stood in broken glass and told his leg-breaker to get out of your bar."
"That's stubbornness, not bravery."
"Same thing, where I come from." He drank.
Set the mug down. "My brother Mikey used to drink at your place.
Sat at the end of the bar, drank Yuengling, tipped too much because your dad was good to him.
When Mikey died—overdose, dealers that moved in while I was overseas—your bar was one of the last places he was happy. "
The words hit her somewhere unprotected. She thought of the regulars she'd lost over the years, the faces that stopped coming in, the empty stools that stayed empty.
"I'm sorry about your brother," she said.
"I built the Outlaws because I couldn't save him. Couldn't save the neighborhood he loved. So I built something that could." His jaw tightened. "And then I let a piece of shit like Petrak operate three blocks from my compound because he kept his head down and didn't make noise. That's on me."
"That's not—"
"It's on me, Maggie. And I'm fixing it."
His phone rang. He answered with a clipped "Talk to me" that shifted him instantly from the man drinking coffee across from her to the president running an operation.
She listened to the one-sided conversation—short sentences, tactical language, names she was starting to recognize. Hollow. Parkway. Ash.
"Copy," he said, and hung up. "Hollow says Victor put four men on your bar. Sitting outside in a car, watching the door."
"My bar." The words came out flat. Her bar, with its boarded window and empty register and her father's broken mirror swept into the trash. "They're going to destroy it."
"Not while my brothers are watching."
"Your brothers can't sit outside my bar forever."
"They won't have to." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and the space between them compressed again.
"Maggie, listen to me. Victor Petrak has been running his operation for twenty years because nobody pushed back.
We're pushing back. But it's going to get worse before it gets better, and I need you somewhere I can keep you safe. "
"Here?"
"The compound. My home. Full club security, brothers on rotation, no one gets in who doesn't belong."
"You want me to move into your clubhouse."
"I want you alive. The clubhouse is how I make sure of that."
She stared at him. This man—this dangerous, scarred, impossible man—was asking her to leave her entire life and move into a motorcycle club's compound because a loan shark wanted her bar.
Two days ago she'd been pulling pints and pretending the walls weren't closing in.
Now she was sitting in a safe house with an MC president who looked at her like she was something he'd fight a war to keep.
"I have a life," she said. "A bar. Regulars who depend on me. I can't just disappear into a biker compound and—"
"Your bar is boarded up with four of Petrak's men parked outside.
Your regulars can't help you. The cops shrugged.
The lawyers want money you don't have." He wasn't cruel about it—just direct, laying out facts like cards on a table.
"You've been fighting this alone for two months, and you're losing.
Not because you're weak. Because you're outnumbered. "
"And your clubhouse fixes that?"
"My clubhouse gives you an army."
She opened her mouth to argue—to say something about independence, about not being the kind of woman who ran to a man for protection, about everything she'd been telling herself for three years of doing it all on her own.
But the words died before they formed, because he was right.
She was outnumbered. She was losing. And the only person who'd done anything about it in two months was sitting across from her with gun oil on his fingers and bruises on his knuckles that he'd earned defending her.
"How long?" she asked.
"Until Victor's handled."
"And how long is that?"
"As long as it takes."
His phone buzzed again. A text this time. He read it, and something shifted in his expression—a tightening around his eyes, his jaw going hard.
"What?" Maggie asked.
"Ash says the Lawrenceville safehouse location might be compromised. Danny's been talking, trying to earn points with Victor. He doesn't know this specific place, but he knows the neighborhood."
"So we're not safe here either."
"We're safe enough for now. But we move tonight." He stood, and the room shrank around him the way rooms did when he was vertical. "I'm going to make some calls. Lock the bathroom door if you need privacy, but don't touch the windows."
"Pitt."
He stopped in the kitchen doorway, turning back.
"If I come to your compound—and I said if—I'm not sitting in a room waiting to be rescued. I've been dealing with Victor's operation for two months. I know his collectors' faces, his schedules, the pattern of how he squeezes people. That's information you can use."
Something moved in his expression. Not surprise—reassessment. Like he was recalculating her, adjusting the equation to account for variables he hadn't expected.
"You want to help plan."
"I want to be useful. There's a difference."
He looked at her for a long moment—that intense, consuming focus that made her feel like she was standing in a spotlight. Then he nodded once.
"We'll talk about it at the compound."
"That's not a yes."
"It's not a no." He held her gaze. "Pack whatever you've got. We ride at dark."
He disappeared into the kitchen, and Maggie heard him dialing.
She sat on the couch with her cold coffee and her bruised wrist and the dawning realization that her life had just taken a turn she couldn't undo.
In a few hours, she'd climb back on that bike, wrap her arms around a man who made her pulse do things it hadn't done in years, and ride to a place she'd never been to live with people she didn't know.
Her father would've called her crazy.
Her father had also borrowed money from a loan shark, so his judgment wasn't exactly bulletproof.
Outside the window, the Lawrenceville street was quiet. Normal. People walking to work, cars rolling past, a city going about its business while Maggie Kowalski sat in a safe house above a tattoo parlor and waited for dark.
She flexed her bruised wrist. Watched the purple fingerprints shift under her skin.
Then she finished her coffee and started figuring out what she could carry on the back of a motorcycle.