Chapter 10
The garage smelled like chemical foam and blood and the sharp electrical bite of burned wiring, and Nora was on her knees in the middle of it, wrapping a brother's forearms in gauze.
His name was Diesel. Six hours ago he'd been handing her a wrench and calling her Kessler, and now he was sitting on the concrete floor with second-degree burns from wrist to elbow where the fuel explosion had caught him, and he was gritting his teeth so hard she could hear them creak.
"Stop moving," she said.
"It burns."
"I know it burns. That's what burns do. Stop moving or I'll wrap it tighter."
He stopped moving.
She'd found the first-aid kit behind the bar an hour ago and had been working through it since — burn cream, gauze, tape, the butterfly strips she'd used on Hawk's arm before Bronco took over with a suture kit he kept in his saddlebag like a man who'd stitched up brothers before and expected to again.
She wasn't a nurse. She was a woman who'd been cutting herself on glass since she was fourteen and had learned to patch her own hands without flinching, and tonight that was enough.
The garage was wrecked. The roll-up door hung off its tracks, buckled inward where Bishop's truck had rammed it.
Two lifts were knocked sideways. Tool chests lay on their sides with drawers spilled across the floor, sockets and wrenches scattered in the foam and the oil.
The side bay was blackened where the fuel fire had burned through the wall before Nora had killed it with the extinguisher, and the stink of it would take weeks to fade.
But the building was standing. The brothers were standing. And Bishop wasn't.
Nora finished Diesel's wraps and sat back on her heels.
Her hands were steady now. They hadn't been steady two hours ago, when the adrenaline had crashed out of her system and left her shaking so hard she'd had to sit in the bathroom with the door locked and breathe into her hands until the trembling stopped.
She hadn't let anyone see it. She wasn't going to start now.
"You're good at this," Diesel said, looking at his arms.
"I'm good at fixing things. Doesn't matter if it's a windshield or an arm." She stood and stretched the ache out of her back. "Keep them dry. Change the wraps in the morning. If the skin blisters and doesn't pop on its own, come find me."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Don't call me ma'am. You stopped calling me ma'am three days ago and I liked it better."
The ghost of a grin crossed his pain-tightened face. "Yes, Kessler."
She left him on the couch with a bottle of water and two Advil and went back to the garage.
She couldn't sleep and she couldn't sit still, so she worked.
She righted the first tool chest by herself, her shoulders straining against the weight, and started sorting sockets back into drawers by size.
She swept glass and foam and debris into a pile by the breached door.
She checked each lift for damage — two were fine, one had a cracked hydraulic line that was leaking fluid onto the concrete in a slow red drip.
She found a clamp and stopped the leak. It was a temporary fix, but temporary was all she had tonight.
Somewhere around two in the morning, she stopped sweeping and stood in the middle of the wrecked bay and looked at what she was standing inside.
Not the building. The thing the building held.
Men who had put their bodies between her and armed professionals without being asked or paid.
Who had bled on this concrete tonight — Hawk's arm, Diesel's forearms, the bruises she'd seen forming on Trench's shoulder when he'd finally sat down and let someone look at him.
Who had fought for this ground and for her and for each other with the absolute certainty that this was what they were for.
She thought about her father.
Not the shop or the sign. The man. The way he'd stood behind his counter every morning for thirty years, not because the glass business was glamorous but because the people who came through his door needed their windshields fixed and he was the one who fixed them.
The way he'd told her, when he handed her the keys, Don't let them take it, Nora.
Not because the building mattered but because what it stood for mattered — the stubbornness to be useful, to show up, to hold ground because somebody had to.
These men held ground the same way. Different tools, different fight. Same stubbornness. Same refusal to let the people on their block fend for themselves against men with money and muscle.
She measured her own fight against theirs and found it the same.
The broom handle was warm in her hands. The chemical foam was drying on the concrete.
And Nora stood in the wreckage of a motorcycle club's garage at two in the morning and understood, for the first time, that she wasn't visiting this life.
She was in it. She'd been in it since she dropped a glass rack on a man in her own shop.
Slayer found her there at three.
He'd showered and changed, but she could see the damage through the clean clothes — the stiffness in his ribs where Bishop had hit him, the darkening bruise on his throat from the chokehold, the way he held his left arm close to his body where the pipe had caught him.
He moved like a man carrying more pain than he was going to admit, which was exactly what she expected from him.
He stopped in the doorway of the wrecked garage and looked at her standing in it with a broom and a tool chest half-sorted and the hydraulic clamp she'd put on the cracked lift, and something in his face was so open and unguarded that it hurt to look at.
"You should be asleep," he said.
"So should you."
"Can't."
"Me either." She set the broom against the wall. "So I'm fixing things. It's what I do."
He walked into the garage and stood in front of her, and neither one of them reached for distance. There was no distance left. The night had burned it away the same way the fuel fire had burned through the bay wall — completely, leaving only the structure underneath.
"I watched you put out that fire," he said.
"While I was fighting Bishop. I looked up and you were standing in the bay with an extinguisher, fighting the fire so the building didn't go.
" His voice was rough, scraped raw. "You didn't run.
You didn't hide. You fought a different battle in the same war and you saved the garage while I was —"
"While you were saving everything else." She stepped closer.
"That's what this is, Slayer. That's what I've been trying to tell you since I walked into your compound and sat down at your table.
I'm not the woman you protect. I'm the woman who fights beside you.
Different battle, same war. That's how this works. "
He put his hand on her face. She leaned into it.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said. "I don't mean tonight. I don't mean until Vasko's dead and the block is safe. I mean I'm not going anywhere. This fight is my fight. These men bled for me tonight and I'm going to be worth the blood. You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"I mean the fight as much as I mean you. Both. All of it. The shop and the club and the man. I'm in."
He kissed her forehead. Gentle, careful, a man pressing his mouth to the only part of her that wasn't bruised or cut or covered in chemical foam.
She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of it spread through her whole body, and something settled into place between them that was bigger than the war and bigger than the wanting and would be there when both of those things were over.
"Come to bed," he said.
"I'm not done sorting the tool chest."
"Nora."
"I know. I know." She looked at the garage one more time — the wrecked bay, the buckled door, the lifts she'd checked and the leak she'd clamped and the floor she'd swept.
She'd put her hands on this building the same way she'd put her hands on her shop, and it had become hers in the touching. "Okay. Bed."
He took her hand — not steering her this time, just holding on — and they walked through the quiet compound together.
Past the bar where Diesel was asleep on the couch with his wrapped arms propped on pillows.
Past the chapel door, closed and dark. Up the stairs and down the hall to his room, which had become their room somewhere in the last week without either of them naming it.
They didn't touch each other the way they'd touched each other before. He pulled off her smoky clothes and she pulled off his, and they climbed into the bed they'd shared for three nights now and he wrapped himself around her, his chest to her back, his arm over her waist, his face in her hair.
She laced her fingers through his and held on.
They'd come out of the worst night yet more committed, not less. Welded together by what it had cost and what it had proved — that she would fight for this ground the same way he would, that he would let her, that the thing between them was load-bearing and could hold the weight of a war.
"Slayer," she said in the dark.
"Yeah."
"What's your real name?"
A pause. The freight train rumbled past and shook the walls and faded into the distance.
"Wade," he said. "Wade Carmichael."
She turned his name over in her mouth like a stone she'd found on the ground — smooth, warm, real.
"Goodnight, Wade."
His arm tightened around her. She felt him press his mouth to the back of her neck, and the breath that left him was the breath of a man putting down something he'd been carrying alone for a very long time.
"Goodnight, Nora."