Chapter 8
Garrett
The man at the end of the bar doesn't belong in Nightfall Cove.
I know it before I know why. My body registers a threat before my mind catches up, something I learned in the pits at ten and have never needed to unlearn.
He sits four stools down from Colt, one leg crossed over the other, a tumbler of brown liquor in front of him he hasn't touched.
Human. Mid-fifties. Weathered face, grey at the temples, wearing a jacket that doesn't belong on anyone in this bar.
Colt is telling a story about a customer who tried to pay for a new clutch in venison.
Rex laughs into his beer, his shoulders loose for the first time in a week.
Nina pushed me out the door this morning with both palms flat against me.
Go see your brothers. I'll be fine. I have wine and a bath and no patience for you brooding at me.
So I'm here. And the man at the end of the bar watches me over the rim of his glass.
He sets the tumbler down. Slides off the stool and walks the length of the bar.
"Number Seven."
Colt's story dies mid-sentence. Rex's beer stops halfway to his lips.
Fifteen years since anyone has called me that.
Fifteen years, and the sound of it drops into me like a stone down a well.
All the way to the bottom, where the water is black and I don't go anymore.
My hand closes around the mug in front of me hard enough that I feel the glass give a fraction before I remember I like this bar and I like the man who owns it.
The man smiles, pleasant and conversational.
"Didn't think you were still breathing," he says. "The Kuznetsov family's been wondering what happened to their best fighter. Crowds still ask about you. You'd be flattered."
Rex is on his feet.
Colt's hand goes to his gun and stays there, the bar rail between it and the scout.
I don't move.
The purr that has been a fixture inside me since Nina moved into my cabin drops out in an instant, like a flame snuffed under a palm.
What replaces it is the old stillness. The pit stillness.
The quiet I used to drop into before the gate opened and whatever they'd brought to kill me that night came through it.
My heartbeat slows. My breath evens. My vision narrows to a corridor with the scout's throat at the end of it.
I look at him.
He reads the look. He takes half a step back before he catches himself and makes it look like a shift of weight.
"Easy, big man," he says. The smile doesn't move but the eyes above it do. "I'm not here to strong-arm anyone. Courtesy visit. The family's expanding. New venues, bigger gates, better money. We're putting out feelers. And your handler sent me to say the door's open if you ever want to come home."
Home. The word from the mouth of a man who once hosed the blood off me with a pressure washer in a concrete stall.
He slides a card across the bar toward me. Thick stock, black on black, a phone number in silver.
"He sends his regards."
I pick up the card.
I turn it over once in my hand. The fingers that have cradled a newborn orc against me are the same fingers that once broke a jaguar shifter's neck to keep him from breaking mine first. Both facts sit inside me at the same time. I have been carrying them together for fifteen years.
I tear the card in half.
I set the halves on the bar.
The scout's smile widens. "That's okay." He straightens his cuffs. "We know where to find you now. Pretty little town you have here with a pretty little clinic." He taps the edge of the bar, a thinking gesture. "I hear you've got a pretty little nurse, too. New to town. Phoenix transplant."
Every cell in my body wants to go over the bar at him.
I stay where I am.
The part of me the pits made, the part I have kept on a chain in the deepest basement of myself for fifteen years, strains against the chain and doesn't snap it. Putting my fist through this man's face proves I'm still Number Seven. That's the report he'll take back.
I hold the stillness.
The man holds my eyes for two more seconds. Then he reads whatever he sees in them and decides the room has shifted past his control. He nods once.
"Think about it." Then he walks out.
The door swings shut behind him. The bell over it rings once.
Rex stays standing until the taillights turn out of the lot. Then he sits. Colt's hand comes off his gun and picks up his beer. The halves of the card lie on the wood like two dead things.
Rex stares straight ahead, giving me a moment.
"We're calling Knox from the parking lot," he says.
I nod.
Church runs long.
Knox calls it the second we clear the clubhouse door. Finn is already there. Rex phoned ahead from the parking lot. Dawson comes in from the shop in his coveralls. Colt takes the seat on Finn's left. Every patched brother at the oak by the time I take my seat.
Knox doesn't sit. He stands at the head of the table with his hands flat on the wood and looks at me.
The room waits.
I've been sitting at this table for seven years.
In those seven years I have spoken in Church twice.
Once to second a motion. Once to vote. Both times a single word.
Knox has carried the weight of my silence for me, spoken for me at tables where my silence would have been read as weakness, translated my nods and shakes and stillness into club language without ever asking if I need it, because he already knows.
I nod.
The words are already stacked inside me. They have been stacked since I was ten, every night in the cage, every morning in the chute, every year since I walked out of the Kuznetsov compound and never looked back.
"The Kuznetsov family." My voice scrapes out of me, like a hinge after a winter. "Underground fighting ring. Pacific Northwest. Runs out of Spokane and Portland and three smaller towns. Monsters. Illegal. The illegal local cops get paid to overlook."
I stop. I drag air in through my nose. The next sentence weighs heavier than the first.
"They took me when I was ten."
Dawson's wristwatch ticks in the silence.
"Border conflict. My herd got split. The Kuznetsov people found me before anyone else did.
I was young. They knew what I was worth.
They put me in a truck." Another breath.
"Fifteen years. Hundreds of fights on the books.
More off the books. I was good at it. Some called me Gore because crowds wanted a name that sold tickets.
But my handlers called me Number Seven between fights.
I was the seventh minotaur they'd broken. "
Finn exhales.
"Handlers ran the pen. They muzzled us between fights.
