Chapter 11 #2
I laugh. The sound comes out wet and jagged and I wipe my face with the back of my hand.
I tell her about the man who cooked me breakfast I didn't ask for and carved a hummingbird from black walnut because I mentioned my Abuela’s feeder once.
The man who purrs when I touch the spot between his horns and who hasn't spoken more than six sentences in a row to anyone except me and Knox in fifteen years.
The man who pushed me away because he thought love and safety were opposites, because the world taught him that everything he touches gets broken.
"He sounds like your father," Mami says. "Papi didn't talk to me for a week after our first fight. Sat in the garage sanding a bookshelf until I went out there and told him the silent treatment only works if I'm willing to leave, and I'm not."
"I'm not willing to leave either."
"Then stop sitting in a parking lot and go tell him, Mija."
Sarah catches me at the clubhouse door twenty minutes later. Reeve asleep against her shoulder, his fist curled around the collar of her shirt, his mouth open in a little snore.
"I came to Nightfall Cove to disappear," she says. "But I stayed because I found the place where I could finally be seen." She shifts Reeve's weight. "Go get your man, Nina. He hasn't eaten since you left."
I grab my keys.
The drive to the cabin takes eight minutes. I know because I've counted it before—eight minutes from the clubhouse lot to the bend in the forest road where the clearing opens and the cabin appears.
I don't make it to the bend.
The headlights catch the SUV at the four-minute mark, parked sideways across the narrow road where the Douglas firs crowd close enough to scrape both mirrors. Black. Tinted windows. Engine running, exhaust fogging in the cold.
I brake. My headlights flood the vehicle and for one stupid second I think it's a breakdown—someone stuck on the ice, someone who needs a push. Then the doors open.
Three men. The older one steps into my headlight beam first, and my stomach drops through the floor of the car because I know that face. The man who sat in my waiting room and watched me work through the glass. The man from the clearing.
The one who called Garrett Number Seven.
The younger guy flanks him—the bouncer from Christmas Eve, the one who flinched when Garrett stepped forward in the clearing. A third man stays by the SUV. I don't recognise him. He's big enough that it doesn't matter.
I reach for my phone. The older man is at my window before I can dial.
He doesn't break the glass. He taps it with one knuckle, polite, like he's asking for directions.
"I wouldn't do that, Miss Castell." His voice carries through the window, pleasant and conversational. "We're not here to hurt you. I just need you to step out of the car."
My hand closes around the phone in my lap. My thumb finds the screen.
"If you call someone, this gets more complicated than it needs to be." He tilts his head toward the SUV. "We're going to take a short drive to the cabin. You'll be home in minutes. I just need to have a conversation with my old friend, and he's more likely to listen if you're standing next to me."
Leverage. I'm leverage.
The realisation lands cold and clinical. They don't want me. They want Garrett. I'm the pressure point they're pressing to get him to comply.
I could lock the doors. I could throw the car in reverse and try to back down a mile of narrow forest road in the dark. The third man is already behind my car. I see him in the rearview, his shape blocking the road I came from.
I turn the engine off and I get out.
The older man steps back to give me room. The courtesy of a man who's done this before and knows that calm people cooperate faster than scared ones.
"Phone," he says.
"No."
He studies me for two seconds. Then he nods, like he expected me to say no.
"Fine, you can keep it, but you won't need it."
The younger man opens the rear door of the SUV. I climb in. The seat smells like rental car and cigarette smoke. The third man gets in beside me—close but not touching, a body meant to block the door, not to threaten. The older man takes the passenger seat. The younger one drives.
Four minutes. That's how far the cabin is from where they stopped me. I count the seconds, because counting keeps the fear from settling into my hands where it'll show.
The clearing opens up. The cabin sits dark—no porch light, no smoke, no music. The same dead quiet I expected from a man who hasn't moved in two days.
The SUV stops. The older man gets out and walks to the porch. He climbs the steps like he owns them and knocks on the door, three sharp raps that echo across the frozen clearing.
