Page 10 of Rook's Vow
I tightened my arm around her. Pressed my mouth to the top of her head. She smelled like sweat, like sex, like the woman I'd been falling for since the first night I walked through her door, and underneath the tactical assessment already running in my head there was something simpler and fiercer.
I'd held a line once and lost everything. I was holding one again, and this time the thing on the other side of it was lying in my arms with her heartbeat against my chest. I wasn't going to lose.
The room was still. The highway hummed below us. I held her close, and I started to plan.
FIVE
LEXIE
He didn't want to leave.
I could see it in how he stood by his bike, helmet in his hand, his eyes on me instead of the road. The threats from the Jackal whilst he was still here was still fresh in both our heads, and leaving me alone at the stop felt like setting down a weapon in the middle of a fight.
“I’ve got church," he said. "I have to bring this to Angel. What happened with the Jackals changes things. We knew they were moving closer to this territory, and the club needs to move on this, and they can't move on something I haven't told them."
"I know."
"I'll be two hours. Three at most. I'll have my phone. Anything feels wrong, you call me."
"I've been here alone every day for four years, Rook."
"I know you have." He looked at me with those dark, steady eyes that saw everything, and the thing in them was fear. Controlled, managed, run through whatever analytical filter he used to process the world, but fear all the same. He was afraid to leave me here. "Two hours."
He kissed me. Quick, hard, his hand on the back of my neck, and I held onto his shirt for a second longer than I needed tobecause the part of me that had spent five days learning what it felt like to not be alone didn't want to relearn the alternative.
He rode out. The sound of his engine faded down the highway and the quiet came back and the stop was just me alone again.
I unlocked the door, and started the fryers. A couple of truckers came through, long-haulers who'd been on the road since before dawn. I poured coffee, took orders, ran the register. The routine of it was a comfort, the muscle memory of a thousand identical mornings smoothing over the anxiety that was sitting in my chest.
Billy came in at ten. Sat at the counter, ordered his usual. We talked about the weather, about the highway construction up near Kalispell, about nothing at all, and the normalcy of it was so thin I could feel the breeze through it.
I kept looking at the lot. Every engine, every vehicle that slowed on the highway, every flash of movement in the corner of my eye. The plywood was still over the window. I'd been meaning to get it replaced, been meaning to call the glazier again, and I hadn't because some part of me knew there was no point fixing a window that was going to get broken again.
Billy left and a family came in, ate burgers, the kids running around the way kids do when they've been in a car too long. They paid and left. The lot emptied. By late afternoon I was alone and the stop was quiet in a way that felt deliberate, like the world was holding its breath.
My phone was on the counter. I checked it. No messages from Rook. He'd said two hours, maybe three. It had been three and a half. Church ran long sometimes he told me, I knew that. Club business didn't operate on a schedule.
I wiped the counter, restocked the sugar. Ran a rag over the pie case. The things I always did, the rhythm I always fell into, and underneath it the anxiety was growing teeth.
But then the bikes came.
Not one. Not two. The sound of half a dozen engines on the highway, heavy, throated, slowing as they approached the turnoff. The sound built in the quiet the way a storm builds on a clear horizon, distant, then closer, then undeniable, and by the time the first bike turned into the lot I was standing behind the counter with my hand on the baseball bat I kept beneath the register.
Six of them, it was the Iron Jackals. They pulled into the lot and lined up their bikes, cut their engines in unison, and the silence after was worse than the noise. They dismounted, in a deliberate and unhurried was. The gray-bearded one was with them, the older Jackal, the one who'd told me he'd burn the place down. He walked toward the door and the others followed. I stood behind my counter with my bat, my grandfather's building around me and I thought, very clearly,two hours, Rook. You said two hours, why aren't you here.
The bell rang when they came in.
They spread out. Two by the door, two along the far wall, one by the kitchen entrance. He walked to the counter and sat down on a stool and looked at me the way he always looked at me. Like I was furniture and something of no consequence to him.
"We gave you time to get used to this," he said. Conversational. Almost bored. "We gave you a warning. We even gave you a chance to get your boyfriend to back off. And instead you went and fucked an Angel. Now we're past the point where this ends nice."
"Get out of here now, you aren’t welcome at my truck stop.”
"Your stop?” He smiled. A cold, empty thing that existed on his mouth and nowhere else. "That's cute. This hasn't been your stop since the first time we sat down in that booth. You just didn't know it yet."
He nodded to the man by the kitchen.
The sound of breaking glass came from the back. Not the window, something deeper inside, the kitchen, the storage room. More breaking. The crash of shelving, the heavy thud of equipment hitting the floor. One of them was in my kitchen, tearing it apart, and the sound of it went through me like a blade because that kitchen was where my grandmother had taught me to make pie and they were destroying it.
