Chapter 6
The headlights had been the club's own watch. Bronco told her that in the morning, standing in her shop doorway with a paper cup of gas-station coffee and the particular look of a man who knew exactly what had happened on that workbench last night and was enjoying not saying so.
"Rotation truck," he said. "Checks the block every two hours. You're covered."
"I wasn't worried."
"I can see that." He glanced at the workbench, and the corner of his mouth twitched. "Slayer wants you at the compound by noon. He says it's not safe to sleep on this block anymore."
"I sleep on Downing Street."
"You sleep wherever the president tells you it's safe to sleep, and right now that's not anywhere Vasko's people know about.
" Bronco's tone shifted, and for a moment she heard the officer underneath the grin.
"Kell was his night driver. When Vasko finds out he's gone, the next thing he sends won't be a reckless kid with a crowbar.
It'll be professional. And it'll come for you first because you're the soft target. "
"I dropped a glass rack on a man last night. I don't feel particularly soft."
"You're not. That's why Slayer wants you inside the compound instead of a hospital." He took a sip of the terrible coffee. "Noon, Nora. Pack what you need from the shop and your apartment. We'll send a truck."
She hated it.
She hated every piece of it — being moved, being managed, being told where to sleep by men she'd known for less than a week.
She'd carried this shop through two recessions and a divorce and a landlord who'd tried to double her rent, and she'd done it from behind this counter with her own two hands.
Being packed up and relocated like cargo went against every stubborn instinct she owned.
But she wasn't stupid.
Kell Marchetti was dead in her parking lot — or wherever Slayer's brothers had taken what was left of him — and the man he worked for was still breathing.
Bronco was right. The next escalation wouldn't come at eleven with a crowbar and a grin.
It would come quiet, and it would come for her because she was the one standing on the ground Vasko wanted.
She packed the shop essentials into boxes by ten. Tools she couldn't replace. Her father's work-order ledger. The framed photo of him standing in front of the sign the year he opened. Insurance papers, customer files, the good glass cutter he'd given her when she turned eighteen.
She locked the bays and taped a sign to the front door: CLOSED FOR RENOVATION. BACK SOON.
It felt like losing.
She drove to her apartment and packed a duffel in twelve minutes flat — clothes, boots, toiletries, the quilt her grandmother had made that she'd slept under every night since she was nine.
She stood in her own doorway and looked at the apartment she'd lived in for six years and felt the strange, unsteady sensation of a life being picked up and moved to unfamiliar ground.
The Mayhem truck was waiting when she got to the compound. Two brothers she hadn't met loaded her shop boxes into the garage bay while she stood in the gravel lot with her duffel over her shoulder and took the measure of the place she was about to live in.
* * *
It was bigger than she'd realized. Walking through with Slayer yesterday she'd only seen the great room and the corner where they'd sat.
Now she saw the whole layout — the garage bay stretching eight lifts deep along the side, the chapel in the old freight office at the back, the mezzanine above with bunks for brothers passing through.
The pole lights in the lot out back where sixty bikes could park behind cyclone fencing and razor wire.
The great room felt different in daylight.
The timber trusses threw long shadows across the polished concrete.
The reclaimed bowling-alley bar glowed amber in the sun coming through the high windows.
The mining lamps over the pool table were dark, but somebody had left a lamp on behind the bar and it gave the space the warm feel of a room that was lived in hard and taken care of.
It smelled like coffee and leather and the faint sweet skunk of a legal grow house leaking through the walls from somewhere on the block. It smelled like men who worked with their hands and rode loud machines and didn't bother to disguise either one.
Slayer was waiting at the bar.
He'd showered and changed since last night, and the bruise on his shoulder had gone deep purple where it showed above his collar.
He looked at her standing in the doorway with her duffel and her grandmother's quilt and her jaw set, and something moved across his face that was tender and careful and nothing like the way he'd looked at her on the workbench.
"You good?" he asked.
"I'm here. That's not the same thing."
He nodded, accepting the difference without trying to close it. That was the thing about him — he didn't try to fix what she was feeling. He just made room for it.
"Your room's upstairs, second door on the left. It's not much — bed, dresser, bathroom down the hall. But it's yours for as long as you need it."
"My room." She set the duffel on the bar. "Not your room."
The almost-smile. The devastating one. "Not my room. Unless you want it to be."
"I'll let you know."
"I'm sure you will."
She carried her own duffel upstairs because she'd be damned before she let a man carry her bag into a room she hadn't chosen to live in.
The room was small and plain — a single bed, a scarred dresser, a window that looked out over the lot and the fence line and the rail spur beyond.
She put her grandmother's quilt on the bed and her father's photo on the dresser and stood there for a minute, planting herself in the space the way she planted herself in any space. By deciding it was hers.
When she came back down, the compound was awake.
Brothers she'd met and brothers she hadn't were moving through the great room and the garage bay with the easy rhythm of men who lived and worked in the same building.
Hawk was at the bar eating eggs off a paper plate.
