CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Night Before
By Friday, Josie's shop had quietly transformed into something between a business and a small fortress, cameras mounted discreetly at every entrance, a rotation of club members cycling through overnight shifts in a truck parked across the street, and a new deadbolt on the back door that Sawyer had installed himself, testing it twice with the particular thoroughness of a man who needed his own hands to confirm something was actually secure.
She'd expected the extra presence to feel suffocating, a reminder of exactly the danger hanging over her, but instead found a strange comfort in it, in Cole's cheerful wave from the truck each morning when she opened up, in the quiet nod from whoever had taken the overnight shift before, in the simple, accumulating evidence that an entire club had decided, without her having to ask twice, that her safety was worth their collective effort.
"You're handling this better than I expected," Sawyer said Friday evening, watching her close out the register with a steadiness that surprised even her.
"I grew up around this world, remember. I know how to function scared.
I spent four years watching my father do exactly that every time club business got heavy, and I spent three years after doing it myself, just about a different kind of fear.
" She shrugged, though the gesture cost her more composure than she let show.
"This is just the first time in a long while that I'm not doing it alone. "
He came around the counter and pulled her into a loose embrace, chin resting against the top of her head, and she let herself lean into it, exhaustion and fear and something steadier than either finally allowed to settle for a moment in the quiet, closed-up shop.
"Reeve and I leave for the meeting tomorrow afternoon," he said, quiet, into her hair. "Location's a warehouse out past the industrial park, neutral ground both sides agreed to. We should be back by evening."
"Should be."
"Will be." He pulled back enough to meet her eyes, steady, certain.
"I need you to hear me say that and believe it, Josie.
Not because I'm promising you nothing can go wrong.
Because I'm promising you I'm not walking into that room careless or unprepared, and I'm promising you I have every reason in the world to walk back out of it and come find you after. "
She studied his face a long moment, looking for the old evasiveness, the careful management of her fear that used to be his default, and found instead only plain, steady honesty, uncomfortable in its own way but far easier to trust than comfort would have been.
"Okay," she said finally. "I believe you're going in prepared. I still get to be scared."
"You get to be as scared as you need to be." He kissed her forehead, soft. "I'd worry about you more if you weren't."
Cole arrived not long after for the evening shift change, bundled against the cold, his usual easy grin edged with a seriousness Josie had watched grow in him steadily over the last two weeks, the particular fast education of a young man being asked to carry real weight for the first time.
"You two look like you could use a distraction," Cole observed, setting up a thermos of coffee on the shop counter with the ease of someone who'd made himself thoroughly at home over the last several nights. "I brought cards. Sawyer's terrible at poker, in case you didn't know that about him."
"I'm not terrible," Sawyer protested, though the easy warmth in his voice suggested he welcomed the interruption as much as Josie did.
"You have a tell the size of the district," Cole said cheerfully, already dealing. "Every time you've got a good hand you go quiet in this specific way. Josie, you should know this about him. Might come in handy someday."
They played three unhurried hands at the shop counter, the overnight cold settling outside while the small space stayed warm with lamplight and easy company, and Josie found herself grateful, in a way she hadn't expected, for Cole's determined cheerfulness, for the way he refused to let the weight of tomorrow's meeting swallow the evening entirely.
Sawyer did, in fact, have a tell, a particular stillness that settled over him right before he won a hand, and by the third round Josie had learned to read it as easily as Cole apparently had years ago.
"I'm glad you're both in my life again," Josie said at one point, without fully planning to say it out loud, surprising herself with how simply true it felt.
Cole's easy grin softened into something more sincere. "Feels like the old days a little, doesn't it. Before everything got complicated."
"Feels like something new, built out of the old days," Sawyer corrected gently, reaching over to fold his hand around Josie's on the counter. "Better this time, I think, for having survived what broke it the first time."
Cole left a little before midnight, waving off Josie's offer of a spare blanket for the truck with cheerful bravado, and Sawyer stayed, the two of them curling together on Josie's small couch instead of climbing the stairs, neither quite ready to be far from the shop's front window on the night before tomorrow's meeting.
"Talk to me about something that isn't tomorrow," Josie murmured, her head resting against his chest, his heartbeat steady and grounding under her ear.
"Tell me about the shop. What you want it to look like in five years, once all of this is behind us." His voice was warm, easy, a deliberate gift of ordinary conversation in the middle of an extraordinary week. "I want to hear you plan something that has nothing to do with any of this."
She let herself talk, quiet and unhurried, about expanding the showroom, about maybe finally hiring a second mechanic, about a dozen small, hopeful plans she hadn't let herself voice out loud in longer than she could remember, and somewhere in the middle of describing a paint scheme for the back wall she wanted to try eventually, she fell asleep against his chest, safe and warm in the lamp-lit shop, the truck of watchful club members idling steady across the street outside.