The Veteran Biker's Curvy Girl

The One that Got Left

PROLOGUE

°°°

Six years, four months, and change ago, Marcus Reyes had known exactly what he was for.

He knew it in the pitch black of an compound outside Kandahar, on his belly in gravel that still held the day's heat, Danny Okafor's breathing loud in his left ear through the comms and louder, somehow, six feety away in the actual dark.

He knew it the way he knew his own pulse.

Extract the asset. Cover Danny. Get them both to the rally point before first light turned the ridge into a shooting gallery.

He'd done the first two.

"Tank, on your six," Danny said, not urgent, just informational, the way he said everything, like the world was a checklist he intended to finish in order. "Two hundred meters and we're golden."

"Copy." Marcus didn't look back. That was the whole job — you didn't look back, you trusted the man behind you to hold his lane, and Danny had never once failed to hold his lane in four years of Marcus trusting him to.

The compound wall gave them cover for maybe ninety of those two hundred meters. Then it didn't.

He remembered the quality of the light before it happened — not muzzle flash, not yet, just the sky doing the thing it does in that part of the world right before dawn, going the gray-blue of a healing bruise.

He remembered thinking, with the small useless corner of his brain that was always thinking something unrelated, that his knee had started aching two klicks back and he hadn't said anything because saying it wouldn't have changed the mission.

He remembered the sound arriving before his body registered what it meant.

He remembered turning — turning, which he wasn't supposed to do, which broke twenty years of training in half a second because some animal part of him needed to see Danny's face — and Danny wasn't behind him.

Danny was down, already down, the asset was screaming something in a language Marcus's exhausted brain couldn't translate fast enough, and the two hundred meters that had felt like nothing ten seconds ago now felt like the entire distance between who Marcus used to be and who he was about to become.

He got to Danny. He always made himself remember that part, because it was the only part that hadn't gone wrong.

He got to Danny in nine seconds, applied pressure in eleven, had him half-dragged toward the wall in twenty, screaming for the medevac that was already inbound because someone — Ruiz, it had been Ruiz — had the presence of mind Marcus didn't have left to call it in.

Danny's hand found his wrist. Not weak. That was the thing nobody believed when Marcus told it, on the rare occasions he told it at all — Danny's grip wasn't weak. It was exactly as strong as it had always been, like his body hadn't gotten the message yet about what was happening beneath his ribs.

"Hey," Danny said. Not urgent. Informational. "Hey, Tank. You're gonna have to tell my sister I said the thing. The thing I always said I'd tell her when I got back."

"Tell her yourself." Marcus's hands were doing something competent and useless to the wound, applying the pressure he'd applied a hundred times in training, on dummies, on other men, none of it mattering now the way it should have mattered.

"You've got maybe four minutes on that bird, you tell her yourself, you hear me—"

"Four minutes." Danny's laugh was wet and it was still, somehow, a laugh, the same dry rasp of a laugh Marcus had heard across a thousand miles of transport trucks and mess halls and one particularly bad New Year's in Ramstein. "Four minutes. Copy that, Tank. Real generous estimate."

He didn't get four minutes.

He got forty seconds, and in thirty-one of them he asked Marcus — not the medic who'd finally arrived, not Ruiz, not God — he asked Marcus, specifically, by name, not callsign, to make sure someone told her. His sister. Not the thing he'd always said he'd tell her. Just that he'd meant to.

Marcus told her three weeks later, standing on a porch in Georgia in his dress uniform, and it was the hardest ninety seconds of a life that had, up to that point, specialized in hard ninety-second intervals.

She'd nodded like she already knew. Maybe she had.

Maybe Danny had told her some version of it a hundred times before Marcus ever got the chance, and Marcus's whole careful, terrible errand had been unnecessary — a debt he'd needed to pay more than she'd needed him to pay it.

The knee that had started aching two klicks out turned out to be the least of what he brought home.

The knee, they could fix, mostly, with titanium and a physical therapist named Angela who did not accept "it's fine" as an answer to how it felt.

The rest of it — the nine seconds it had taken him to reach Danny, replayed at half speed for six years running, always with the same unbearable footnote, that nine seconds was fast, Marcus, that's fast, that's about as fast as a human body can move across open ground — the rest of it didn't have a surgeon.

What he'd built instead, in the years since, was simpler than therapy and worked about as well as therapy usually did, which was to say imperfectly, but it worked. He'd built a rule.

The rule was this: don't let anyone get close enough that losing them would put you back on your belly in that gravel, replaying nine seconds you couldn't outrun even sitting still.

It wasn't a hard rule to keep, as rules went.

Ironclad Saints business didn't require intimacy, it required competence, and Marcus had competence in excess — enough that Reyes "Tank" Reyes had made VP inside four years of prospecting, not because he wanted the chair but because nobody else wanted it as little as he did, which in a motorcycle club was its own strange qualification.

He kept the peace. He handled what needed handling.

He went home to an apartment over the garage that had exactly as much furniture as a man needed and not one photograph on the wall, because photographs were for people who trusted the future to keep holding still long enough to look at them.

The rule worked fine for six years, four months, and change.

Marcus woke in that apartment on an ordinary Tuesday in September, the ceiling fan turning slow circles above him, his knee doing its familiar 6 a.m. complaint, and he ran the math the way he ran it most mornings — nine seconds, two hundred meters, nothing he could have done differently that would have changed the outcome, which didn't make the outcome any easier to live inside — and then he got up, because the math never actually changed anything.

It just kept the books honest. Reminded him what he was and wasn't built for.

He had no idea, lacing his boots in the gray early light, that a woman two miles away was already up and dressed for a shift at a clinic that treated half his club off the books, and that by the end of the week his careful, honest, six-year-old math would stop adding up the way it always had.