Chapter 12
Garrett
The SUV takes the first curve too fast and my horns scrape the ceiling liner, tearing a seam in the fabric. The younger man behind the wheel flinches at the sound like he forgot what he put in his back seat.
She'll call Knox. I told her to call Knox, and she heard me.
I held her face in my palms and gave her the only thing I had left to give.
A plan. Two words pressed into the space between us where the purr should have been.
Call Knox. She'll do it because Nina doesn't fold and she doesn't freeze and she's already dialling as the taillights clear the bend.
Knox will come. The brotherhood will come. I need to buy time.
The older man rides in the passenger seat.
He turned around once after we pulled out of the clearing, looked at me the way you'd check on luggage, then faced forward.
He hasn't spoken. The younger one drives, knuckles white on the wheel, his jaw set.
The third man sits to my left, his shoulder pressed to the door, as far from me as the seat allows.
Smart. He knows the only reason he's breathing is that Nina stood six feet away and I couldn't risk her getting caught in it.
They don't have that leverage anymore. Nina is behind us. Safe. Standing in a clearing with a phone and the number of a man who has never failed to come when I needed him.
The hummingbird sits in my jacket pocket.
I grabbed it off the counter when I heard the knock, three sharp raps that echoed across the clearing like a summons.
My fist closed around the carving before I opened the door.
Instinct, maybe. The same instinct that made me carve it in the first place, the need to hold proof that these fists can make something instead of break it.
My body drops into the old rhythms without asking permission.
Heartbeat slowing, breath evening out, peripheral vision widening to take in the locks, the door handles, the distance between my seat and the tree line beyond the glass.
The pit trained this into me—the predatory calm before the gate opened—and I hated it for years because the calm made me good at what they forced me to do.
I don't hate it now. The calm has a purpose the pit never gave it.
The older man turns.
"You made the right call, Number Seven." His voice carries the same pleasant, conversational tone he used on the porch.
The tone of a man who trades in bodies and calls it business.
"One season. The family gets their return, the investors are satisfied, and you walk out clean. I've seen the contract. It's fair."
Fair. A contract for a cage.
My handler used to talk like this in the van between fights.
Big crowd tonight, Seven. They love you out there.
Make it a good show and I'll leave the muzzle off tomorrow.
The same friendly cadence, the same assumption that the animal in the back seat is listening because animals don't have better options.
But the last time I sat in a vehicle like this, I had nothing. No cabin with pine boughs strung over the doorframes. No brother who gave me a name and a seat at his table. No woman whose off-key singing through a bathroom door rewired years of silence.
I had a number and a muzzle and concrete under my knees. I had years behind me and the rest of my life stretching out like a sentence with no end and no reason to believe anyone would come.
Now I have every reason.
The highway curves along the coast. Through the window, the Pacific sits black and flat under a sky with no moon.
The trees thin as we climb toward the headland and the pavement straightens.
I read the terrain the way I read every room the pit put me in.
Two-lane highway. No shoulder. Douglas firs tight on both sides.
The tree line sits eight feet from the asphalt.
If the vehicle stops, I can reach the trees in four strides.
I don't need the trees. I need the road behind us, and what's coming up it.
The purr is gone. Died when Nina's face broke in the clearing, when my thumbs brushed her cheekbones and I gave her two words instead of the hundred I owed her. The silence in my chest sits where the hum should be, a hollow frequency, an absence so total that my ribs ache around the shape of it.
"The ring's got a new venue in Bend," the older man says. "Converted warehouse, climate-controlled. No more outdoor fights in January. Viktor's put in heated pens, too. Ventilation. It's a different operation now."
The younger one taps his thumb against the wheel and glances at the mirror.
His eyes move over me and move away. He's nervous.
The older one isn't. The older one sat in Nina's waiting room and watched her work through the glass partition, drove past my cabin at a crawl, stood on my porch and used the woman I love as a bargaining chip, and he's never once considered that I might be more than the animal his employer put a number on.
I let him keep thinking it.
Twenty minutes later, headlights in the mirror.
Not one set. Five, six, staggered in a line, the beams cutting through the dark behind us.
