5. Mia
FIVE
MIA
I left at two in the morning.
The compound was dark. I moved through the lodge with the training that governed every space I needed to leave without being noticed.
Soft steps. No lights. The bag over my shoulder, the same one I’d always kept packed just in case.
I had cash in my purse, keys in my hand, and held them tight so they didn’t jangle.
Priest was asleep in the guest room. I’d lain beside him for an hour after he fell asleep, my hand on his chest, listening to him breathe, and I’d made my decision with the part of me that understood cost.
These men had families. I’d lived in Forsaken long enough to know that.
I’d seen their women in town, at Rosie’s, at the grocery store.
I’d seen the little girl on the sidewalk on Saturday mornings.
I’d heard about the baby. I knew what a compound full of people who loved each other looked like from the outside, and I knew what a bullet through a window sounded like, and I wouldn’t be the thing that connected those two facts.
Marco’s crew had already shot up Main Street. They’d come again. And the longer I stayed, the closer the next attempt got to someone who had nothing to do with my choices.
I slipped out the side door, crossed the lot to my car, and pulled through the gates with my headlights off.
I took the back road east. Not Highway 12, which was the obvious route and the one anyone looking would watch first. The two-lane through the foothills, the one I’d driven once, weeks after arriving in Forsaken, memorizing it like every other exit. The habit that was keeping me alive right now.
Two hours of empty road. Mountains black against stars. The wheel steady in my hands and every mile pulling at the place in my chest where his heartbeat had been.
The motel was a single-story building off the highway in a town I didn’t bother learning the name of. A vacancy sign buzzing in the lot. A clerk who took my cash without looking at my face and handed me a key on a plastic diamond.
Room 7. A bed, a chair, a bathroom with a shower curtain that had seen better decades. I locked the door, put the chain on, and sat on the edge of the bed with my bag at my feet.
I was alone.
I’d been alone since arriving in Forsaken and it had been manageable.
Lonely, yes. Hard, yes. But manageable because I hadn’t known what the alternative felt like.
Now I did. For forty-eight hours I’d been inside something real.
A man who knew my name. Men who’d heard the truth and chosen to help instead of look away.
The warmth of someone’s arms around me in the dark, someone who’d protected me through gunfire to keep me alive and then memorized how I took my coffee because that was just how his mind worked.
I’d walked away from it. I’d walked away because staying felt selfish and because I’d already cost him a bullet injury and because the next cost could be someone who wouldn’t be so lucky.
I sat on the bed. The clock read four forty-seven. A truck passed on the highway, headlights sweeping across the curtain. The room smelled like industrial cleaner and old stale carpet.
I didn’t cry, no matter how much I wanted to. The discipline held, as it always held, muscles clenched around the thing I was carrying because if I let go I wasn’t sure I could pick it back up.
I sat there for I don’t know how long feeling completely numb.
The knock came just after dawn.
I was still on the edge of the bed, but lying down at this point and staring blankly at the ceiling. I hadn’t moved, hadn’t slept, and hadn’t opened my bag. The light through the curtain had shifted from black to gray to thin gold and I’d watched it change without processing any of it.
The knock came again. Steady, unhurried. The knock of someone who knew you were inside and was willing to wait.
I looked through the peephole.
Priest.
Standing in the corridor, hands at his sides. He was wearing the same clothes from yesterday. He hadn’t slept either. It showed in the set of his jaw, the fatigue around his eyes, the stillness of a man who’d been driving for hours on nothing but focus.
I opened the door.
He looked at me. Took in the bag on the floor, and the room.
“How did you find me?” My voice was hoarse.
“You wouldn’t take the highway. Too obvious, too exposed. The back road east was the logical route, and there are only a handful of motels between Forsaken and Billings.” He paused. “I just kept driving and checking until I found you.”
Simple. Clean. He’d thought about where I’d go, how I’d think about it, and he’d followed the logic until it led him to a parking lot with my car in it.
“You need to go,” I said.
“No.”
“Priest. Listen to me. Marco’s people shot up my shop. They know where the compound is. As long as I’m near you, near the club, the people you care about are at risk. I won’t be the reason someone else gets hurt. You already took a bullet protecting me, I don’t want it to be worse next time.”
“That’s not your decision to make for us.”
“It is. It’s the only one I have left.”
He didn’t argue. He didn’t give me a speech about the club handling it or the compound being safe. He walked past me into the room, pulled the chair from the desk, sat down, and rested his forearms on his knees. Settled. Like he’d arrived at a place he intended to stay.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Sitting.”
“I asked you to leave.”
“I heard you.”
I stared at him. He looked back at me with the same patience he’d shown across what felt like a thousand shop-counter mornings. Steady, unhurried, present. He was giving me space. He was also making it clear that the space had him in it, and he wasn’t going anywhere.
