3. Mia
THREE
MIA
I lay awake for hours, turning from one side to the other, kicking the sheets off and pulling them back.
Every time I closed my eyes the sound came back.
Glass fracturing, the percussive crack of rounds punching through the shopfront, the split second of silence before Priest’s arms locked around me and pulled me down.
I replayed the phone call. The voice. I replayed the handler’s voicemail greeting, the recorded message from the regional office, the hollow feeling of reaching for a system that had already let go of me.
I thought about Priest’s shoulder. The blood soaking through his shirt. How he’d said it was a graze like it was nothing, like catching a bullet for a woman in a flower shop was just another day.
Eventually the dark outside the window turned gray, then pale blue, and I gave up pretending sleep was an option.
There was a knock at my door. I sat up, pushed my hair back. “Yeah.”
The door opened. Priest, two mugs in his hands. He’d changed his shirt. The gauze on his left shoulder was bright white just about visible under his t-shirt, clean, recently dressed. He set a mug on the nightstand and leaned against the doorframe with the other.
I picked it up. He’d added cream. Too much, and no sugar, but the fact that he’d tried made my throat tight. He’d paid enough attention across all those Tuesday mornings to know I didn’t drink it black. He’d gotten the details wrong and the gesture exactly right.
“Thank you,” I said. Took a sip. It was terrible and I didn’t care.
“Angel wants to talk,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“Who’s Angel?”
“Our president. You met him last night on the porch. He runs the club.”
Last night was a blur of gates and timber and a man’s calm voice saying come on in, you’re safe here. I’d been shaking too hard to file the details properly. “And the other men? The ones who were here?”
“Ghost is our VP. Rook handles intel. They’ll be in the room. I’ll be there too.”
He said it simply. No pressure, no sales pitch. Just the facts, laid out with the steady patience of a man who’d wait as long as it took.
“I’m ready,” I said.
Angel sat across from me at a long timber table in the common room.
He was slightly older than I’d realized last night, and he gave off the air of a man whose authority came from earning it rather than demanding it.
He introduced Ghost, who leaned against the far wall with his arms folded and a stillness about him that felt deliberate.
Then Rook, who sat at the end of the table with a laptop open, lean and watchful, his fingers resting on the keys.
Priest sat beside me. Close enough that his warmth reached me without contact.
Angel didn’t waste any time getting started.
“Someone put rounds through your business on Main Street yesterday with one of my brothers inside,” he said. “Priest took a bullet keeping you covered. That makes this club business. We want to help, but we can’t do that blind. I need to know what we’re dealing with.”
Silence and I took a breath.
“I can’t.” The words came out before I’d decided to say them.
Reflex. All that conditioning rising up like muscle memory, slamming every door shut at once.
“I’m not supposed to tell anyone. That’s the rule.
That’s how the program works. I don’t tell, I don’t trust, I don’t let anyone in.
Those are the rules and I’ve followed every single one of them since the day they gave me this name. ”
My voice was climbing. I pressed my hands flat on the table to steady them.
Angel didn’t push. He sat there with his coffee and his steady eyes and he waited — a man who’d sat across from frightened people before and knows that silence does more work than pressure.
“The rules kept you alive,” Priest said beside me. Low, even. “But somebody broke them yesterday. Not you. From what you are saying, it sounds like you’re in witness protection.”
That landed. Right in the center of the thing I’d been circling all night. I’d followed every protocol. I’d been perfect. I’d done everything they told me and someone on the other side of the system had sold me anyway.
The rules hadn’t failed. The people enforcing them had.
“Macy Bowers is a cover identity,” I finally said. “US Marshals Service witness protection program. I’ve been in WITSEC for two years.”
The room shifted when I confirmed what they had already suspected. Not visibly, not with any dramatic reaction. Ghost’s eyes sharpened. Rook’s fingers stilled on the keyboard. Angel’s expression didn’t change, but the quality of his attention did.
I told them about Marco Salieri. The relationship, the charm, the gradual discovery that the man I thought I loved ran a drug distribution network behind clean business fronts.
Going to the feds. Wearing a wire. Sitting in a federal courtroom and testifying until there was nothing left to say.
He got twenty years to life. I got a new name, a town I’d never heard of and instructions to trust a system that was supposed to keep me invisible.
I told them about the handler. Inspector James Rawlings. Regular check-ins for eighteen months, then sporadic, then silence. The threatening call. The backup numbers that led nowhere.
Rook was already working. I could hear the keys, fast, precise. “Rawlings,” he said. “James. USMS?”
“Yes.”
He typed. His eyes didn’t leave the screen.
Angel looked at Ghost. Ghost gave a single nod.
“We’ll find out what happened to him,” Angel said.
“Rook will run it down. I have a contact in federal law enforcement who can verify from the other end.” He paused.
Leaned forward slightly. “You’re safe here.
These walls, these men. Every brother in this club is ex-military.
We know how to protect people the system can’t. For as long as you need.”
I believed him. I shouldn’t have. But this wasn’t a bureaucracy with a phone number that rang to voicemail. This was a man looking at me across a table with the weight of a promise behind his eyes, and beside me was another man with a bandaged shoulder who’d already proven what his word was worth.
The meeting broke up. Ghost went, Rook took the laptop into the back, already on a call and Angel put his hand on my shoulder as he passed. Brief, warm and reassuring.
And then it was just Priest and me.
We stood in the hallway outside the guest room. He’d walked me back without being asked, and now the corridor was quiet and the lodge was still. I was standing in front of a man who’d caught a bullet for me less than twenty-four hours ago.
