Chapter 4
Chapter Four
MARGOT
Three days in and I’ve noticed that this club has a rhythm.
I learn it the way I learn any system. Through observation, pattern recognition, the quiet noticing of who goes where and when and why.
The clubhouse operates like a hospital in some ways.
Shift-based, hierarchical, everyone with a role and a rank and a clear understanding of their place in the machine.
Morning is quiet. Coffee and low conversations, the prospect cleaning up from whatever happened the night before.
By noon the main room fills up. Men in leather, bikes rumbling in and out of the lot, the sound of pool cues and classic rock from the jukebox that only plays old vinyl.
Evenings are louder. The Anvil, the bar side of the building, opens up and people from outside come in.
Women, mostly. Hangarounds, they're called, apparently.
I pretend not to notice the knowing looks they give me.
I've been given a wide berth. Whatever Rogue said in that meeting, it stuck.
Nobody hassles me. A few are friendly. Colt, obviously, who brings me coffee without being asked and loans me paperbacks from a surprising collection in his room.
Sully, the VP, who nods at me each morning like I'm a regular.
Gage, the enforcer, who doesn't speak to me but doesn't glare either, which I'm told is his version of warmth.
On the second night I woke to the sound of fists on heavy leather.
Rhythmic, savage, coming from somewhere below my room.
I went to the window even though it doesn't open and pressed my ear to the glass.
The sound kept going for twenty minutes.
In the morning I found the heavy bag in the workshop area, its chain still swinging slightly, and drops of blood on the concrete floor that someone had attempted to mop.
His blood. I know because I checked his knuckles at breakfast. Two of the splits had reopened, fresh red seeping through pink new skin.
He let me re-bandage them without comment. Sat at the bar with his coffee and held his hands out like an offering while I worked. The brothers pretended not to watch but I felt their attention. Curious, assessing, trying to make sense of their president submitting his hands to a woman.
And then there is Rogue.
Rogue who appears at unpredictable intervals, dropping into whatever space I'm occupying with that heavy presence of his and saying nothing for long stretches before asking a single question.
Did you sleep, did you eat, do you need anything.
Like he's checking vital signs. Rogue who watches me when he thinks I'm not looking, and sometimes when he knows I am.
Today is day three and I'm sitting on the building's river-facing deck, a concrete platform with mismatched chairs that catches the breeze off the water, when he comes out.
It's mid-afternoon and the heat is a living weight on everything.
My borrowed t-shirt sticks to my back. The Mississippi looks like poured bronze under the July sun.
He drops into the chair next to mine. He's in his usual uniform.
Dark jeans, boots, a plain white t-shirt under the cut.
The shirt is tight across his chest and muscular arms in a way that's functional rather than vain.
He's just big. Built like someone who's been fighting since childhood, which is probably accurate.
"You're getting a tan," he says.
"I'm getting bored."
"That a complaint?"
"An observation."
He pulls a cigarette from his cut pocket. The lighter flares and I watch him pull in smoke, watch the way his cheeks hollow and his eyes half-close. It's a ritual. Meditative. Those scarred hands cup the flame with a gentleness that seems impossible given what I've seen them do.
"What do you do when you're not working?" he asks.
The question is personal. Everything between us has been transactional until now. Logistics, needs, boundaries. This is different. This is curiosity.
"Read. Run. Cook, when I have time. Watch terrible reality TV without shame."
"What do you read?"
"Anything. Everything. Right now I'm reading one of Colt's. A thriller about a serial killer."
"Appropriate." There's that ghost-smile again. It's so slight I'm starting to wonder if I'm imagining it.
"What about you?" I ask.
He looks at me. Smoke curls up between us in the still air. "What about me what?"
"What do you do when you're not... this?" I gesture at the cut, the clubhouse, the life.
"I'm always this."
"Nobody's always one thing."
He takes another drag. Looks out over the river. The afternoon light hits the scars on his hands, turns them silver. "I rebuild engines. Old bikes, mostly. Tear them down to nothing and build them back."
"That's therapeutic."
"That's mechanical."
"Same thing, sometimes."
He doesn't respond to that. But he doesn't leave, either.
We sit in the heat and the silence and I become aware, uncomfortably and undeniably, of the sheer physical reality of him beside me.
The size of his forearm on the chair rest, the wounds on his knuckles, the way his knee is angled toward me.
He smells like warm skin and leather and a musk that my body responds to before my brain can intervene.
