Chapter 6 #2
Kinsey is a grenade with the pin already pulled, and Ounce is standing in the blast radius on purpose.
Not my problem. Not my war.
I've got my own.
Saylor is wiping down the bar, her movements efficient, automatic, the body running while the mind is somewhere else.
I've seen this from her before. The disconnect between what her body is doing and where her head has gone.
She's been carrying something since that night she showed up at my room shaking.
I don't know what.
She didn't tell me, and I didn't ask, because asking means she has to choose between the truth and a lie, and I'm not ready to know which one she'd pick.
But whatever it is, it surfaces in small ways.
The way she checks the parking lot through the window every twenty minutes. The way her phone sits facedown on the bar all night, screen hidden, like she's afraid of what might light it up.
The way she flinched when a customer came through the door with a baseball cap on, and covered it so fast I would have missed it if I hadn't been looking.
I was looking.
I'm always looking.
By midnight, the bar is loud, warm, and running on fumes and goodwill.
Ellie makes a toast. Stands on a chair because she's five-foot-four and refuses to be spoken over, lifts a glass, and says twelve words.
"Backroads is back." Her voice cuts through the noise like a blade. "Thank you for showing up."
Ruger lifts his glass. The room follows.
Saylor is behind the bar, dish towel over her shoulder, a glass raised in her free hand.
She's flushed from the work and the heat and the energy of a hundred people packed into a room built to hold eighty.
She looks alive. Not guarded. Not invisible. Alive, in a way I haven't seen from her in the six weeks I've been paying attention.
Then my phone vibrates in my pocket.
I step into the hallway behind the kitchen and pull the phone out.
It’s an alert from the monitoring system I built after the financial leak.
Someone has probed the network again. Different IP. Different entry point.
They're testing my defenses. Moving slower now, more careful, after the first leak went public.
They know we're looking. And they're coming anyway.
I screenshot the alert and save it. My thumbs hover over Ruger's name in my contacts.
Not tonight. Tonight is Ellie's night. The digital ghost can wait until morning, and by morning, I'll have more data to show him.
I pocket the phone and head out to the bar.
Saylor catches my expression when I come around the corner.
She's pouring a draft, her attention flicking to me and away, reading me the way she reads everything.
"You okay?" She asks it without looking up, her voice low enough to disappear under the music.
I lean against the counter near her, close enough to feel her warmth. "Yeah. Work stuff."
She slides the beer to the customer. "Club work or school work?"
I straighten a stack of napkins. "Club."
She nods, but doesn't push. Pours the next beer and hands it off with a smile so small I almost miss it.
Two people standing in each other's silence. Trusting it. Even when it's heavy.
At midnight, the crowd thins.
Regulars settle their tabs. Brothers head out in groups, engines rumbling to life, departure echoing through the mountain dark.
Ellie hugs Tildie goodnight, kisses Ruger on the cheek, squeezes Saylor's shoulder on her way to count the register.
The squeeze is deliberate. I see it.
Saylor sees it too.
Her attention follows Ellie for a second, and there's something on her expression I won't try to name.
Gratitude, maybe. Or the look of a woman who's been invited inside and can't decide if she's allowed to stay.
She grabs her jacket from behind the bar. "I'm heading out."
I'm wiping down the last table. "I'll walk you."
She zips the jacket, keys already in her grip. "You don't have to."
I toss the rag behind the counter. "I know."
We cross the parking lot together. The air is cold, breath visible in the glow of the lot light.
Her car is parked near the edge, next to my Harley.
She unlocks the Honda and turns to me. Her expression is shadowed, half-lit, tired in a way deeper than a long shift.
I reach out and tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. My knuckle grazes her cheekbone. She doesn't flinch.
"You did good tonight." My voice is low.
"It was fun." She says it like the word is unfamiliar in her mouth. Like she hasn't used it in a while and it surprises her coming out.
I lean down and kiss her. Brief, warm. Not the desperation of the other night.
Steadier. A bookmark, not a chapter.
She presses her forehead against my chin for half a second, then opens her car door.
"Goodnight, Rookie." Her lips curve as she says the road name, an inside joke between us now.
"Goodnight, Saylor." I step aside so she can pull out.
She drives away. I watch the taillights turn left onto the main road.
And then I see it.
Across the lot, pulled onto the gravel shoulder maybe fifty yards past the entrance. A dark truck. Engine off, headlights off, sitting in the blackout gap between the lot light and the tree line.
A silhouette in the driver's seat. Shoulders and a baseball cap.
Not a customer. Not a brother. Not a townie finishing a cigarette before driving home.
Someone sitting in the dark. Watching the bar. Watching the door Saylor walked through four hours ago. Watching the parking lot she drove out of thirty seconds ago.
My body goes cold the way it does when patterns connect and the picture they make is wrong.
Dark truck. Older model.
Saylor came to me four nights ago shaking and wouldn't say why.
I pull my phone out, open the camera, and zoom in.
The plate is partially obscured by mud, but I get four of the six characters before the truck's engine fires, headlights snap on, and it pulls onto the road heading in the same direction Saylor went.
I save the photo. Look at the dark road where two sets of taillights are disappearing around the same curve.
Her name is on my screen. I call.
It rings. Rings again. She picks up, her voice tired. "Hey."
"Where are you right now?" I keep my voice level, but something in it must land wrong because the pause before she answers stretches too long.
Her turn signal clicks in the background. "Driving home. Why?"
"Lock your doors when you get there." I stare at the empty road. "Text me when you're inside."
Another pause. "Rookie, what's going on?"
"Probably nothing." The word tastes like a lie, and I swallow it. "Text me when you're inside. Please."
A long exhale on her end. "Okay."
The line goes dead.
I stand in the parking lot with the cold air biting through my jacket and the partial plate glowing on my phone screen, with every alarm in my body sounding at once.
Not the digital kind. The other kind. The kind I stopped trusting three years ago because the last time they fired, I was wrong about everything.
But Saylor came to me shaking, and now a truck is following her home.
My instincts might be compromised. But my vision works fine.
I get on the bike and ride.