7. Rogue
Chapter Seven
ROGUE
The call comes at three AM on day six.
I'm in bed with Margot. Her back against my chest, her breathing slow and even, one of her hands resting on my forearm where it drapes across her waist. I've been sleeping like the dead since she started staying in my room, which is dangerous and stupid and I don't care.
For the first time in three years, my brain shuts off when my head hits the pillow.
Then the phone buzzes on the nightstand and I'm awake instantly. The way you learn to wake when any sound could mean violence.
Gage. I pick up.
"We've got a problem." His voice is flat. Gage doesn't do urgency. Everything is delivered in the same bass monotone whether he's ordering a beer or reporting a body. "Deacon Vargas from The Crest just showed up at The Anvil. Says he wants a meeting."
I'm already sitting up, already swinging my legs off the bed. Margot stirs behind me.
"Meeting about what?"
"Says he knows what happened, knows about the girl. Says Devlin wants her, that he doesn’t want a civilian involved in this shit between us.”
Everything in me goes cold. Not fear. Focus. The temperature my brain drops to when threat levels escalate and options narrow.
"Where is he now?"
"Sully's got him in the bar. Four of us on him. Me, Sully, Brick, Donovan. He came alone but that doesn't mean he actually is alone."
"I'm coming down. Nobody moves until I get there."
I hang up. Stand. In the dark, I find my jeans and pull them on. My cut goes over a bare chest. No time for shirts. The Glock goes in my waistband. Knife in my boot.
"Rogue." Margot's voice. Awake, alert. She's propped up on one elbow, hair wild, eyes catching the faint light from the window.
"Stay in this room. Lock the door."
"What's happening?"
"Club business." I turn to look at her. She's beautiful in the dark. A shape and a warmth and a gravity that I want to fall back into. "Lock the door, Margot. Don't open it for anyone but me."
She nods. Doesn't argue. Doesn't demand answers. She reads the situation and understands that right now obedience isn't submission. It's tactics.
I leave. Hear the lock click behind me.
The main room in the Anvil is lit low. Deacon Vargas sits at the bar.
A wiry man with a Crest cut and a face that belongs on a wanted poster.
He's drinking our whiskey and looking comfortable, which makes me want to put his head through the bar top.
Gage is behind him. Sully to his right. Brick and Donovan at the pool table, pretending to play, cues in hand like weapons.
I stop ten feet from Vargas. Cross my arms. Let the silence work.
He turns on his stool. Looks me over. Bare chest, cut, the gun I'm making no effort to hide. He smiles. It's the kind of smile that makes you want to break teeth.
"Rogue." He raises his glass. "Thanks for the hospitality."
"Talk. Then leave."
"Straight to it, then. I can respect that." He sets his glass down. "Devlin knows about the woman. The one you took from the Shell station the night Ricky disappeared."
I keep my face blank. Years of practice. "Don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure you don't." Vargas's smile widens. "Thing is, there's a camera two blocks south of that station. City traffic cam. Shows a Road King leaving the area with a woman in scrubs. Timestamp matches when Ricky went off the radar."
Fuck.
"Devlin's not interested in a war over a dead courier," Vargas continues. "Ricky was a fuck-up. We all knew it. But a witness..." He lets it hang. "Witnesses are leverage. And leverage is currency. We’ll let the Ricky thing slide if you give us the girl. We’ll call it insurance.”
"She didn't see anything."
"Traffic cam says otherwise. And you bringing her here instead of letting her walk?" He shrugs. "That tells its own story."
I close the distance. Stand over him. He doesn't flinch. Crest men don't, as a rule. But his hand drifts toward his waist and Gage moves in behind him, one massive hand landing on his shoulder like an anchor.
"Here's what you tell Devlin," I say. My voice is quiet.
The kind of quiet that men who know me understand as the most dangerous register.
"There is no witness. There is no leverage.
And if any Crest member comes within a mile of this building, I will personally deliver them back to Nashville in pieces. Clear?"
Vargas holds my gaze. Measuring. Then he drains his whiskey, sets the glass down, and stands.
