EPILOGUE - Melissa
THREE MONTHS LATER
The drive from Missoula took an hour and forty minutes, and I’d made it enough times now that I stopped noticing the turns.
Three days a week, campus and clinicals, then the highway home through the mountains.
Home. The word had started fitting somewhere around week six, quietly, without announcement, the way the best things do.
I was one semester from finishing my degree.
The university had worked with me on the gap, the missing months, the credits that needed bridging.
There was paperwork, meetings with the dean, a counselor who asked careful questions I answered carefully.
But the program took me back, and my hands were still sure, and the work hadn’t forgotten me even if everything else had changed.
I’d called Mrs. Donaldson on a Wednesday morning, three weeks after the raid. Sat on the edge of the bed with Razor beside me and my phone in my hands, and I’d dialed the number I still knew by heart and listened to it ring four times before she picked up.
She’d kept him. Four months of the expensive wet food, the kind I could never afford, and he’d gotten fat.
She’d cried on the phone. I’d cried in the truck on the way to pick him up, and Razor drove with one hand on the wheel and the other on my knee and didn’t say a word about it.
Professor had looked at me from Mrs. Donaldson’s arms with the deeply offended expression of a cat whose routine had been disrupted, and then he’d ignored me for the entire drive home.
Sat in his cage in the footwell, facing away, tail flicking.
Forty minutes of pointed silence from a ten-pound animal.
He’d forgiven me by the next morning of course. He climbed onto my chest at five a.m. and purring into my face until I fed him, and I’d cried then too because even the inconvenience felt like getting something back I thought I’d lost.
That was six weeks ago. Professor now lived at the lodge.
He wasn’t supposed to. The plan had been temporary, keep him at the compound until Razor and I found a place in town.
We’d looked at two houses already, both within a few miles of the compound, both with porches and enough space and the kind of quiet that didn’t make me nervous anymore.
But Professor had settled into the lodge like he’d been running the place for years, and the brothers had let him, and the temporary arrangement had become something nobody was in a hurry to change.
I dropped my bag at the door, kicked off my shoes, and followed the sound of voices toward the main room.
I stopped in the doorway.
Razor was on the floor, his back against the couch, dragging a feather toy across the floorboards. Professor was going after it like the feather had personally insulted him, skidding sideways on the wood, all four paws scrambling.
Duke was cross-legged next to them, shaking cat treats out of a bag into his palm and offering them one at a time. He had a fresh scratch on his forearm that he was pretending wasn’t there.
I leaned against the doorframe. “What am I looking at right now?”
Razor looked up at me. He was sitting on the floor of the lodge with a feather toy in his fist and he didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed.
“He was bored,” Razor said.
“So you bought him a toy.”
“And treats,” Duke added, holding up the bag like evidence of their good cat parenting.
“And treats.” I repeated before looking at Duke’s arm. “He scratched you?”
Duke glanced at the scratch. “My arm got in the way.”
“The cat drew blood.”
“He’s assertive. I respect that.”
Professor caught the feather, lost interest, then turned and ate a treat out of Duke’s hand with the delicacy of a king accepting tribute.
He padded over to Razor and climbed into his lap, turned once, and settled.
Razor scratched behind his ears and Professor collapsed sideways and purred so loud the sound filled the room.
“This is a motorcycle club,” I said. “You’re supposed to be intimidating badasses.”
“We are intimidating,” Duke said.
“You’re hand-feeding treats to a cat and you bought him a new feather cat toy. He has you wrapped around his paw and you don’t even see it.”
“He likes the feather,” Razor said, like that settled it.
I sat down next to him. Professor opened one eye, decided I was acceptable, and went back to sleep. Razor put his arm around me and I leaned into him and his thumb traced a slow line along my shoulder, absent, easy, the touch of a man who’d stopped thinking about whether he was allowed.
I shook my head in disbelief, but smiled. The compound was settling into the sounds that meant evening was coming, the shop closing up, the first noise from Angel’s Rest as Bree opened the bar.
This was apparently my life now, and I loved it.