Chapter 13
Maggie found him in his room at the compound, sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, cleaning a wound he hadn't told anyone about.
The ride back from the warehouse had been a blur—bikes in formation through empty streets, the smell of smoke and gunpowder clinging to everyone like a second skin, brothers splitting off to handle cleanup while Pitt steered them home with one hand on the throttle and her arms death-gripped around his waist. He'd walked through the compound without stopping, spoken to no one, disappeared up the stairs while Hollow handled the debrief.
She'd given him ten minutes. Then she'd followed.
His door was unlocked. She pushed it open and found him in the gray spill of streetlight through the curtain, shirtless, his cut thrown over the chair, pressing a wadded t-shirt against his left side where a dark stain was spreading through the fabric.
His hands were steady. His face was somewhere else entirely—that thousand-yard distance she'd seen once before, in the safehouse, the look of a man replaying violence behind his eyes.
"You're hurt," she said.
"Graze." He didn't look up. "Caught a ricochet off the column. It's nothing."
"You're bleeding through a shirt. That's not nothing."
She crossed the room and pulled his hand away from the wound. A gash across his ribs—four inches long, shallow but ugly, still seeping. Not life-threatening. But the sight of his blood on her fingers did something to her that had nothing to do with first aid.
"Maggie, I can—"
"Shut up."
She found the first aid kit in his dresser—because of course he kept one there, this man who lived ready for damage.
Alcohol wipes, butterfly strips, gauze. She knelt beside the bed and cleaned the wound with hands that wanted to shake and didn't, because she wouldn't let them. Not now. Not in front of him.
He hissed when the alcohol hit. His hand came up and gripped her shoulder—reflex, not intention—fingers digging in hard enough to bruise.
"Sorry," he muttered.
"Don't be." She pressed a butterfly strip across the gash, then another, closing the wound in neat intervals. Her hands on his skin. His blood under her fingernails. The heat of him radiating into her palms like a furnace.
She looked up. He was watching her with that intensity—the one that made her feel like the only person in the world, the one that burned through every defense she'd ever built.
But tonight it was different. Tonight the control was gone.
Whatever leash he kept on himself had snapped somewhere between the warehouse and this room, and what she saw in his eyes was raw and desperate and barely held together.
"You could've died tonight," she said.
"Didn't."
"Because I shot someone." The words tasted strange—true and terrible and necessary. "Because I was watching your back and I pulled the trigger and he went down."
"Yeah."
"I'm not sorry."
"I know."
"I'd do it again."
His hand moved from her shoulder to her jaw, tilting her face up, and the look in his eyes shifted from desperate to dangerous. "Maggie. Stop talking about shooting people and come here."
She surged up from her knees and his mouth caught hers before she was fully upright, his hands in her hair, pulling her onto the bed and onto him with a force that knocked the first aid kit to the floor.
This wasn't a kiss—it was a collision. Teeth and tongue and the taste of adrenaline, his hands yanking her shirt up while her fingers scrabbled at his belt, both of them moving with the frantic urgency of people who'd almost lost something and needed to prove it still existed.
"Mine," he growled against her mouth, and the word vibrated through her like a struck bell.
Not the way he'd said it their first night—reverent, wondering.
This was possession. This was a man who'd watched bullets fly past the woman he'd claimed and was now putting his brand on her with his hands and his mouth and his body because words weren't enough.
"Prove it," she said.
He flipped her. One motion—his hands on her hips, her back hitting the mattress, his weight pinning her with an impact that drove the air from her lungs. She grabbed his dog tags and pulled him down, kissing him hard enough to taste copper, and his groan was the sound of a man coming apart.
Clothes disappeared in fragments—her shirt over her head, his sweatpants kicked off, her borrowed shorts peeled away with hands that weren't patient and didn't pretend to be.
Every contact point burned. His chest against hers, his hips between her thighs, his mouth on her throat pressing heat into her pulse until she couldn't tell if the pounding was her heartbeat or his.
"Dominic," she gasped, and his whole body jerked like she'd hit him with a live wire.
"Say it again."
"Dominic. I'm right here. I'm alive. We're both—"
He silenced her with his mouth and his hands and the full weight of everything he'd been holding back since the warehouse.
This wasn't the careful exploration of their first time, the slow mapping of scars and softness.