Nothing.
He knocks again. "Garrett. Or do you still prefer Number Seven?"
The door opens.
Garrett fills the frame the way he fills every frame—shoulders wider than the doorway, horns scraping the header, his body blocking the light from inside.
He's still in the clothes I last saw him in.
His face is hollow, two days of not eating carved into the angles of his jaw and the shadows under his eyes.
Then he sees me.
The younger man has my arm. A hand above my elbow, firm enough to make the point. Garrett's focus drops to that hand and every line of his body changes. The man disappearing and the fighter stepping into his place.
"Easy." The older man raises both palms, a gesture that would be calming if it came from anyone else. "She's fine and she'll stay fine. I just need five minutes of your time."
Garrett doesn't look at the man. He looks at me. His face asks the question his mouth can't form—did they hurt you—and I shake my head once.
"Here's the situation." The man leans against the porch railing like they're old friends catching up.
"The family's been patient. We made a courtesy visit.
Your president made his little speech. Very impressive.
But the ring doesn't run on speeches, and the investors want their fighter back.
" He pauses. "Come with us. Willingly. Fight one season.
The family gets their return, the crowds get their show, you walk away clean at the end of it. She walks free right now."
One season. Like it's a job offer. Like fifteen years in a cage is a gap on a resume he's asking Garrett to fill.
"If you don't," the man continues, "the family will keep coming.
Next time it won't be a conversation. Next time we won't be so gentle with your little friend here.
" He nods toward me. "Next time it'll be the clinic.
The pregnant nurse. The president's wife and child.
We know where all of them are, Garrett. We've always known. "
The clearing holds its breath.
Garrett stands in the doorway with his hands at his sides. I know what he's going to say before he opens his mouth. I've watched him put everyone else first since the day I met him, and the look on his face right now is the same one he wore when he packed my bags.
"Yes." His voice scrapes out, gravel and rust. "Let her go. I'll come."
The sound that tears out of me doesn't have a name. Not a scream. Not a word. Something between the two, raw and jagged, pulled from the same place the anger has been sitting for two days.
"No." I wrench my arm free. The younger man reaches for me and I shove his hand away. "Garrett, no. This is the same thing. This is exactly what you did with the bags—you're deciding for me, you're sacrificing yourself because you think that's what love looks like—"
"Nina." He comes down the porch steps. Two strides and he's in front of me, close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off him, close enough to see the tremor in his hands that he's fighting to hide.
He takes my face in his palms. His fingers span my jaw, my temples, the whole of me held in hands that could break the men behind us without effort.
"Call Knox." He says it low, just for me, his lips barely moving. "The second they leave. Call Knox."
He's not surrendering. The realisation cuts through the panic like a blade. He's buying time. He knows the brotherhood will come—he just needs me safe and the call made.
"Don't do this." My voice cracks. "Garrett, please—"
His thumbs brush my cheekbones. The purr starts—faint, broken, a sound meant only for me, too low for the men to hear. He holds my face for two more seconds. Then his hands drop and he steps back.
He walks to the SUV. The older man opens the rear door. Garrett has to duck to fit inside, folding himself into a space built for men half his size, and the image guts me—a man making himself small for a cage he's chosen so the people he loves don't have to.
The doors close. The engine turns over.
I stand in the clearing with my boots in the frozen mud and my breath coming in short, sharp pulls and I watch the taillights move down the forest road.
The second they disappear around the bend, my phone is in my hand.
Knox picks up on the first ring.
"They took him, Knox." My voice holds. Wrecked, shaking, but it holds. "Three men in a black SUV heading north on the forest road toward the highway, from his cabin. They took Garrett."
Silence. One beat. Then Knox's voice, flat and certain and stripped of everything except the order underneath it:
"Stay where you are. I'll send someone to get you, and we'll go get your man."
The line goes dead.
I stand in the clearing in front of the dark cabin with the phone pressed to my chest and the cold biting through my jacket and I don't move. I don't collapse. I don't cry.
I wait.