Chapter 10
Garrett
He gives me the short version. A man walked into the clinic during Nina's shift.
No appointment. Sat in the waiting room like he belonged there, and Colt, parked in the lot on day patrol, didn't flag him because the guy looked like every other walk-in with a cough and a magazine.
Then Lily's school called about a meltdown and Colt left for twenty minutes, and in those twenty minutes Jess looked up from a chart and noticed the man hadn't moved, hadn't checked in, hadn't touched the magazine in his lap.
He just sat there watching Nina work through the glass partition.
Jess couldn't place why he made her skin crawl, then it clicked.
She called Knox. The man left before anyone could reach him.
He didn't touch her, didn't speak to her, didn't need to.
The message was clear: We can reach her whenever we want.
I pull myself out from under the Ford. Rex is already at the parts counter with his phone in his hand, running plates from the parking lot camera Dawson installed last month.
Colt is already hunched over Knox's laptop at the workbench, pulling records on the Kuznetsov family's known contacts in Oregon.
He got back from Lily's school before I got off the phone.
Dropped her with Sarah at the clubhouse and came straight here.
His face is grey. He keeps looking at me and looking away.
I don't speak. Everything in me wants to put my fist through the wall, and the words I need aren't the kind that fix anything.
Knox rides. I ride with him, Rex behind us, Finn bringing up the rear.
Four bikes down Main Street in the middle of the afternoon, the exhaust loud enough to turn heads on the sidewalk.
Knox leads us to the Rusty Anchor. Colt's records traced the rental car to a room at the motel on Spruce, but the car is parked outside the Anchor.
Knox swings through the door first. Finn and Rex flank him. I come through last and have to turn sideways to clear the frame.
The two scouts sit at a booth in the back. The older one—the man from the bar, the one who called me Number Seven—sets his drink down. The younger one stands up.
"Garrett Maddox is a patched member of the Feral Sons MC." Knox's voice carries without volume. He doesn't need to raise it. "His debts to the Kuznetsov ring were paid in blood and years. If any representative of the Kuznetsov family enters Nightfall Cove again, they'll be leaving in pieces."
The older scout meets Knox's eyes. He holds them for two seconds, maybe less, and then his gaze shifts past Knox's shoulder to me.
I look at him the way I looked at him across the clearing on Christmas Eve.
He picks up his jacket. The younger one follows. They leave through the side door without a word, the bell swinging behind them. Gravel pops under the tires and the sound fades north toward the highway.
Finn exhales.
Knox turns to me. His hand comes up and grips my shoulder, a squeeze that says more than the speech he gave. He holds it a beat, then drops it.
"It's done," he says.
But it isn't. Knox has never dealt with the Kuznetsov family.
I have. Almost two decades in their operation taught me how they work.
They don't send two scouts unless there are six more you haven't seen.
They don't back down from a bar speech. They smile, they leave, and they come back at three in the morning with a van and a sedative and the next time anyone sees you, you're behind a gate with a number on your back.
Knox's words bought us days. Maybe a week. No more.
The clubhouse is warm and I sit at the oak table in Church and I can't stop turning it over.
The Kuznetsov family found me. They know about Nina.
They know where she works, what shift she runs, what she looks like.
The orc clan sent letters to Knox's cabin, and scouts have been photographed at the tree line east of town.
Humans First spray-painted the clinic wall in red—MONSTERS OUT—and I covered the paint with two coats of beige from Webb's Hardware but the words are still underneath.
Three threats. Three directions. And Nina is standing in the middle of all of them because of me.
I press my palms flat on the oak. The grain bites into the calluses and I focus on the texture because the alternative is putting my fist through the table. I've broken enough things in my life. I promised myself when Knox gave me this seat that I wouldn't break anything that belonged to the club.
She should take the Seattle contract.
The thought drops into me like a stone. She mentioned it once, early on, a throwaway line.
A six-month stint at a teaching hospital, good money, a city where nobody knows her and nobody painted her workplace because her boyfriend spent fifteen years in a cage.
She laughed it off. I'm not going anywhere.
And I believed her because I needed to believe her.
I stay in the empty room, staring at the table, working through every angle I can find, looking for one that ends differently.
There isn't one.
If the Kuznetsovs come back, they won't stay in a waiting room.
If the orc clan escalates, the letters will become bodies.
If Humans First decides the graffiti wasn't enough, she's the human working at the monster clinic beside the orc's pregnant mate.
She's a target because of me. Every thread of danger in this town traces back to me.
I leave the clubhouse. I ride home. The forest road winds through Douglas firs dusted white, the afternoon light thin and grey, and the cabin appears in the clearing the way it has for years—except the windows glow now.
She's inside. I can see her through the glass, moving between the counter and the stove.
The ache in my chest is so sharp I pull the bike to the edge of the trees, kill the engine, sit in the cold with my hands on my knees.
I have to do this because doing nothing is how you lose people. Keeping threats from the people you love is how you lose them—Knox proved that when he hid the clan photographs from Sarah and Jess.
But removing myself from her life is different from hiding information. Removing myself from her life removes the reason anyone targets her at all.
I get off the bike.
Her bags are in the guest room closet. I know this because I carried them there the night she moved in.
Two duffels and a roller, the kind a woman who moves every twelve weeks learns to pack tight.
I pull them out. I open her drawers. I fold her scrubs, her sweaters, the sleep shirt she stole from me that still smells like both of us.
The toiletries lined up on the bathroom shelf beside mine.
It takes fifteen minutes. I pack it all. Every one of them guts me.
I set the bags by the front door.
She comes out of the kitchen with a dish towel over her shoulder and sees the bags and stops.
