Chapter 6
SABER
The text comes in at four in the morning. Five words.
Razor: Four Crimson Warriors. County line. They asked about Shelby.
I’m out of bed and dressed in under a minute. Cut on. Boots on. Glock in the waistband.
I bang on Joker’s door. He opens it already dressed, gun in his hand.
“How many?” he asks.
“Razor says four bikes.”
He slips his gun into his waistband. “What about Nitro?”
“Unknown.”
We take the stairs fast. Duke is in the common room, boots up on the table, cleaning a knife. He doesn’t ask what’s happening. He stands, slides the knife into his belt, and falls in behind us.
I stop at the foot of the stairs. Shelby’s room is directly above me. She’s behind a locked door, asleep, with no idea that the men who want her are sitting miles from this building.
My fist tightens at my side. If they get past me, if they get to that door, if they put one boot on those stairs—I’ll kill every last one of them and mop their blood off the floor before she wakes up.
They won’t get to her.
Not tonight. Not ever.
I push through the front doors and into the gravel lot. My bike is where I left it, and the engine catches on the first kick. My guys surround me. Our Harleys tear down the dirt road and hit the highway, and the desert swallows everything behind us.
The county line marker is a green sign half-eaten by rust, bolted to a post that leans fifteen degrees south. Ash Valley starts here. My territory starts here. And four Crimson Warriors are parked on the wrong side of the line.
Razor is thirty yards ahead of them, sitting on his bike with the engine off. A cigarette dead between his lips, unlit. He’s been watching them, and they’ve been watching him, and nobody’s made a move.
I pull up next to him. My other guys spread wide. Headlights off. Engines idling.
The four Crimson Warriors are standing beside their bikes. Three I don’t recognize—young, wide-shouldered, disposable muscle. The fourth is older with a gray beard. His road name is stitched on his cut: Deacon.
Nitro didn’t even come himself. He sent his VP.
I swing off my bike and walk. Not fast. Not slow. The gravel crunches under my boots, and the sound carries across the empty highway.
Deacon steps forward. His hands are visible, palms up, signifying he’s come in peace. But I call bullshit. My hand rests on the handle of my gun.
“Saber.” He says it like we’re old friends. “Nitro sends his regards.”
“Nitro can come deliver them himself.”
“He could have, but he sent me.” Deacon glances at my guys, then back to me. “We’re here for two things. Our man. And the girl. The waitress.”
“Bull pulled a gun on me. Your boy Edge is dead because Bull can’t shoot for shit and put a round in his own man. That’s your mess, not mine.”
“Your woman was in that lot.” One of the young ones. Shaved head, neck tattoo, and a mouth that’s about to get him killed. “Nitro wants her. She answers for what happened to Edge.”
Razor’s boots hit gravel behind me. He’s off his bike.
I don’t turn around, but I don’t need to. I know the sound of Razor moving, and right now he’s moving the way he does before things get violent.
“She didn’t pull the trigger,” I say. “Bull did. She’s got nothing to do with this.”
Deacon raises a hand. The young one shuts up, but his jaw is grinding, and his fists are balled. He’s going to be a problem in about three minutes.
“Nitro wants resolution,” Deacon says. “Hand over Bull and the woman, and this ends clean.”
I take one step closer. Deacon holds his ground, and I’ll give him credit for that, because the three behind him don’t. They shuffle. Shift their weight. One of them drops his hand toward his waistband, and Razor clicks his tongue from the darkness. The hand goes back up.
I look at Deacon. Then past him, at the three young ones.
“You come to my territory.” My hand closes around the Glock. I pull it slow, let them all get a good look at it. “You threaten me. You make demands about a woman under my protection. And your boys can’t keep their hands off their fucking guns.”
I level the Glock at the nearest kid’s left knee and squeeze the trigger.
The shot cracks through the desert, and he drops screaming. Gravel sprays. His hands go to his thigh, and he’s writhing on the ground, howling into the dirt.
The second kid bolts. Gets one step. I put a round through his calf, and he hits the road face-first.
Deacon hasn’t moved. His hands are up, palms out, but his face is chalk-white, and the vein in his neck is hammering hard enough that I can see it from here.
The third kid is frozen. Razor and Joker have their guns on him. Duke has his gun pointed at Deacon.
The two on the ground are screaming. Blood pools on asphalt, going black in the headlights.
Good. Scream loud enough for Nitro to hear it from his clubhouse.
I walk straight up to Deacon until the barrel of my Glock is an inch from the bridge of his nose.
He doesn’t breathe.
“Go back to Nitro.” I keep my voice low, steady, and I don’t blink.
“Tell him I will kill every single one of you if you ever come into my territory again. Every. Single. One. No warning. No conversation. I will stack bodies on this road until the county has to reroute the highway around them. I haven’t decided what to do with Bull yet. So he stays with me.”
Deacon’s eyes are locked on the barrel. His Adam’s apple bobs.
“And the woman?” His voice comes out thin. Scraped raw.
I press the barrel between his eyes. The metal dents the skin.
“She’s my Old Lady.”
It comes out of my mouth, and the second it does, it’s real. Not strategy. Not a play. A fact that’s been true since she cracked a man in the skull with a water bottle to save my life.
“If anyone touches her—if she gets a bruise, a scratch, or a bad fucking dream because of your crew—I won’t call a meeting.
I’ll ride to your clubhouse, shoot Nitro in his chair at his own table, and burn that shithole to the slab.