"I'll pass it along," he says. "But Rogue. Devlin doesn't bluff. If he wants her, he'll come for her. With numbers. And then you'll have to decide what one woman is worth to you."
"Get out of my bar."
He walks out. Takes his time. Doesn't look back. The door closes behind him and I stand in the silence of the bar and feel something reshaping in my chest. Something that was already reshaping, if I'm honest, from the moment she put her hands on mine and cleaned my wounds.
I'm not keeping her to protect the club anymore. I'm keeping her to protect her. And those are different calculations entirely.
My father would have called this weakness.
Would have said that a woman clouds judgment, bends priorities, turns a president into a liability.
He kept my mother at arm's length for twenty years.
Loved her in his way, provided for her, but never let her close enough to become a target.
And she died alone in a hospital bed while he was on a run, and he got shot in a parking lot six months later.
Maybe he was right. Maybe attachment is a vulnerability in this life.
But standing in this bar with the smell of Vargas's cheap cologne still in the air, I know one thing with absolute certainty.
I am not my father and I don't have his gift for distance.
And anyway, Margot is not a woman who'd accept distance even if I tried to impose it.
"Rogue." Sully's voice. Careful. He's been around long enough to read me the way Margot is learning to. He sees the things I'm not saying. "We need to talk about this."
"Tomorrow. Church at eight. Full table."
"The girl..."
"Is under my protection. Not the club's protection. Mine." I look at him. Let him see it in my face. The decision that's already been made, the line I've already crossed. "Devlin Marsh can come with his numbers. He can bring the whole Nashville chapter. But he doesn't get her."
"And if it costs us?" Sully asks. He's trying to gauge how far this goes. How deep.
"Then it costs us. And I'll bear the weight of that."
He holds my gaze a long moment. Something knowing moves across his face. The look of a man who's seen this before. Then he nods, slowly. Like he's acknowledging something he saw coming a long time ago.
I take the stairs two at a time. Down the hall to my room. Knock twice.
The lock clicks. The door opens. Margot stands there in my shirt, barefoot, her eyes searching my face for information the way they always do.
"Come here," I say.
She steps forward and I wrap my arms around her. Pull her against my chest. Her cheek against my sternum, her hands flat on my back, the whole warm length of her pressed to me. I breathe her in. Shampoo, sleep and her perfumed skin. Something in my chest unlocks that I didn't know was clenched.
"Are you okay?" she asks against my chest.
"Fine."
"Liar." But she doesn't push. Just holds on. Lets me hold her. Stands in the dark hallway of my clubhouse and gives me something I haven't had in years. Stillness. Safety. A body against mine that isn't demanding or fearing or wanting anything but presence.
I pull back and look at her.
"The people who Ricky worked for," I say. "They know about you."
She doesn't panic. That assessment again. I can see it behind her eyes, the clinical processing, the risk evaluation. "What does that mean?"
"It means they want you as leverage against me. It means they think you're a card they can play."
"What do you think?"
"I think you're nobody's card." I cup her face in my hands. My scarred, damaged hands against her smooth skin. "I'm going to handle this, Margot. But I need you to trust me."
"I trust you."
Three words. Simple and devastating. She says them without hesitation, without qualification.
And I know she means it. Not because she's naive, not because she doesn't understand what I am, but because she does understand.
She sees the violence and the strategy and the blood on my hands and she trusts me anyway.
I've never had that before. My brothers trust me. With their safety, their livelihood, their freedom. But that's trust earned through structure and hierarchy and years of proving competence. Margot's trust is different. It's personal. It's given freely to the man, not the president.
"Come back to bed," she says.
I follow her. Close the door. Lock it. Strip off the cut and the jeans and climb into bed where she's waiting. Warm and open, pulling me down against her. I press my face to her neck and breathe and her fingers move through my hair with a gentleness that I don't deserve and can't refuse.
"I won't let them touch you," I say into her skin.
"I know."
"This thing, that's happening between us..."
"I know," she says again. And she does. She knows what this is. What it's becoming. The word I can't say because saying it makes it real and real things can be taken.
I fall asleep with her in my arms and dream about nothing. And in the morning, I go to war.