Chapter Thirteen
I DIDN’T SLEEP, and I didn’t try very hard to, because sleeping meant letting go of the last of her off my back and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.
Sat out front of the cabin most of the night with a whiskey I poured and never touched, ice melting down till there wasn’t anything left but warm brown water in the glass.
Garden black. Woods blacker. Her arms still locked around my middle where they sure as hell weren’t anymore, and every time I shut my eyes I got another piece of it, her chest against my back, her thighs tight to mine, those hands fisted in the front of my cut when I pulled us onto the road.
The weight of her helmet against my shoulder.
That second at the compound when I’d stopped the bike and she hadn’t let go yet.
That one was gonna kill me.
Twenty minutes. That’s all it was. Twenty minutes with a girl holding on because her car shit the bed and there wasn’t another way home.
I’ve done things in this life that should’ve cost me years of sleep and slept fine afterward.
Put men down. Patched brothers up while they bled through my hands.
Buried people I loved and got up the next morning because there was work needing done.
Amy Dawson held on to me for twenty minutes and I sat awake till the damn birds started.
Pathetic.
Wasn’t just having her against me, though that was bad enough.
First time she grabbed me, every damn muscle I had locked up.
Couldn’t help it. Those arms went around my waist and her body hit mine, soft everywhere I wasn’t, and for about half a second I forgot there was a road under us.
Had to get my head right before I got us both killed, so I breathed, put my eyes where they belonged, and rode.
Then about a mile past the bridge, something changed.
She quit fighting me.
Not fighting me. She hadn’t been doing that.
Fighting herself. Holding her body back like she could keep one inch between us on a moving bike through pure stubbornness, and Christ knew she’d tried.
Then the inch went away. Her hands loosened in my cut.
Her arms went soft around me. Her weight heavy against my back instead of holding away from it, and a second later that helmet came down against my shoulder.
I damn near missed a gear.
She stayed there. That was the part I couldn’t get past. Amy relaxed against me.
I felt the exact second it happened. Amy didn’t ask for it.
Didn’t even know she was giving it. Her body just decided I wasn’t the thing she needed to guard against and leaned into mine like it remembered something the rest of her was still too pissed off to admit.
Fuck.
Then there was the stop sign.
Should’ve kept both hands on the bars. Didn’t need to touch her. She was holding on fine. But I looked down and saw those hands twisted up in my cut and put mine over them before I could talk myself out of it.
One touch.
That’s all I meant to take. Then my thumb moved across her knuckles. Stupid. Selfish. I did it anyway, and she could’ve pulled her hands out from under mine, but she didn’t.
Rode the next five miles wanting another stop sign like a goddamn teenager.
By the time we hit the compound she was all the way against me, forehead back on my shoulder, arms easy around my waist, and I didn’t want to see that gate.
First time in my life I’d wanted a road to grow another hundred miles while I was riding it.
Could’ve kept going till the tank ran dry with her wrapped around me like that.
Then I stopped the bike, and she didn’t let go.
One second.
Maybe two.
Didn’t know for sure, but I didn’t breathe through either. I could still feel that part hours later, sitting outside my cabin like an idiot with melted ice in my whiskey.
Wasn’t the wanting that kept me awake. I’d wanted Amy so long I’d gotten used to carrying it. Knew how to live around that particular ache.
It was the trust.
She’d put her body against mine and gone silent.
I’d spent months telling myself I’d done the right thing by her, then months learning what bullshit that was, and now she’d handed me the one thing I had no right asking her for.
Didn’t matter that it only lasted twenty minutes.
Didn’t matter that come morning she’d probably be back to looking at me like she’d rather cross the street than stand beside me.
I had it tonight.
So I sat there and let myself keep it.
Around one I finally went inside and lay down, stared at the ceiling, and told myself what I always told myself, this was the right kind of hurt. The kind a man earns when he’s the one who did the damage.
Half believed it.
Same as always.
Then the sun came up and I went to see about her car, and the night stopped mattering.
* * *
Gearhead had it up on the lift by the time I got to the shop, hood open, the guts of it spread out on a rolling cart, that little Honda looking sad and violated the way a car does when it’s been opened up.
He had a rag in his hands and grease to the elbows and a look on his face I didn’t like, the look of a man turning something over that won’t sit right for him.
“Radiator,” he said, before I asked. “Like you figured. She’s been runnin’ it hot a while, that part tracks, but the hot’s not what killed it.” He set the rag down. “Come look at this and tell me I’m seein’ things. ’Cause I might be.”
I came and looked.
He had the radiator off, sitting on the bench, and he put a finger near a spot low on the core, not touching it, the way you point at something you’re not sure of. There was a hole in it. Small. Low and to the side, down where you wouldn’t see it without pulling the thing.
“Now that,” Gearhead said slow, “could be nothin’.
I want to say that first. Could be she picked up a rock off the interstate, road junk, some piece of metal kicked up under there at speed, punched it and dropped back off, happens, I’ve seen it.