"Garrett?"
I can't look at her. One glance and the words will dissolve, I'll cross the room, press my face into her hair, the purr will start, and every bit of resolve holding this together will collapse.
I stare at the floorboards. My hands hang at my sides. The cabin holds the silence the way it held it before she arrived—total, airless, a quiet that used to feel like safety and now feels like suffocation.
"Garrett, what is this?"
"The Seattle contract." My voice comes out flat. Dead. The version of my voice that belongs to the pits, the one I used when the handlers asked if I could fight again and the answer was always the same regardless of the injuries. "You should take it and go now."
Her face changes. Not hurt, not yet. Confusion first, her brow pulling together, the dish towel sliding off her shoulder onto the floor.
"What are you talking about?"
"He sat in your waiting room." Every word costs me, and not the way words usually cost me. The words come out easy for once. That's the worst part. My voice works fine when it's being used to destroy something. "Watched you work. The Kuznetsovs know your name, your schedule, your face."
"I know. Knox told me. The club handled it."
"The club handled two scouts. The family has dozens."
She crosses the room. She reaches for my arm and I step back. One step. It takes everything I have. Her hand falls.
"Don't." Her voice drops low. "Don't you dare shut down on me."
I pull the silence over me the way I pulled it over me in the pits—a blanket, a thing between me and the world that nothing can penetrate.
I learned it at ten years old, kneeling on concrete with the muzzle strapped to my face, and I've never hated myself for knowing it the way I hate myself right now.
But she'll leave if I make it cold enough. She'll leave and she'll be safe, and nothing else matters.
"You packed my bags." She says it like she's testing the words, turning them over. "You packed my bags and you won't look at me. You don't get to decide this for me." Her voice rises. "You don't get to make me safe by making me leave."
The purr is dead. I choked it out the moment I lined her duffels in the hallway, and the absence fills the room louder than the sound ever did. She feels it. I can tell because the anger drains out of her face and what replaces it is worse—she knows exactly what I'm doing.
"You're using it." Her voice cracks. "The silence. The wall. You're using the thing they taught you in the pit to push me away."
The accuracy of it hits me behind the ribs.
"This isn't protection, Garrett. This is cruelty."
She waits. I give her nothing. The man who carved her a hummingbird stands in his own cabin wearing the face of Number Seven, and the woman he loves is begging him to stop and he can't stop because stopping means she stays and staying means she gets hurt.
She picks up the dish towel from the floor. Folds it once and sets it on the counter. Walks to the hook by the door and pulls on her coat.
I don't move.
She comes back through the living room with her coat on. At the kitchen counter she stops, pulls the carved hummingbird from her pocket, and leaves it next to the coffee maker. She doesn't look at me.
The front door opens. Her boots cross the porch. Her phone is at her ear, her voice rough, controlled. "Jess. Can I stay at the clubhouse tonight?"
Her car turns over. The headlights sweep across the kitchen window and the beams drag shadows across the counter where the carved bird sits.
Taillights shrink down the forest road and disappear around the bend.
I stand in the doorway until the engine fades to nothing.
Then I walk out onto the porch and lower myself to the top step.
The cold bites through my shirt, through the fur on my arms, through the numbness I built to drive her away.
The clearing stretches empty and white and the forest holds a silence I spent fifteen years surviving.
I don't go inside. Inside smells like her—shampoo, the spice paste she rubbed into chicken thighs yesterday, the pine boughs she hung over the doorframes because she wanted the cabin to feel like Christmas.
Going inside means sitting in the middle of everything she left behind, and I'm not ready for that.
I stay until my fingers stop feeling the step under them.
I hear boots on gravel. A bike, killed at the tree line. Knox walks out of the dark with his cut zipped and his breath fogging in front of him.
He stands at the bottom of the steps and looks up at me.
"You're a fucking idiot."
I don't respond.
He climbs the steps and lowers himself beside me. The wood groans under both of us. He doesn't say anything for a while.
"I kept my distance from Sarah at the start," he says.
"Told myself she'd be better off without an orc complicating her life.
" He pauses. "Her ex showed up while we were out at a fire.
She fought him off until I got there. Could have gone the other way.
" His voice is steady but the steadiness has an edge.
"She didn't need me to stay away, brother. She needed me close."
He stands. Grips my shoulder hard enough that I feel it through the numbness.
"Get inside before you freeze to death."
He walks back to his bike. The headlight sweeps the yard, and he's gone.
Another minute. Maybe five. Then I go inside because my body forces me to, my fingers locked into fists I can't open.
The fire has burned out. The room is dark. The guest room stands open. The pine boughs hang where she strung them and the smell of them mixes with the smell of her and the combination carves a hollow space behind my ribs that the winter rushes into.
The hummingbird rests on the kitchen counter.
She didn't take it.
The purr starts without permission. Low, aching, the sound of an engine with no one left to run for. It fills the empty rooms, vibrates through the counter under my palm, rolls out into the dark.
I close my hand around the bird and hold it against my chest and I don't know if I've just saved the woman I love or destroyed the only future worth having.
An engine on the forest road. Distant, moving slow.
I lift my head. The sound grows, headlights sweeping through the trees beyond the clearing, the beams catching the falling snow in long white streaks.
The car doesn't stop. It rolls past the turnoff to my cabin at a crawl, the brake lights flare once at the curve before the road bends north.
They're still watching.
The purr dies in my chest. I stand at the window with the hummingbird pressed against my ribs and I watch the dark where the taillights disappeared and I know, the way I've always known, that Knox's speech at the Anchor bought time. Not safety. Time.