The growl of engines reaches the SUV before the lights do, a sound I know in my bones, the low rolling thunder of V-twins running in formation, the exhaust harmonics of bikes I've ridden beside since Knox pulled me out of the ash.
The older man checks the side mirror.
"We've got company," the younger one says.
The bikes close the gap. Through the rear window I see them. Knox at the centre on his black Heritage, his cut visible under the streetlight. Finn on his left. Rex and Dawson flanking wide. Colt bringing up the rear. Every patched brother.
The road ahead narrows where the headland meets the tree line, a stretch where two vehicles can't pass without one giving ground. Knox accelerates into it. The formation widens. Bikes fan across both lanes and the SUV has nowhere to go.
The younger one brakes. The tyres grab gravel and the SUV slides to a stop at an angle across the centre line.
Knox parks his bike twenty feet from the bumper. He kills the engine. The brothers kill theirs. The quiet that follows rings louder than the exhaust.
The third man reaches under his jacket.
My grip closes around his forearm. The bones shift under the pressure and I hold his eyes while his face drains white. He lets go of whatever he reached for.
Knox swings off his bike and walks toward the SUV with his shoulders squared and his arms loose at his sides. He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to. The look on his face says everything his words said at the Rusty Anchor, except this time the words aren't coming first.
The older man steps out with his palms up, the same pleasant smile he wore at the bar, at the clearing, on my porch twenty minutes ago.
"Gentlemen. Let's not—"
Finn hits him from the side. The sentence ends against the hood of the SUV, Finn's forearm across the back of his neck, his body bent forward over the metal.
Rex pulls the younger one out of the driver's side.
The kid comes out swinging and Dawson puts him on the ground in two moves, his face pressed into the frozen asphalt, Colt's boot on his neck.
I open my own door. The third man doesn't move to stop me.
Knox looks at me. His face is blank except for the vein in his temple, the one I've seen pulse twice in seven years—once when the clan scouts photographed Sarah, once now.
"You good?"
I step out. The cold hits me and the forest smells like pine and wet earth and the ocean crashes against rock somewhere below the headland. My legs hold.
Knox grips my shoulder. The same hold he gave me the night I patched in, the night he said welcome home, brother, except this time he digs in hard enough to bruise and he doesn't let go for five full seconds.
He steps back.
I walk to the front of the SUV.
Finn pulls the older man upright. The smile is gone. Blood runs from a split in his brow and his jacket hangs open. The pleasant, conversational mask has cracked apart to show what sits underneath: a man who sells fighters and picked the wrong stretch of highway to drive them on.
I stand in front of him.
The fists that carved a hummingbird from black walnut wrap around his throat. The violence the pit built into me, used on my own terms, for my own people.
He grabs my wrist. His fingers don't reach halfway around it.
"You spent years calling me a number." My voice comes out low, flat, the rumble that vibrates through the ground under our boots. "You came for me when I was ten and you came for me again and you used the woman I love as a bargaining chip."
His feet leave the ground. I lift him one-armed the way the handlers lifted me by my horns when I wouldn't stand after a fight—except they had leverage and tools and I have nothing but the body they made and the choice they never gave me.
I set him down.
His knees buckle. He hits the asphalt and stays there, coughing, clutching his throat.
I kneel. My face level with his.
"This is the last time anyone from the Kuznetsov family enters Nightfall Cove." Each word costs me the way all words cost me, dragged up from somewhere deep, and I spend them because they're worth spending. "Next time, nobody drives home."
I straighten and turn to Knox. His face cracks for half a second, pride and relief breaking through, and I open my mouth to say something I've never said to him before—
The shot splits the night.
My ears ring. I spin. Beside me, Colt stands with his Glock levelled and smoke curling from the barrel, his face flat, his aim locked on a point behind me.
The older man is on the asphalt. His pistol skids across the frozen ground and stops against the front tyre. Colt put a round through his chest. His eyes are open. His mouth works once, twice, and then it stops. A pool of blood spreads underneath him.
Colt lowers the weapon. His arm doesn't shake.