I'm attracted to him. That's the clinical assessment, and there's no point in lying to myself about it.
It's insane. He killed a man in front of me. He's keeping me here against my will. Softly, without locks, but the constraint is real. He's a criminal, a violent man, the president of an outlaw motorcycle club. He is everything I should find repulsive.
But my body doesn't operate on should. My body is keyed into the way he moves.
Deliberate, economical, every motion purposeful.
The way his voice drops when he says my name.
The way he looked at me last night when I was reading and he thought I couldn't see.
Hungry, but also confused by his own hunger, like a man confronted with something he doesn't have any rules for.
"Your hands are healing," I say. Because I need to say something and the silence is getting thick with things neither of us is addressing, but both of us are thinking about.
He looks down at his knuckles. The bandages are gone. He took them off yesterday. And the wounds are closed now, pink and new. "Your doctoring worked."
"Nursing."
"Same thing."
"It is absolutely not."
"Noted." He stubs out his cigarette on the arm of the chair. Turns to face me more fully. "You could've run. That first night. The door wasn't locked. You didn’t even try.”
"I know."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because I'm not stupid. Even if I could have got past your men, running in an unfamiliar neighborhood with no phone or money after witnessing a murder. That's a survival horror movie, not a plan."
"And now? Three days in. You know the layout, the schedules. Colt leaves the front door unlocked half the time."
I consider lying. Consider giving him the strategic answer. I'm still trying to figure things out or I'm waiting for the right moment. But something about this man makes me want to be honest in ways that might be dangerous.
"I don't have anywhere I need to be badly enough to risk it," I say. "And..." I stop myself.
"And?"
"And I'm not sure what I'd be running from."
The air between us shifts. I said too much. Or exactly enough. His gaze drops to my mouth and back up so fast I almost miss it, but I don't miss it. My skin heats in a way that has nothing to do with the Memphis sun.
"You should be running from me," he says. Low. The gravel in his voice scrapes against my nerve endings.
“You are probably right."
"I'm not a good man, Margot."
"I know what you are."
"Do you?"
I turn in my chair to face him fully. We're close. Closer than we've been since that first night when I held his hands and cleaned his wounds. I can see the individual hairs of his stubble, the thin scar that bisects his left eyebrow, the darker ring around his pale irises.
"You're a man who kills when he has to and doesn't lose sleep over it.
You run a club that operates outside the law and you're good at it.
You'd have to be, to keep these men in line.
You're fighting a war that killed your father and you'll either win it or die trying.
" I hold his gaze. "But you didn't hurt me.
You put me in a room with a lock on the inside. You asked if I needed anything."
"That doesn't make me good."
"I didn't say you were good. I said I know what you are, and I do.”
His jaw works. That muscle jumping beneath the stubble.
He's looking at me like I've done something impossible, like I've reached inside him and touched something he keeps hidden.
And I know, with the same certainty I have when I look at a patient's vitals and know what's coming, that if I leaned forward right now, if I closed this distance between us, he wouldn't stop me.
But I don't. Because this thing between us is a blade and we're both holding it and neither of us knows yet which way it's going to cut.
A door slams inside the clubhouse. Voices. Loud, urgent. The moment shatters. Rogue is on his feet instantly, the softness gone, replaced by the coiled alertness of a man who lives prepared for violence.
"Stay here," he says. He's gone before I can respond, disappearing through the door with a speed that shouldn't belong to someone that big.
I sit in the heat and the silence and listen to my own heartbeat. It's fast. Faster than it's been since the gas station. But not from fear.
From want.
God help me, I want him. I want the weight of those hands on me, the scrape of his voice against my ear, the dangerous reality of him pressed against the dangerous reality of me.
I press my thighs together and stare at the river and wait for my pulse to normalize.
It doesn’t, not even a little bit.
When he comes back twenty minutes later, whatever emergency resolved, his jaw tight but his body calm, he finds me exactly where he left me. Same chair. Same river. Same heat.
"Everything okay?" I ask.
"Handled." He drops into the chair. Closer this time, or maybe I'm imagining it. His knee is inches from mine. "You didn't go inside."
"You said stay here."
"Since when do you do what I say?"
I look at him. He's looking at me. And the air is still thick and the river is still bronze and nothing has changed except everything.
"Since it served my purposes," I say.
He almost laughs. I hear it. The exhale through his nose, the twitch of his mouth. Close. Closer than I've heard from him.
I'll take it.