Chapter 13
Garrett
Jess cleans the split on Finn's knuckles at the kitchen table while he tells her it doesn't hurt and she tells him to shut up.
Rex leans against the counter with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his jaw, scrolling his phone with his free hand.
Dawson sits on the floor by the door with his boots still on, his head tipped back against the wall, eyes closed.
Colt stands at the window, watching the tree line the way he's watched it since we pulled into the clearing—steady, patient, the gun still on his hip.
Knox sits in the rocker with a beer he hasn't touched. He hasn't spoken since we got back. He doesn't need to. His presence in the cabin is the statement—the president in the room, the silence that says I'll stay here until I decide you're safe.
Nina moves between them.
She checks Rex's jaw, tilting his face toward the light with two fingers under his chin. She brings Dawson water without being asked. She stands behind Jess and holds the gauze while Jess wraps Finn's hand, and the two of them work together the way they work at the clinic.
The brothers leave one by one. Dawson first with Jax to deal with the body, then Rex with the frozen peas still pressed to his jaw.
Finn kisses Jess's forehead and follows.
Colt is the last to go—he pauses at the door and looks at me, and whatever he sees on my face is enough.
He nods once and pulls the door shut behind him.
Knox stands from the rocker. He grips my shoulder and holds it for a beat.
"Get some rest." He squeezes once and lets go. "Both of you."
The cabin goes quiet.
Nina locks the door. She crosses to the hearth and feeds the fire two logs, the bark catching, the flames climbing. She moves through the room the way she moved through it weeks ago.
I stand in the middle of the kitchen and watch her rebuild what I tore apart.
"Nina."
She turns.
"I'm sorry." The words come out rough, scraped from the same place they came from on the highway, but here in the quiet of the cabin they cost more.
No brothers at my back. No adrenaline. Just her face and the fire and the thing I need her to hear.
"For the bags. For the silence. For using the worst part of what they made me to push away the best thing I've ever had. "
She crosses the kitchen. Her palm finds my chest—over the scars, the ridges the pit left on my skin. She presses flat and holds.
"I know, Gar." Her voice is steady. "I'm still here."
She doesn't make it easy on me. She shouldn't. But she stays at the table, as I cook eggs at the stove because my hands need something to do that isn't violence, and by the time we've eaten and the fire has burned down to coals, my breathing matches hers and the shaking in my hands has stopped.
The next day she rehangs the pine boughs I took down.
She stripped them off the doorframes herself—I'd left them piled by the woodshed, couldn't bring myself to burn them.
Now she threads them back through the nails above the kitchen door, standing on the chair I built last winter, humming something off-key that I don't recognise.
The candles go back on the windowsills. Her shampoo bottle reappears on the shelf in the bathroom.
The cabin fills back up with the sounds I tried to erase, and the tightness I've carried in my chest loosens with each one.
Knox's New Year's party fills the clubhouse yard with firelight and noise.
String lights loop between the posts of the covered patio. The fire pit throws sparks into the dark. Someone dragged the speakers outside and the music competes with the wind off the coast, bass thumping through the frozen ground under my boots.
I stand where I always stand—the doorframe between inside and out, close enough to hear the laughter and far enough to breathe.
Finn has Jess cornered at the end of the bar, leaning over her with that grin he uses when he's trying to get a rise out of her, telling her something that makes her shove his chest with both hands.
She's laughing. He catches her wrists and pulls her in and kisses the top of her head, and the curve of her belly presses against him.
Across the room, Sarah settles baby Reeve into Knox's arms and Knox shifts the boy against his chest without breaking his conversation with Dawson, the adjustment automatic, a man who's held his son long enough that the weight has become part of his existence.
Betty fusses with the buffet table, rearranging platters nobody asked her to rearrange.
Gerald trails behind her holding her coat.
He drapes it over a chair when she ignores it, picks it up when she moves to the next table.
The two of them orbit each other with the practiced gravity of people who've stopped pretending.
Raven from the Mystic Moon stands at the end of the bar with a glass of something dark, her silver rings catching the firelight, talking to a woman I don't recognise.
