10. Margot
Chapter Ten
MARGOT
Three weeks after the night The Crest came to the compound, I go back to my apartment.
Not to stay. To pack.
Rogue drives me in a blacked-out Dodge Ram that looks like it belongs to a federal agent.
He waits in the truck while I go inside, because he knows I need this moment alone.
The apartment smells stale. Three weeks of closed windows in Memphis summer.
My neighbor kept the cat fed and the plants alive but the space feels like it belongs to someone else. Someone I used to be.
I pack methodically. Clothes, books, the few things that matter. My nursing license renewal paperwork. The photo of my grandmother on the nightstand. My cat, Hemingway, an orange tabby who is deeply unimpressed by the carrier, protests loudly but goes in.
I leave the furniture. Leave the dishes. Leave the life.
It takes forty minutes. When I come back down with two duffel bags and a cat carrier, Rogue is leaning against the truck with his arms crossed, watching the street. Vigilant. Always vigilant.
"That's it?" he asks.
"That's it."
He takes the bags. Opens the truck door for me and waits until I'm in before going around to the driver's side. It's a small thing, the door, the waiting, but it's him. Not gentle. Not soft. But attentive in ways that other men perform and he simply does.
The past three weeks have been a reshaping. After the attack, Devlin Marsh pulled The Crest back to Nashville. Not out of conscience but out of math. He lost several men in one night. The Dead Saints brothers held their ground. The cost-benefit analysis no longer favored aggression.
Rogue says it's not over. Says men like Devlin don't forget, they just recalculate. But for now, for this stretch of time that could be weeks or months or longer, there's peace. And in that peace, I've been making choices.
I quit Memphis General. Put in my notice two weeks ago.
My charge nurse, Linda, who taught me how to run a code blue and never once looked at me with anything but respect, said she understood.
Said she could see something had changed in me when I came back for my last two weeks.
Not broken, she said. Rearranged. She hugged me in the break room and told me to be careful.
I said I would be and we both knew careful had a different definition now than it used to.
I'm taking a position at a clinic on the south side.
Less pay, but regular hours at least. The have the kind of patients who sometimes have bullet wounds, and never have insurance.
It's not the adrenaline of the ER. But I've found my adrenaline elsewhere now.
And the work matters. Maybe more, in its quieter way.
It's a compromise. Everything is, with this life. I know what Rogue does. I know what the club is. I've made peace with the grey areas. With the violence that serves protection, with the law that bends for loyalty, with the blood on his hands that will never fully wash off.
I've also made peace with the fact that I love him.
That happened somewhere between the first night and the third, between patching his knuckles and sleeping in his bed, between watching him kill and watching him hold me in the dark like I was the most fragile thing he'd ever touched.
I don't know exactly when. It doesn't matter.
It's true now. Solid and present and irreversible.
He hasn't said it. Not in words. But I speak his language now.
The language of action, of choice, of hands that say what his mouth won't. He says it when he wakes me with coffee exactly how I like it.
When he rebuilt a shelf in his room for my books without being asked.
When he holds my face in those scarred hands and looks at me like I'm the only thing he needs.
The truck pulls up to The Forge and the building looks different to me now.
Not a prison, not a clubhouse. Home. The iron gates, the river behind it, the row of bikes out front.
Colt waves from the doorway. Gage nods from beside his Dyna, hands black with grease.
Sully's nowhere visible but his bike is here.
He's probably inside, holding down the bar with a newspaper and a whiskey.
Rook is here too. Recovered, mostly. He wears the scar like a badge, shows it to anyone who'll look, tells the story with increasing embellishments. Margot the nurse saved my ass, he says to anyone new. Don't piss her off.
I carry Hemingway inside in his carrier and the cat immediately escapes and begins investigating the clubhouse with the skeptical efficiency of a health inspector. Several large, tattooed men crouch down to offer their fingers for inspection. The cat ignores them all.
Rogue carries my bags to our room. It's our room now. Has been since that first night I stayed, really, but my books on the shelf and my clothes in the closet make it official. He sets the bags on the bed and turns to me.