Trench — the kid who'd pinned a man to her concrete apron last night — was wiping down the pool table like it was his personal responsibility.
Diesel was somewhere in the garage bay, the sound of a ratchet and classic rock drifting through the open door.
They all looked up when she came down the stairs. Every one of them.
She knew what they saw. The president's woman. The civilian they were putting up because the boss said so. A responsibility, not a member.
She walked past them to the garage bay.
Diesel had a Sportster up on a lift with the carburetor pulled, and he was staring at it with the frustrated expression of a man who'd been staring at the same problem for an hour. Nora leaned in the doorway and watched him for thirty seconds.
"Your float valve's stuck," she said.
He looked up. Big man, shaved head, tattoos from wrist to shoulder. He blinked at her.
"Your float valve. It's hung up on a piece of grit in the seat. You can hear it in the way the idle drops out. Pull it, clean the seat with a Q-tip and some carb cleaner, put it back in. Twenty-minute fix."
"You wrench?"
"I grew up in a glass shop. My dad rebuilt engines on weekends for fun. I had a carburetor apart before I had a driver's license." She pushed off the doorframe. "You want a hand or you want to stare at it for another hour?"
Something shifted in his face. The look that said civilian cargo rearranged itself into something closer to respect, and he stepped aside and handed her a wrench.
She was elbow-deep in the Sportster's carb when Slayer appeared in the garage doorway.
He leaned against the frame and watched her work.
She could feel his eyes on her the way she could feel weather changing — a pressure drop, a shift in the air.
She didn't look up. She didn't need to. She knew exactly what expression he was wearing, because she'd seen it last night when she'd walked into the compound and sat down at his table: the look of a man watching a woman take up space in his world and realizing she fit.
"Diesel says you diagnosed his carb in thirty seconds," Slayer said.
"Stuck float valve. It wasn't hard." She wiped her hands on a shop rag that was already black. "He was overthinking it."
"He tends to do that." Slayer was quiet for a beat. "You need anything? For the room, or—"
"I need my shop back. I need my vans back. I need the man who burned them to stop breathing." She set the wrench down and looked at him. "But right now I'll settle for being useful instead of kept."
He held her eyes. The garage was loud with Diesel's radio and the rattle of tools and the distant sound of Bronco arguing with someone on the phone, and in the middle of all of it, Slayer looked at her like she was the only thing in the room worth watching.
"You're not kept," he said. "You've got the run of the place. Go where you want. Do what you want. This is your home until it's safe to go back to yours."
No rules. No restrictions. No sit-here-and-wait-for-the-men-to-handle-it.
It wasn't how anyone had handled her before. Not her ex-husband, who'd wanted her smaller. Not her landlord, who'd wanted her gone. Not the sport-coat man who'd wanted her block.
Slayer wanted her here. And he wanted her whole.
Something loosened in her chest that she'd been carrying since she locked the shop door this morning and taped a sign to it that felt like surrender.
"Thank you," she said. She meant it differently than she'd meant it last night in the lot. Last night it had been gratitude for violence. This was gratitude for room.
He nodded once. Then he crossed the garage, took her face in both hands, and kissed her.
Not like last night — not desperate and adrenaline-fueled and half out of their minds.
This was slow, deliberate, a man kissing a woman in front of his brothers in broad daylight because she was his and he wanted every man in the building to know it.
Diesel suddenly found something fascinating about the Sportster's rear tire.
Slayer pulled back. His thumb traced her cheekbone once, smearing a line of engine grease across her freckles, and his eyes held hers with that quiet gray-blue certainty.
"You need anything," he said, "you come find me."
He walked out. She watched him go, feeling the grease on her cheek and the pressure of his mouth still on hers and the eyes of every brother in the garage very carefully not looking at her.
She picked up the wrench.
"All right," she said to Diesel, who was still studying the rear tire like it contained the secrets of the universe. "Let's get this carburetor back together."
By five o'clock she'd fixed the Sportster, diagnosed a fouled plug on a Road King, and traded enough insults with Diesel and Trench that the kid had stopped calling her ma'am and started calling her Kessler.
She ate dinner at the bar next to Hawk, who didn't say twelve words the entire meal and somehow made the silence comfortable.
She drank a beer. She sat on a couch that smelled like leather and gun oil and watched the compound settle into its evening rhythms — the brothers drifting between the bar and the garage, the sound of bikes in the lot, the low rumble of conversation that sounded like a family that had chosen itself.
She thought about her father's shop, dark and locked, the sign still over the door. She thought about the quilt on her borrowed bed upstairs. She thought about Slayer kissing her in front of his brothers like a man planting a flag.
She was still thinking when she heard the compound gate roll open and the deep rumble of a V-twin coming in, and she looked up to see Slayer pull into the lot and kill the engine, and the way her chest lifted when she saw him scared her more than anything Vasko had done so far.
Because she could fight a man who wanted to take her shop. She knew how to do that.
She didn't know how to fight the feeling that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.