Chapter 6
Garrett
She sleeps with her face against my chest, one arm thrown across me, her body draped over mine like a blanket that doesn't cover enough.
I haven't moved in four hours. My left arm went numb two hours ago. I don't care. I'd cut the arm off before I'd wake her.
The fire has burned down to a red glow behind the grate.
Her breath hits the fur above my chest in a slow pulse I've been counting since the logs stopped popping.
Her hair is everywhere. On my arm, my chest, caught in the fur along my collarbone.
Every strand a point of warmth against my skin.
No one has held me in the dark before. Not like this.
In the pits they hosed us down after the fights, checked our wounds, ran their hands over the damage to assess what it would take to get us ring-ready again.
I don't have a reference for this. Her face against my chest because she wants it there.
She's going to wake up. She's going to be kind about it. She felt sorry for me, and by the time Jess pulls into the clearing she'll have sorted last night into a box marked mistake. She'll find the right words. She's good at words.
She stirs, making a sound I have no name for, my arm tightens around her before I can stop it.
I ease her off me inch by inch. She mumbles, rolls into the warm shape I leave behind and pulls the quilt up to her chin. I stand over her in the grey dawn and the purr rises in my chest uninvited.
I make breakfast.
Eggs. Bacon. Bread in the iron. Coffee too strong, the way she likes it, grounds in the bottom of the cup. My hands aren't as steady as I want them to be. A man whose hands have held a skull together while a ring doctor stitched the scalp has no business shaking over scrambled eggs.
I set her plate at the end of the table. I stand at the counter with my own mug and I don't sit.
She wakes while I'm at the stove. I hear the quilt shift, the soft sound of her sitting up, and when I turn she's looking at me from the couch with the blanket pulled to her chin and wearing a smile on her face that I don't deserve.
She doesn't look like a woman building a kind rejection. She looks like a woman who slept well.
She wraps the quilt around her shoulders and pads barefoot to the bathroom. The door clicks shut and then I hear the water run.
She comes out five minutes later in one of my flannel shirts. It hangs to her knees. The cuffs are rolled twice. Her feet are bare on the floor, her hair's been finger-combed, and when she sees the table her lips part.
"You cooked."
I nod.
She crosses the room and sits where she's sat every morning this week. She picks up the coffee and breathes it in, eyes closed, the same face she makes over the stew I made a few nights ago—she's content. I turn away before the purr can climb into my throat.
"Garrett."
I stop.
"Sit down."
I don't move. If I sit, she'll talk. If she talks, the kind version of this shouldn't happen again is going to come out of her mouth, and I've taken hits my whole life but I don't know how to take that one.
She pushes back from the table and catches my forearm before I can turn away. Her palm is small and hot against the fur.
"Please, come sit with me."
I sit. The chair groans under me. I hold my mug with both hands.
She eats. She talks about her day ahead the way she talks about everything.
A follow-up on a broken wrist from Wednesday, a supply order that didn't arrive, whether Jess is going to notice she isn't wearing her hair up.
Because Jess notices everything, Garrett, she's going to take one look at me and know.
She laughs. All of it normal. Like last night opened a door she has no interest in closing.
The purr rolls out of my chest and I'm too rattled to hold it. She glances up. She reaches across the table and rests her palm over the back of my hand. Her thumb strokes once. She goes back to her eggs.
The logic I built this morning falls apart.
Finn takes one look at me when I come through the garage bay door. The grin starts before I've cleared the threshold.
"Well."
I walk past him.
"You look different."
I don't stop.
"Brother." He says it through a laugh. "I'm not going to say anything."
"You already did."
"Fine, I'm done." He holds up both palms. "I'm happy for you. That's all."
Rex crosses from the parts counter with a grease rag over his shoulder. "What's different."
"Gore smiled."
"Bullshit."
"I saw a twitch. It totally counts."
"Twitch doesn't count."
"Counts in his face. For him it's a smile."
I pull the cover off the Dodge on the rack and climb under.
The transmission needs the synchro replaced, and I can bury myself in the small precise work of it all afternoon.
My wrench closes on the first bolt and the pull of muscle in my shoulders settles me the way it always does.
Cold metal, familiar torque, the smell of oil and brake cleaner.
Finn provides running commentary from the next bay over about a raccoon getting into Rex's saddlebags that I don't need to engage with but listen to anyway because the sound of someone talking while I work has become a thing I need without noticing it.
My hands strip the synchro hub but the rest of me is still at the kitchen table, her palm on the back of my hand, her thumb stroking once.
I let the purr roll through my chest under the truck, low enough that the engine noise covers it.
Holly Summers shoves through the side door around noon with takeout boxes from the Rusty Anchor stacked in her arms. Her hair is purple this week.
Her jacket hangs open, tattoo sleeves visible under a thin black tank top.
The Russian dagger on her left forearm is old and faded.
The koi on her right is new, colour still saturated.
Rex is off the parts counter before her boots clear the doorway.
Holly sets the boxes on the counter and Rex is at the door frame before she turns around.
His palm goes flat against the wood above her head.
She tilts her chin up. He says something too low for me to catch.
She shifts her weight onto one hip, an inch closer to him than anyone should stand to Rex Flynn, and grins at him like she's daring him to do something about it.
She holds the grin a few seconds longer, then ducks under his arm and strolls out the way she came in. "Enjoy, boys." The door swings shut. Her truck cranks over in the lot and Rex stands in the doorway watching her taillights turn out of the drive.
Finn, without looking up from his wrench, "You're an idiot."
"Shut up."
I say nothing. I've known Rex long enough to recognise a man running from the one thing he wants.