The anger came first. Hot, sharp. I’d made a sacrifice and he was sitting in a motel chair acting like it was negotiable. I’d left to protect them. I’d given up the only real thing I’d had since the day I walked into Forsaken.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m not running from you. I’m running so nobody else pays for what I did. I testified. I did the right thing. And people keep getting hurt because of it. You got shot because of me.”
“Correction. I got grazed by a bullet because I chose to put my body over yours. I chose to protect you and that was my call.”
“And next time it could be worse. Next time it could be one of the women, or the baby, or...”
My voice cracked. A fracture that ran through the word and kept going. The muscles I’d been clenching since my placement, the ones holding everything in place, the discipline and the fear and the loneliness, gave out.
I sat on the bed because my legs wouldn’t hold me.
I pressed my hands over my face and the breathing turned into something I couldn’t control, a sound coming out of me that I didn’t recognize.
Something deeper than sobbing. The sound of a woman who’d been strong for so long she’d forgotten she was allowed to stop.
He didn’t rush to me. He let it come. Let me shake and gasp and fall apart on the edge of a motel bed, and when the worst of it passed he got out of the chair and sat beside me. Close. Solid. His thigh against mine. His hand on my back, broad and warm, holding me in the world.
“I’m tired,” I whispered. “I’m so tired of doing this alone.”
“Then stop.”
Two words. No speech, no romance, no ornamental promises. Just the offer.
I turned to him. His face was close, his eyes on mine, and what I saw there wasn’t pity. It was recognition. The look of someone who understood what it cost to carry a heavy thing alone for years and what it felt like when someone reached for the other end.
He lifted his hand from my back and put it on the side of my neck. His thumb resting against my jaw, his fingers curling into my hair. He held me there, his eyes searching my face, asking without words. And then he kissed me.
It wasn’t careful. It wasn’t the patient, measured kiss from the hallway at the compound.
It was the kiss of a man who’d driven through the dark for two hours to find a woman in a motel room and was done pretending any of this was casual.
His mouth covered mine and the force of it pushed the air out of my lungs and I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him closer because the alternative was drowning.
I pulled at his shirt. We undressed each other with hands that weren’t patient, weren’t gentle, buttons and zippers and fabric shoved aside because careful was something that belonged to our first time and this wasn’t that. This was need.
I needed to feel him against me with nothing between us.
He bore me back onto the bed, his body over mine, his mouth on my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my shoulder. I arched into him, hooking one leg over his thigh and pulling him closer. I reached between us and guided him in and the sound that came out of me was relief, raw and unguarded.
He stilled. Let me adjust. His breath was warm against my jaw.
“Okay?” he murmured.
“Yes. God, yes.”
He began to move and this was nothing like the first time.
The first time had been discovery, two people learning the shape of each other.
This was what happened when you’d held everything together for longer than your body could stand and someone finally gave you permission to let go.
I gripped his shoulders and met every thrust, my hips rising to his, and the sounds filling the room were mine, unfiltered, the sounds of a woman who’d stopped performing.
He shifted, pulling me up with him until he was sitting on the edge of the bed and I was in his lap, my knees on either side of his hips.
The angle changed, deeper, and I sank down with a gasp.
This was mine. I set the pace, my hands on his shoulders, rolling my hips in deep, slow strokes that built heat from the base of my spine outward.
His hands gripped my waist, steadying me, letting me take what I needed.
His face held me. The tension in his jaw. His breath catching every time I rolled forward. His eyes on mine, present, anchored. This man who’d walked into my shop every second Tuesday with flowers for his grandparents and a gentleness he thought nobody saw.
“Mia.” My name, rough, strained.
I moved faster. His fingers pressed into my skin and the restraint in him was palpable, the effort it cost him to let me lead. I kissed him hard, my teeth catching his lower lip, and the sound he made against my mouth sent heat flooding through me.
His hand slid between us, his thumb finding my clit, circling in tight, precise strokes while I rode him.
The dual pressure of him inside me and his thumb on me built to a peak so sharp I couldn’t breathe.
I pressed my face against his neck, my hands gripping the back of his head, and I came apart.
The orgasm tore through me in waves, my whole body clenching around him, and he gripped my hips and thrust up into me, hard, urgent, and followed with a groan that I felt in my chest.
We stayed. My arms around his neck, my face against his shoulder. His hands on my back. Breathing. Just breathing. The motel room was quiet except for us and the hum of the heater and the distant highway.
He pressed his lips to my temple.
I didn’t say I’d go back. I didn’t decide, not yet, not in words. But I stayed in his arms and I wasn’t performing. I wasn’t running. I wasn’t planning the next exit or memorizing the next route.
I was just here. With him. And for the first time since settling here, enough was enough.