Chapter 9
Three days at the compound, and Maggie had learned the rhythm of a motorcycle club the same way she'd learned the rhythm of a bar—by watching, listening, and making herself useful before anyone could tell her to sit down.
Mornings started early. Brothers drifted into the kitchen between six and eight, grabbing coffee and food before disappearing into the garage or the common room or wherever the day's business took them.
The old ladies ran the kitchen not because anyone told them to, but because feeding a dozen grown men required logistics that most of the brothers couldn't manage without burning the building down.
Maggie inserted herself on day two. She showed up at six with her hair piled up and her sleeves rolled, and when the dark-haired woman—whose name she'd learned was irrelevant because everyone just called her by her man's road name plus "old lady," which Maggie found both horrifying and oddly charming—raised an eyebrow, Maggie said, "I've been feeding crowds since I was sixteen. Point me at something."
They pointed her at breakfast.
Turned out, feeding a motorcycle club wasn't that different from running a bar kitchen during a Saturday rush.
Volume cooking, limited menu, keep it coming until the plates stopped moving.
Maggie scrambled three dozen eggs, fried four pounds of bacon, and kept the coffee rotating through the industrial pot she'd found in the back of the pantry—the one nobody used because they couldn't figure out the settings.
She had it calibrated in ten minutes. It was a commercial Bunn.
She'd been running one since high school.
Brothers started showing up earlier once word spread that the food had improved.
"Who made the eggs?" Hollow dropped into a chair with a plate stacked high enough to qualify as architecture. "These are actual eggs. With seasoning. I didn't know we owned seasoning."
"The new girl," said the prospect clearing dishes.
Hollow looked at Maggie, standing at the stove with a spatula and a look that dared him to comment. He grinned—big, bright, the kind of grin that probably got him in trouble regularly.
"Prez is gonna have a hard time letting you go," he said.
"Nobody's letting me do anything. I'm making breakfast, not signing a contract."
"In this club? Same thing."
She threw a dish towel at him. He caught it without spilling a bite, laughing, and Maggie felt something loosen in her chest that had been tight for months.
By the third morning, she had the kitchen dialed in.
Breakfast at seven, coffee always hot, lunch supplies stocked for whoever wandered through midday.
The old ladies gave her space at the stove and claimed her at the table afterward, pulling her into conversations that covered everything from compound logistics to club gossip to pointed questions about Pitt that Maggie deflected with the skill of a woman who'd been dodging nosy regulars for years.
"He watches you," the younger woman said over coffee, casual as commenting on the weather. "Like, watches you. I've never seen him do that."
"He watches everything. He's the president."
"He watches everything like a security camera. He watches you like a man who forgot to eat."
Maggie's cheeks burned. She buried her face in her mug.
The truth was, she watched him too. It was impossible not to.
Pitt at the compound was different from Pitt in crisis—not softer, exactly, but less compressed.
The constant vigilance that had thrummed through him at the safehouse relaxed here into something more natural, the ease of a man in his own territory.
She'd catch him in the common room with brothers, talking through plans or trading insults, and his face would open up in ways she hadn't seen before.
Not smiling, necessarily—Pitt didn't smile easy. But present. Engaged. Almost human.
And then he'd look up, find her across the room, and those blue eyes would lock on with an intensity that made her stomach drop like a missed step on a staircase.
It happened constantly. She'd be drying glasses behind the bar—because of course she'd gravitated to the bar, because bars were her natural habitat—and she'd feel it.
That prickle at the back of her neck, the heat of being watched by someone who didn't bother hiding it.
She'd look up, and there he was, mid-conversation with Gibbet or Parkway, eyes on her like she was the only frequency he was tuned to.
He didn't come to her. That was the maddening part. He watched, he hovered at the edges, he found reasons to be in whatever room she was in, but he kept a distance that felt deliberate. Like he was holding himself on a leash and the leash was fraying.
The touching, though—the touching didn't have any distance in it at all.
Every time they passed in a hallway, his hand found her.
Small of her back, hip, the brush of fingers against her arm.
Quick contacts that lasted a beat too long, each one sending a jolt through her that she felt in her teeth.
At meals, he sat beside her without asking, his thigh pressed against hers under the table, and when she shifted he shifted with her, maintaining the contact like breaking it wasn't an option.
He'd claimed the chair next to hers. Not with words—with presence. After the second day, no brother sat there. They just knew.
On the third afternoon, Maggie found herself behind the clubhouse bar wiping down the counter—because old habits die hard and a dirty bar made her twitchy—when Pitt walked in from Church.
Whatever they'd discussed had put an edge on him.
His jaw was tight, his shoulders set, and his eyes found her immediately, zeroing in like a targeting system.
He crossed the room, and the brothers at the pool table shifted out of his path without being asked. He stopped at the bar directly across from her, planted both hands on the counter, and leaned forward.