Knox rolls into the lot at three with Sarah on the back of the bike and Reeve strapped to his chest in a carrier that looks absurd against the leather of his cut. Three-month-old orc baby in a knit cap, and Knox handles him like he's been doing it his whole life.
Sarah swings off the bike and tugs Knox's hand. "We need ten minutes."
"Twenty," Knox says.
Sarah's cheeks flush. She's already unbuckling the carrier straps from Knox. "Garrett, can you—"
I'm already reaching. She passes Reeve to me. Knox follows Sarah through the clubhouse door with a hand on her lower back and a stride that has nothing to do with club business. The door shuts behind them. Finn, from under a hood two bays down, says "Twenty bucks says fifteen minutes."
I ignore him. Reeve settles into the crook of my arm the way he always does—easy, boneless, trusting in a way that tightens something behind my ribs.
I check the beanie, tuck the blanket edge under his chin, and lower myself onto the bench outside the bay.
He grabs a fistful of my chest fur and yanks. I let him.
One hand under Reeve's back, the whole span of it from his shoulders to his thighs.
One hand at the base of his skull where the soft spot is still closing.
The kid weighs nothing. He opens his eyes—the dark amber Knox gave him—and stares up at my face with the attention of a creature who hasn't learned yet that some of us get stared at for other reasons.
He giggles.
Knox comes back fifteen minutes later with his shirt untucked and Sarah half a step behind him, her hair redone badly and a flush still climbing her neck. She reaches for Reeve. He's asleep against my chest, one fist still tangled in my fur, his breathing slow and even.
"Out cold," I say.
Sarah lifts him gently, tucking him against her shoulder. She mouths thank you at me and presses a kiss to Reeve's head. Knox claps my shoulder on his way past.
"You're his favourite," he says. "Don't let it go to your head."
Sarah takes Reeve inside. Knox watches her go, then turns to me.
"Walk with me."
We cross the lot to his office. He shuts the door. Sits behind his desk and pulls three envelopes from the top drawer. Dark wax seals, heavy parchment. He sets them in a row between us.
"These came in at the mail drop on Wednesday."
I break the wax on the first one. The handwriting is a clerkish slope I've seen on Bloodstone clan documents. No more gifts. No more invitations to winter feasts.
The clans will not be ignored forever.
Your brothers will suffer for your cowardice.
Return voluntarily or be retrieved.
I read each one twice. Fold them back along their creases.
"Retrieved means dogs and ropes and a cage in the back of a truck," I say.
Knox nods. "I know. But that's not all." He pulls a folded sheet from the same drawer and slides it across to me. A photograph—grainy, taken from a distance. Two figures at the tree line east of town, heavy builds, cloaked.
"Dawson spotted them yesterday morning. Sat there for two hours, then left."
I study the photograph. The builds are orc. The cloaks are clan-issue, the kind the Bloodstone scouts wear on long-range patrols.
"They're not writing letters anymore," Knox says. "They're scouting. I'm doubling patrols and keeping this between us and the brothers. The women don't need this right now."
I shake my head.
"Sarah's got a three-month-old, Gore. Jess is pregnant. I'm not putting this on them until I have a plan."
And Nina. Nina who isn't club, isn't claimed, and has no bond to warn her if something comes through the tree line while she's working. He's wrong. I don't have the words for why yet, but he's wrong.
I shake my head again.
"We'll talk about it. Let's not worry them yet, okay?"
I nod. Not agreement. He knows it's not.
I walk out of his office and climb onto my bike and head to the clinic to make sure she's safe.
The clinic sits at the corner of Main and Third.
Someone has spray-painted the east wall in red. The paint is still wet.
MONSTERS OUT.
Four feet high across the siding between the two windows on the east wall. I sit on my bike with the engine idling and look at the red paint on the wall of the building where Nina works, and every territorial instinct I own locks onto it at once.
Someone put this on the wall of her work.
I pull the flip phone out of my cut. Photograph the graffiti and then send it to Knox.
Then I turn the bike around and ride to Webb's Hardware.
Lucas Carter brings me a gallon of beige exterior and a roller without asking.
I pay in cash, ride back, and cover the paint.
The first coat doesn't take. I do a second.
The sun is starting to set by the time the siding is clean. Her shift ends at six. I'm on the bike and moving before the clinic door opens.
I don't go home. I take the coast road north and ride until the engine heat works through my legs and the cold works through everything else. By the time I turn back, the sky is dark and the cabin windows glow against the snow.
Through the front window she sits on the couch with the phone pressed to her ear, the quilt over her lap, her legs curled under her. One hand in the air, moving the way her hands move when she's telling a story—ay, Mami, no, I'm telling you—and the sound of her laugh carries through the glass.
I stop the bike at the edge of the clearing. Cut the engine. Snow falls in thin flakes that catch in the floodlight off the porch.
I sit in the dark and watch the light in my window.
The purr starts, but it doesn't roll the way it has all day.
It catches. Stutters against my ribs like something pressing outward that can't find the exit.
It aches. Not the low easy hum from the breakfast table or the steady thrum under the truck—this one has teeth.
This one knows about the letters in my cut and the cloaked figures at the tree line and the red paint I scraped off the wall of her building an hour ago.
My mother called this the finding sound. She told me once, before the raiders came, that I'd know when it happened. She said it would feel like my chest had outgrown my body.
She didn't tell me it would feel like fear.
I'm falling in love with her. And I've spent the afternoon reading threats addressed to my brothers, studying photographs of scouts at our borders, and covering slurs on the wall of the building where she works.
Loving her doesn't just risk me. It puts her in the centre of everything I've spent fifteen years trying to stay clear of.
The terrifying part isn't that she might leave. It's that she might stay, and I might let her. I've survived everything life has thrown at me. I don't think I'd survive losing this.