Griz guards the front door with a beer he hasn't touched.
Jax hovers near the keg, prospect patch visible on his cut, looking like a man who hasn't decided whether he belongs yet.
Nina moves through the room and I track her without meaning to.
She hugs Sarah. She laughs at something Jess says, a full sound that carries above the music and hits me across the yard.
She crouches to let Reeve grab fistfuls of her hair, and the baby yanks and she winces and laughs again, and Jess untangles her while Knox watches with an expression I've seen him wear exactly once—the night I told him I wanted to patch in, and he gripped my shoulder and said welcome home, brother.
Nina fills the spaces I leave empty. The conversations I can't start, the handshakes I can't offer, the easy warmth that a room full of people requires and I've never been able to give. She does it without thinking and the club loves her for it.
Knox finds me on the porch.
He leans against the railing and hands me a beer. I take it. We stand in the cold, the party muffled behind the door, breath fogging between us. Twenty years of this—him and me in comfortable silence, the language we built when I couldn't speak and he stopped expecting me to.
"How you doing?"
I flex my knuckles. "Fine."
He nods. Takes a pull of his beer and looks out at the tree line.
"She's stronger than you gave her credit for."
Another nod. He's not wrong. I gave her every reason to stay gone and she came back anyway.
"Don't do it again."
Not a request but a presidential order, the voice he uses in Church when the gavel comes down and the decision is final.
I meet his eyes. "I won't."
His jaw works. The mask cracks—a hairline fracture, pride and relief surfacing for half a second before he pulls it back. He clears his throat.
"You deserve this, brother. You always did."
He goes back inside. The door shuts behind him and I stand on the porch with his words settling into the places I've kept hollow since before I patched in.
The countdown starts messy. Someone's phone clock runs ten seconds ahead of the television and Finn counts down from thirty while Jess tells him it's only ten and he ignores her.
I'm at the edge of the room, my shoulders against the wall, the noise washing over me while the midnight numbers fall through the speakers and the club erupts in shouting and clinking glasses and kisses.
Nina walks straight to me.
Through the crowd, past the brothers, past the table of champagne flutes and the knot of people hugging by the fire pit. She walks to me with purpose in her stride and puts both hands on either side of my face and tilts my head down because she can't reach my mouth without help.
"Happy New Year, Gar."
She kisses me in front of the entire club.
Finn whistles. Knox raises his glass. I kiss her back, my hands spanning her waist, and I lift her off the ground because it's the only way to reach her mouth without folding in half.
Her boots dangle a foot off the floor while Finn whistles from somewhere behind us.
Her fingers trace the base of my right horn and the purr rolls out of me loud enough that every brother in the room hears it.
I used to flinch at the sound—the involuntary leak, the one thing my body did without permission, the noise the pit handlers mocked because it proved the animal in the ring could still feel.
I don't flinch now. Her lips curve against mine.
I set her down. Nobody says a word.
Across the room, the midnight pairs have settled—Finn dipping Jess so low her boots leave the ground, Knox pulling Sarah close with Reeve asleep between them.
Holly stands behind the bar pouring champagne. Rex stands across the room, not looking at her.
When the clock struck midnight, neither of them moved.
I caught it because I catch everything from the periphery—Rex's champagne glass in his fist, his knuckles going white, Holly's gaze locked on his face across twenty feet of crowded room.
Then a man I don't recognise—human, tan, built like a tourist who spends his winters somewhere warm—leaned against the bar with an easy grin and said something that made Holly laugh.
Rex's glass cracked in his hand.
He set the pieces on the nearest table. Champagne bled across the wood and nobody noticed. He turned and walked out the back door without a word.
Holly's laughter vanished. Her eyes tracked him to the door, and what surfaced underneath looked like a woman who'd spent months waiting for a man to fight for her and just watched him leave instead.
The tourist said something else. Holly smiled and poured his drink, and the mask went back on.
Not my business. But I know what it looks like when a man walks away from the thing he wants because he's convinced himself he doesn't deserve it.
The cabin is warm when we get back.