Then I’ll find every man who knew about it and put them in the ground next to him. You understand me?”
He nods. The barrel drags across his forehead with the motion.
“Say it.”
“I understand.”
I drop the gun to my side. Step back. The air between us fills with the sound of the two guys bleeding on the pavement.
“Take your wounded.” I holster the Glock. “Bull stays with me as collateral until Nitro calls me himself.”
Deacon moves fast. He and the uninjured kid drag the two wounded to their bikes.
The one with the blown knee can’t swing his leg over, so they shove him forward on Deacon’s seat, and Deacon mounts up behind him, one arm pinning the kid to his chest. The other bleeder gets the same treatment on the second bike, slumped over the tank, the uninjured kid holding him upright from behind.
The engines fire. The headlights sweep north.
I stand in the road and watch until the taillights shrink to red dots and disappear.
Razor is beside me. He holsters his weapon and spits into the gravel.
“Your Old Lady?”
“Yeah.”
He chuckles. “Does she know that?”
“Not yet.”
He doesn’t say anything else.
I walk back to my bike. My hands are shaking—adrenaline, not regret. I grip the handlebars until my knuckles go white and the shaking burns itself out.
By morning, every MC in the southwest will know what happened at this county line. They’ll know the Prez of the Hellborn Kings shot two men for standing on his road. They’ll know he pressed a gun to the Crimson Warriors’ VP’s face and threatened to burn their clubhouse to the ground.
And they’ll know he did it over a woman.
Good.
Let them know.
It’s almost six when I get back. The sky is going gray-pink at the edges, and the clubhouse is quiet.
I head to the kitchen.
Four eggs. Scrambled. Buttered toast. Hot sauce on the side. I set the plate on the counter and pour coffee.
I’m standing there with the mug halfway to my mouth when the kitchen door opens.
Shelby. She’s in pajamas, and her hair is messy, creased from the pillow. Her green eyes are half-open, squinting against the overhead light.
“I heard bikes. Unusual for so early in the morning.” Her voice is rough from sleep. “What happened?”
“Handled.”
She wraps her arms around herself and leans against the doorframe. Her pajama shirt rides up. I look at the bare skin on her midriff, then I look at the coffee.
“Saber. What happened?”
I set the mug down. “Crimson Warriors sent four men to the county line. They wanted Bull back, and they wanted you. I said no. They left.”
She’s awake now. All the way. Her green eyes are locked on mine, and the sleep is gone, replaced by something sharper.
“They came for me.” Her voice cracks on the last word.
“They won’t come again.”
“You don’t know that.”
I push the plate toward her. “Eat.”
She doesn’t move toward the plate. She moves toward me. Three steps across the kitchen until she’s standing right in front of me, close enough that I can smell my soap on her skin and see the pillow crease on her left cheek.
“What did you tell them?”
I should give her a version that doesn’t include the words “my Old Lady” or the fact that I shot two men in the legs and pressed a gun between Deacon’s eyes.
I don’t lie.
“I told them you’re mine.”
Her chin lifts. I expect a fight. For her to tell me she’s not my property. But she doesn’t give me the fight I’m expecting.
She gives me something I’m not prepared for.
She closes the distance. One step, then another, until her bare feet are between my boots and her chin is tipped all the way back to hold my eyes.
“Did you mean it?” Her voice is low, stripped down. No challenge in it. No accusation. A question she needs the answer to before she can take her next breath. “That I’m yours.”
The smart play is to tell her I said it to keep her safe. That “Old Lady” is a title, a shield, a word that keeps Crimson Warriors from putting a bullet in her. That it doesn’t have to mean what it sounds like.
But that’s a lie. And I’m not going to lie to her.
“I meant it.”
Her hands come up. Both of them. Fingers curling into the front of my cut, knuckles pressing hard against my chest. She pulls herself up on her toes and drags my mouth down to hers.
The kiss hits like a detonation.
Her lips are soft, and she kisses me like she’s been needing me for weeks. And now that she’s let go, she’s not interested in being careful about it.
Her mouth opens against mine, and I’m done. Every wall I built, every inch of distance I put between us, every night I stood in her doorway and kept my boots on the other side of the threshold—gone. Burned down in the time it takes her tongue to slide against mine.
My hands find her waist. I lift her onto the counter, and she wraps her legs around me, heels digging into the backs of my thighs, pulling me in. I fist her hair and tilt her head back, and the sound she makes against my mouth is one that I won’t forget.
I kiss her like I’ve been starving. Because I have. Weeks of wanting her, lusting after her, and now she’s in my hands, and she’s real.
And she’s mine. Not because I told Deacon. Because she’s telling me.
Her fingers rake up the back of my neck and into my hair, and she bites my bottom lip hard enough to sting. I press her back against the cabinet, one hand flat on the counter beside her hip, the other tangled in her hair, and we’re not gentle.
This isn’t soft. This is weeks of want crashing, and neither of us is pretending anymore.
I pull back. Not far. An inch. My forehead against hers, both of us breathing hard, her fingers still twisted in my hair.
Her lips are swollen. A flush crawls up her neck and across her cheeks.
She smiles. And it’s not the almost-smile that I’ve seen from her a dozen times. It’s a real, full, devastating thing that takes apart everything I thought I knew about what I could afford to want.
“I like that I’m yours,” she tells me.
Five words. My undoing.
She lets go of my hair. Slides off the counter. Picks up the fork.
She takes a bite of the eggs, chews, and looks up at me like she didn’t just change my entire goddamn life.