"You've been cooking," he said.
"Someone had to. Your prospects were serving cereal for breakfast."
"I heard. Hollow won't shut up about it."
"Hollow won't shut up about anything. That's kind of his thing."
His mouth twitched. "You're settling in."
"I'm keeping busy. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
She stopped wiping the bar. He was close—leaning across the counter with those scarred hands flat on the wood, his face a foot from hers, the smell of leather and engine oil and something warm underneath filling the space between them.
"What happened in Church?" she asked.
"Club business."
"About Petrak?"
"About Petrak."
"And?"
"And he's pulled his crew back two blocks since we hit the safehouse. Lost his primary enforcer and eight soldiers in one night—he's regrouping."
"That's not pulling back. That's reloading."
Pitt's eyes sharpened. "Yeah. It is."
"So what's the plan?"
"The plan is we watch. Map his remaining crew, find the next pressure point, and take it apart."
"And me? What's my part?"
His hands shifted on the bar, fingers spreading, and she noticed the bruises on his knuckles had gone from purple to yellow-green. Healing. The hands that had killed a man for touching her were healing, and she couldn't stop staring at them.
"Your part," he said slowly, "is staying here. Where I can see you."
"That's not a part. That's a parking spot."
"Maggie—"
"I told you I have information. Petrak's collection routes, his schedule, the faces of every man who walked into my bar for two months. You need that intel, and I'm the only one who has it."
"I know."
"Then use me."
His jaw worked. She could see the conflict playing out across his face—the president who needed every advantage warring with the man who wanted her behind three walls and a locked door.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Parkway's putting together a full map of Petrak's operation. You sit with him, tell him everything you know."
"Tomorrow."
"That's what I said."
"Not next week. Not when you get around to it. Tomorrow."
He leaned closer. The bar was the only thing between them, and it wasn't wide enough. She could see the ring of darker blue around his irises, the scar tissue through his eyebrow, the way his gaze dropped to her mouth for a fraction of a second before snapping back up.
"You always push this hard?" His voice had dropped to something rough and private.
"Harder, usually. I'm being polite because you're letting me use your kitchen."
"My kitchen." He said it like the words tasted interesting. "My bar. My compound. My kitchen. Starting to sound like you live here, Maggie."
The air between them went electric. She felt it in her fingertips, the back of her neck, the pit of her stomach—a charge building that had been accumulating since the moment he'd walked into her bar and looked at her like she was something worth protecting.
"Maybe I do," she said. Quiet. Testing the words, testing him.
Pitt's hands curled on the bar. His knuckles went white, tendons standing out like cables, and she realized he was holding on to the counter the way a man holds on to something when the alternative is reaching for what he wants.
"Careful," he said.
"Why?"
"Because I'm about three seconds from coming around this bar, and if I do that, everyone in this room is going to know exactly where things stand between us."
Her heart slammed. Once, twice, hard enough that she was sure he could hear it. The common room was half-full—brothers playing pool, a prospect mopping near the door, two old ladies on the couch pretending not to watch.
"Would that be a problem?" she asked.
"For me? No." His eyes were pure heat, the cold blue burned away. "For you? That's your call. Because once my brothers see me claim what's mine, there's no walking it back."
Claim what's mine. The words hit her like a shot of whiskey—hot, immediate, spreading through her chest.
She held his gaze. Didn't blink. Didn't breathe.
"Maggie." Hollow's voice cut through from across the room like a foghorn. "Prez. Sorry to interrupt whatever the hell this is, but Parkway just called. He's got movement on Petrak's crew—new faces, reinforcements maybe. Wants eyes on it tonight."
Pitt straightened. The heat didn't leave his face—it banked, controlled, shoved down into whatever furnace he kept it in.
His eyes stayed on Maggie for two more seconds, three, and in them she saw a promise that had nothing to do with protection and everything to do with the way his hands had curled on the bar like he was physically stopping himself from touching her.
"Tell Parkway I'm on my way," Pitt said. His voice was gravel.
"You got it." Hollow paused, looked between the two of them, and had the good sense to leave without commentary.
Pitt stepped back from the bar. The distance felt like a wound.
"Tomorrow," he said. "Parkway. Your intel."
"Tomorrow," she agreed.
He turned and walked toward the door, and she watched him go—leather and purpose and barely leashed intensity, every brother in the room tracking their president without looking like they were tracking him.
At the door, he stopped. Turned his head just enough to catch her eye over his shoulder.
"Cook whatever you want," he said. "It's your kitchen."
Then he was gone, and Maggie stood behind the bar with the counter still warm where his hands had been, her pulse hammering, replaying two words in her head like a song she couldn't stop hearing.
What's mine.
She picked up the bar towel. Started wiping. Couldn't stop smiling.