Radiator sits right up front, it eats whatever the road throws.
” He scratched his jaw with the back of his wrist. “That’s the reasonable answer and I’d put money on the reasonable answer nine times in ten. ”
“But.”
“But.” He blew out a breath. “The shape of it’s a little too…
I don’t know. Road debris tears. Punches ugly, leaves a burr, tweaks the fins around it.
This is cleaner than I’d want it to be. Almost like something narrow went in on purpose, once, and came back out.
” He shook his head. “And there’s no strike anywhere else on the front end.
Nothing on the condenser, nothing on the skid, no paint off the bumper.
Whatever got the radiator didn’t touch one other thing on its way in, which is a neat trick for a rock doing seventy.
” He picked the rag back up, wiped his hands like he wanted the feel of it off him.
“I ain’t sayin’ it’s anything, Rune. I want to be real clear.
I’ve been wrong about weirder. I’m sayin’ it’s the kind of thing where if you asked me to swear to it either way, I couldn’t.
That’s all. It just sat funny with me and I figured you’d want to know, since you’re the one out there with her. ”
I looked at that little clean hole in the metal, and everything the night had left soft in me went cold and dropped away.
Because here’s the thing I did in my head, standing there, the timeline I couldn’t not lay out.
That car ran fine that morning. I know it did, I watched her drive it out the gate at seven-oh-two, smooth, no trouble.
It ran fine all the way to the city. And it died a mile past the bridge coming home.
A slow leak out a hole like that, you’d drive on it for hours before it starved, cooked and quit.
Which means whatever happened to it happened somewhere in the middle. Happened while it sat still.
Happened while it sat all day in a campus lot, in the city, where I was.
While I was sitting forty feet away watching Sawyer put his goddamn hands on her.
Fuck.
Devil gave me one job. Watch Amy. Watch what moved around her. Cars coming in, cars going out, faces that showed twice, somebody hanging around where they had no reason to be. Instead I’d spent half the damn day keeping count of how many times that kid touched her.
Eating his fucking muffin.
Somebody could’ve walked right up to her Honda, dropped down beside it, punched that radiator and walked away while I sat across the street jealous as some lovesick prospect.
Never would’ve seen him.
That one went in deep.
I don’t scare easy, and panic hasn’t ever done a useful thing for me, but standing there looking at that hole I felt something cold work its way down my back, because this wasn’t a man in front of me I could put hands on or a wound I could stitch. This was something I hadn’t seen coming.
It didn’t fit.
That was the problem.
Drago wanted Zeynep. Every piece of word we’d gotten said Zeynep. She didn’t leave the compound without Mystic damn near attached to her, sure as hell wasn’t parking a Honda on a college campus across the river.
Amy was.
And Amy didn’t mean shit to Drago. Girl wasn’t club business. Wasn’t tied to the Fire Dragons, wasn’t part of whatever blood Drago still wanted spilled. Far as that bastard knew, Amy Dawson didn’t exist.
So why the fuck was there a hole in her radiator?
Either it was a rock, and Gearhead, who knows more about cars than any man I’ve met, couldn’t make himself say it was a rock, or somebody wanted Amy Dawson stopped on a dark road, and I couldn’t for the life of me build a story where that made sense.
And a thing you can’t make sense of is worse than a thing you can.
A named enemy you can wall out. This was a hole in a radiator and a mechanic who wouldn’t swear to it and a bad feeling crawling up the back of my neck, pointed at the one person on this property nobody was supposed to have any reason to touch.
“You tell anybody else?” I said. My voice came out level. I don’t know how.
“Just you.” Gearhead watched me. “Figured you’d know what to do with it. Figured wrong, from your face.”
“No.” I made myself ease up, made my shoulders come down, because scaring Gearhead got me nothing and I needed to think.
“No, you figured right. Keep it between us for now. I take it to Devil like this, a maybe and a bad feeling, with everything he’s already carrying on Zeynep.
He can’t do anything with it but tell me to keep a closer eye on her, and I’m already watching her closer than my own damn pulse.
” That last part came out truer than I meant it to.
Gearhead had the decency to pretend he didn’t hear it.
“Get her a new radiator. Good one. And Gearhead, keep the old one. Don’t pitch it. Put it somewhere.”
“Already planned to.” He nodded, slow, a man who’d caught the same chill I had and hated it. “You watch her, brother.”
“I’m going to.”
I walked out of Gearhead’s shop into a compound armed for the wrong damn war. Men on the walls. Guns on the gates. Every eye pointed toward a threat with Zeynep’s name on it.
Somebody might be after her. And I was the only one who even suspected it, I couldn’t prove it, I couldn’t explain it, and the last time I had her safe in my arms I’d handed her a helmet, driven her home and thought the worst thing in my world was how much I wanted her.
I’d been watching the wrong damn thing.
I wasn’t going to make that mistake twice.