This was combat translated into contact—fierce, demanding, two bodies burning off the terror of almost-loss through friction and heat and the desperate, primal need to feel alive.
She matched him. Gave back everything he gave, her nails raking his shoulders, her teeth on his neck, her body rising to meet his with a force that surprised them both.
She wasn't fragile and she'd told him so, and now she was proving it—taking him, challenging him, refusing to let him hold anything back.
He didn't. The restraint that defined him—the control, the discipline, the iron will that kept a motorcycle club in line—dissolved under her hands.
She felt it go, felt the exact moment he stopped thinking and started feeling, and the sound he made against her skin was the most honest thing she'd ever heard from him.
The world narrowed to the space between their bodies.
Sensation stacking on sensation—his hands bruising her hips, her legs locked around him, sweat and breath and the creak of a bed frame that wasn't built for this kind of intensity.
She buried her face in his neck and held on, riding the wave of it, feeling everything—the adrenaline, the fear, the fury, the overwhelming relief of being alive and together and whole.
When it crested, it crested hard—a shuddering, gasping unraveling that left her boneless and breathless, her face pressed against his shoulder, his arms locked around her so tight she could feel the bandage on his ribs pressing between them.
He didn't let go. Didn't roll away, didn't create distance. Stayed exactly where he was, breathing hard against her hair, his heart slamming so hard she felt it through both their chests.
"I can feel your bandage," she murmured.
"Don't care."
"You're going to tear your stitches."
"Don't have stitches. You used butterfly strips."
"You're going to tear your butterfly strips."
His laugh was ragged, exhausted, and real—a sound that vibrated through both of them and loosened something that had been wound tight since the first gunshot at the warehouse.
He shifted enough to take his weight off her but kept her close, pulling her against his side, his arm heavy across her waist.
She pressed her palm flat against his chest. His heartbeat was slowing—still fast, but steadying, the engine throttling down. Under her hand, the dog tags sat warm from his skin. She traced the raised letters without reading them, feeling the shape of a name that belonged to a different life.
"I shot someone tonight," she said again. Quieter this time.
"You saved someone tonight." His hand covered hers on his chest. "Different framing."
"Is it?"
"Yeah." He turned his head on the pillow to look at her. In the half-dark, his eyes had gone soft in a way that only happened here—in this bed, after this, when the walls were down and the man behind the president was visible. "You saw a threat. You acted. You kept someone you love alive."
The word landed between them like a grenade with the pin still in.
Love. He hadn't said it directly—had curved the sentence so it could mean something else if she needed it to.
But the shape of it was there, unmistakable, and Maggie felt it settle into her chest with a weight that was terrifying and welcome in equal measure.
"Someone I love," she repeated.
"If that's what this is."
She propped herself up on his chest, looking down at him. Blood on her fingers, gunpowder in her hair, bruises on her hips from his hands. She'd never felt more certain of anything.
"That's what this is."
His hand came up to her face. Gentle now—the fierceness spent, replaced by something that looked like a man realizing he'd been given something he didn't know how to deserve. His thumb traced her lower lip, her jaw, the curve of her ear.
"Maggie Kowalski," he said. "Bartender. Shooter. Pain in my ass."
"Dominic Bradshaw. Biker. Bleeder. Man who can't clean his own wounds."
He pulled her down and kissed her forehead—soft, deliberate, the kind of kiss that had nothing to do with heat and everything to do with something bigger.
"Stay," he said.
Not tonight. Not until this is over. Just stay.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said. "You're stuck with me."
His arms tightened around her, his face buried in her hair, and she felt the tension drain out of him like water from a cracked vessel—slowly, completely, until the man holding her was just a man.
Not a president, not a fighter, not the beating heart of a motorcycle club.
Just Dominic, scarred and tired and holding on to the woman who'd chosen him in the middle of a war.
She pulled the sheet over them both. Tucked herself against his uninjured side. Listened to his breathing slow and deepen as sleep took him under.
Outside, the compound was quiet. Brothers on watch, the city sleeping, the Monongahela rolling black and endless toward the Ohio. Somewhere out there, Victor Petrak was counting his losses and planning his next move, one step closer to the end he didn't see coming.
Maggie closed her eyes. Her hand rested on Pitt's chest, rising and falling with his breath, the dog tags warm under her fingers.
She didn't dream.