"You sure about this?" he asks.
It's the fourth time he's asked. Each time, my answer has been the same. But he keeps asking because he's Rogue. Because certainty, for him, must be continuously verified. Because he can't quite believe that someone would choose this. Choose him.
"I'm sure." I step close. Put my hands flat on his chest. Feel his heartbeat, the steady thrum of him alive and present. "I chose this. I choose you. Eyes open."
"Eyes open," he repeats. And then, lower, almost quiet enough to miss, "I love you."
My breath catches. Not because I didn't know. I did. But hearing it, in his voice, in this room, with the Mississippi crawling past outside and the sounds of his brothers downstairs and the reality of this life settling around us like armor. It hits differently. It lands in my chest and stays.
"Say it again."
His hands come to my waist. Pull me flush against him. "I love you." Clearer now. Steadier. Like saying it once made the second time possible.
"I love you too." I stretch up and kiss him. Soft. Deliberate. A beginning rather than a collision.
He makes a sound. Low, barely audible, something between relief and surrender.
His arms come around me and for a moment we just stand there, foreheads together, breathing each other's air.
His hands press flat against my lower back, holding me close.
Present. Rooted. Like I'm an anchor point and he's been drifting without one.
He deepens the kiss. Can't help himself, maybe.
And his tongue slides against mine and his hands grip tighter and for a moment I think we're going to end up on the bed with the duffel bags pushed to the floor and the afternoon disappearing into skin and heat.
Part of me wants that. Most of me wants that.
But there's a cat loose in the clubhouse and boxes to unpack and a life to build, and for once the urgency is banked to a manageable simmer. We have time. That's the thing about choosing. Once you've made the choice, the desperate edge softens. We have tonight and tomorrow and the night after that.
"Later," I say against his mouth.
"Later," he agrees. His forehead drops to mine. We breathe the same air for a moment. Close, synchronized, present.
Then he pulls back and that almost-smile is on his face. The one I've learned belongs only to me. That private, barely-there curve that nobody else in this building has ever seen.
"Welcome home, Margot."
Home. I test the word against the reality. The converted ironworks on the Memphis riverfront, the motorcycle club's headquarters, the place where I was brought against my will and now stand by choice. It shouldn't work. It shouldn't make sense.
But the body knows what it knows. And my body knows this. His hands on my waist. His heartbeat under my palm. His eyes on mine with that focused intensity that sees everything I am and doesn't look away.
I unpack my bags. Put my clothes in the closet next to his.
My soft things beside his dark ones, my running shoes beside his boots.
Hang my grandmother's photo on the wall.
Put my books on the shelf he built. The shelf that's exactly the right height because he paid attention to which books I reach for most.
Hemingway claims the leather armchair in the corner as his and goes immediately to sleep.
By evening, the room looks like it belongs to two people. Like it always did.
I go downstairs. The main room is active.
It's a Tuesday and The Anvil is open, music drifting in from the bar side, the crack of pool balls, Sully's laugh carrying above the noise.
Rogue is at his usual spot at the end of the bar, bourbon in hand, deep in conversation with Gage about something I don't need to hear.
He sees me come in. His eyes track me across the room the way they have from the very first moment. Like I'm a variable he can't account for, a disruption to his systems that he's learned not to correct but to integrate.
I take the stool beside him. He doesn't stop his conversation with Gage. Doesn't need to. His hand finds my knee under the bar. Rests there. Warm and heavy and present.
This is it. This is the life I've chosen. The violence and the loyalty, the danger and the protection, the man who kills with steady hands and touches me with careful ones. It's not simple. It's not safe. It will require things of me that I can't fully predict.
But I'm not a woman who needs simple. Never was.
I lean into him. Just slightly, just enough that my shoulder presses against his arm. He glances at me. That ghost-smile again. Then back to Gage, his hand still on my knee, his body angled toward mine like gravity.
Outside, the Mississippi moves south. Memphis hums its low, constant song. Heat and blues and the diesel rumble of barges. The Forge stands solid on its riverfront lot, brick and iron and history.
Inside, that’s where I belong.