“You took a round for me yesterday,” I said. “You put your body over mine and you got shot. I haven’t thanked you for that properly and I don’t know how to, because thank you doesn’t really cover it. You saved my life.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“Priest.” I stopped. Looked at him. The bandaged shoulder.
The stubble along his jaw. The eyes that had been watching me since my first week in Forsaken with a patience I hadn’t understood until now.
“I need to tell you something. I held it back in there because it just didn’t feel right, and they’ll find out when they start digging anyway.
But my name, my real name, I feel like you should be the first to know who I really am. ”
He waited. He was good at waiting, I’d discovered that about him.
“Mia,” I said. “My real name is Mia Hart.”
I said it quietly. Two syllables I hadn’t spoken aloud in two years, the name I’d locked away because locking it away was the price of survival. Giving it to him felt like unclenching a fist I’d held so long my fingers had forgotten any other shape.
“Mia,” he said.
My name in his mouth. Low, careful, held like he understood the weight of it. A different sound than Macy. Sharper. More real. The name of a woman who’d sat in a courtroom and chosen to destroy the man she’d loved once because he deserved to be destroyed.
I hadn’t heard it from another person in two years.
The sound of it cracked through every wall I’d built.
Not violently, not dramatically. Just a shift, a settling, the quiet collapse of a structure that had been holding by willpower alone.
My eyes burned, my chest hurt, and the man standing in front of me had just given me back the thing I’d been missing without being able to name it.
I kissed him.
I didn’t plan it. I didn’t weigh it or calculate or run it through the risk assessment that governed every other decision in my life.
I just needed to feel something that was mine.
All those months of performing, of following rules, of being someone else in a town I didn’t choose, and this man had taken a bullet for me and said my name like I was someone real.
Besides, I was so tired of being careful.
I was so tired of being disciplined and controlled and invisible.
I’d almost died yesterday. I’d almost died and the only reason I hadn’t was standing right here and I wanted to feel alive and I wanted to feel like I was choosing and most of all I wanted his hands on me.
So I kissed him. I put my hand on his chest and stepped into him and pressed my mouth to his.
He was still for one heartbeat. Then his hand came up to the side of my face and he kissed me back, slow, thorough, with the careful attention of a man who’d been waiting and wasn’t going to rush now that the wait was over.
His mouth was warm, his hand steady against my jaw, and when his other arm came around my waist and drew me closer I felt the solid width of him against my body and the last of the pretending fell away.
I pulled him into the room. He came, kicking the door shut, and then his hands were in my hair and my back was against the wall and the kiss deepened into heat that spread through my whole body.
I pulled his shirt over his head. The bandage on his shoulder was stark against his skin, the ink on his arms vivid, and I traced the edge of the gauze with my fingertip. He caught my hand and pressed his lips to my palm, and the tenderness of it made my breath catch.
Then his mouth was on my throat, my collarbone, working down while his hands found the hem of my shirt and stripped it over my head.
He unclasped my bra and his lips trailed across my sternum, between my breasts, and when he took my nipple into his mouth I arched off the wall and gripped the back of his neck and heard myself gasp.
He moved between my breasts, his tongue circling, his hand cupping and stroking, learning what made me react and doing it again until I was panting against him.
His hand slid down my stomach, over my hip, along the inside of my thigh. His touch made every part of my body feel electric. He worked my jeans open and pulled them down with my underwear and I kicked them free and I stood bare against the wall while he knelt in front of me.
He looked up at me. Held my gaze. Then he pressed his mouth between my thighs and my head fell back and I stopped thinking entirely.
Slow, deliberate strokes of his tongue that built heat in layers.
He gripped my thigh, holding me steady, and when he found the rhythm that made my legs shake he stayed there, relentless, patient, until the pressure crested and I came with his name on my lips and my hand braced against the wall because my knees had stopped working.
He kissed the inside of my thigh. Stood, lifting me as he went, my legs wrapping around his hips.
He carried me to the bed and laid me down.
I reached for his belt, got his jeans open, pushed them down, and wrapped my hand around him.
The sound he made was rough, strained, his breath catching as I stroked him.
I guided him into me. He pressed forward slowly, filling me, and we both went still, adjusting, breathing, the intimacy of it enormous.
His face was close to mine, his weight braced on his forearms, and I could see everything in his expression.
Want, tenderness, the quiet intensity of a man who was exactly where he’d been trying not to admit he wanted to be.
He moved. Long, deep strokes that made my spine arch and my nails dig into his shoulders.
I wrapped my legs tighter, pulling him deeper into me.
The angle shifted and the pressure rebuilt, sharper this time, more urgent.
His pace increased, his hips driving against mine, and I could hear myself making sounds I hadn’t made in years, raw, unguarded, sounds that belonged to Mia, not Macy.
“Right there,” I gasped. “Oh my god, don’t stop.”
He gave me exactly what I asked for. Every stroke precise, his body moving with power and focus, his hand gripping my hip to hold the angle.
I felt the orgasm building from deep inside, tightening, radiating outward, and when it hit I clenched around him and cried out and he followed seconds later, burying deep, a groan tearing out of him that I felt through my whole body.
Quiet. His weight settling over me, warm, real. His face against my neck, his breathing ragged, his heart hammering against mine.
He shifted onto his side and pulled me with him, keeping me close.
His arm settled around my waist and I lay there with my cheek against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow, and I thought about the fact that twenty-four hours ago I’d been standing in my shop arranging peonies and now I was lying in a bed in a compound full of ex-military bikers and somehow, I was more myself than I’d been since the WITSEC gave me a new name.
I was just Mia. In a room with a man who’d said my name like he wanted to say it over and over.
I closed my eyes and lost myself in the moment.