A leather and steel rig that pinned the jaw and ran a strap behind my horns.
" I touch the base of my left horn without meaning to.
Put my hand back on the oak. "Some of us bit.
I bit for the first two years and then I stopped because it didn't change anything and it cost me teeth. "
Knox hasn't moved.
"I broke out at twenty-five. Walked north eleven months. Ended up here during the fire. Fought alongside Knox and the rest of them. When the smoke cleared he took me home. He knows the rest."
I swallow.
"Man at the Anchor tonight. Kuznetsov scout. They're expanding. Recruiting old fighters. He knows my face. He knows this town and he knows about Nina."
The name comes out of my mouth rougher than the rest of it. Finn's head turns toward me.
"They've been watching."
The silence holds.
I sit down.
My knees want to shake and I don't let them. I put both hands flat on the wood.
Knox lets the silence run ten seconds. He has always understood what a silence is for.
Then he lifts his head.
"They came for one of ours," he says. "They threatened another."
He looks around. Every face turns toward him.
"We end this."
Nods come back from every chair. Rex. Finn. Dawson. Colt. A circuit closing.
Knox pulls a folded photograph from his cut and slides it across. The grainy tree-line shot Dawson took two weeks ago. Two cloaked figures, heavy orc builds, watching the town.
"And while we're opening the books," he says, "the women need to know about the other thing. The Bloodstone clan's been scouting the tree line east of town. Garrett's been on me to tell them since I showed him the photograph. I said no. I was wrong. We're telling them tonight."
Every head in the room lifts. Finn's jaw tightens.
"We need patrols at the cabin," Knox says.
"At the clinic and the school. Sarah gets a brother with her when she's in town.
Jess doesn't go anywhere alone either. And Nina is under the same protocol as the old ladies starting now.
We can argue about the politics of that with her afterward.
" He looks at me. "She's a part of the club now.
She's club because you say so and because I say so, and nobody at this table is going to tell Garrett Maddox his woman isn't ours to protect. "
I close my eyes for a second.
Finn says, "Fucking amen."
Rex lifts two fingers off the wood. A silent amen of his own.
"Dawson runs the patrol schedule," Knox says.
"Rex on the clinic on nights. Dawson, cabin on days.
Colt, records and plates—anything we can trace through a keyboard.
We double up for the next two weeks. Finn runs point on intel.
Assume they're local, assume they're watching, assume they'll move before New Year's. Questions."
Nobody has any.
"Then we're done."
Chairs push back. Rex stops behind my chair and sets his palm on the back of my neck, holds it a beat, then he walks out.
Finn squeezes my shoulder. Dawson nods. Colt won't meet my eyes, and I've known Colt long enough to recognise it.
It's the face he makes when he doesn't want anyone to see him feeling something.
Knox is the last one out.
He stops at the end of the table and looks at me.
"You did good," he says. "I know what that cost you."
I can't answer him.
He walks out and shuts the door behind him.
I sit with the silence for a minute, maybe two. Then I push up from the chair.
I find the clubhouse bathroom. Lock the door. Grip the sink with both hands. The porcelain creaks and I ease off it before I crack the fixture.
My ribs heave. My head hangs between my shoulders and I watch a drop of sweat fall off my nose into the drain.
The words tore a wound open on the way out.
Speaking to Nina is a gift I have given myself over the last three weeks, one syllable at a time, her patience making space for mine.
Speaking to a room is like surgery without anesthesia.
The words came out clean because I didn't let them come out any other way.
But the cost sits in me now, behind my ribs, a bruise the shape of everything I've never said.
I run the cold tap. Cup water in my hands and splash my face. My horns ache at the base. Some old nerve firing. Fifteen years of the muzzle strap, a memory my body keeps without my permission.
I straighten. Look at the mirror. A big man with wet fur and eyes I recognise from photographs taken at the wrong end of his life.
Pretty little nurse.
I shut the tap.
The cabin is warm when I push the door open.
The fire has burned down to coals. Nina is asleep on the couch, a textbook open across her, Advanced Wound Care, Fourth Edition. Her sock feet stick out from under the quilt. She has drooled a little at the corner of her mouth.
My throat does something I don't have a word for.
I ease the door shut behind me. Hang my cut on the hook. Cross the floor on the balls of my feet.
I lift the textbook off her. Set it beside the half-drunk tea she made hours ago. Pull the quilt up to her chin and she shifts. Her hand comes free of the blanket, finds the edge of the couch, slides off.
I lower myself onto the floor beside her, back against the base of the couch, knees drawn up. The fur along my shoulders brushes the edge of the cushion.
Her hand finds me in her sleep.
Her fingers curl around the base of my left horn the way they've learned to curl around it. Automatic now, after these last weeks. Her thumb settles into the groove at the base.
The purr starts before I can decide whether to let it.
It rolls through me, into the couch frame behind me. Her hand shifts a fraction against my horn and settles deeper. Her breathing slows.
I watch the fire.
The scout is out there. The clan is out there. My past is in a Spokane warehouse with a ledger and a phone number waiting for a call I will never make, and the man who came for me is driving home tonight to report back, and the Kuznetsov family will decide what comes next.
But the feel of Nina's thumb in the groove of my horn is soothing.
I have spent my life protecting nothing because I had nothing worth protecting. I understand it now, on the floor of my own cabin with her hand on my horn and the fire dying in the grate. I have a thing. A thing with a heartbeat and a laugh and socked feet under a quilt. A thing I can lose.
The purr deepens and I let it carry me into the dark.