Page 21 of Tiny's Testament
If Syvannah’s still dreaming about him, then he’s not finished with her, and that truth sits heavy in my chest because it feels like something I should’ve stopped.
Instead, I sit on the floor across from her door, my back against the wall, waiting for her breathing to even out. Peanut curls up on my leg, her tiny purr cutting through the silence like she’s the only thing in this place that still knows how to be calm.
I pet the top of her head. “Guess we both can’t sleep, huh?” I whisper. Peanut blinks up at me, unimpressed, and I almost laugh.
The clubhouse stays dark except for the dim hallway bulb, the compound holding its breath under Capone’s earlier order. No rides. No unnecessary movement. Not until we get a line on Lattimer’s men. Everyone’s wired tight, waiting for something we can’t see yet.
Every small sound sets my nerves on edge, the low hum of the fridge, faint laughter drifting from the common room, even Bones and Pearl upstairs going at it like the world isn’t still bleeding beneath the surface. Torch’s boots pace faintly down the hall, restless and steady. None of us are sleeping. We’re just pretending.
I can’t stop replaying the day Syvannah disappeared, or the night she came back.
It was supposedto be a quiet night. We had just returned from dismantling part of the Black Market Railroad, and the fallout with Aerianna’s FBI partner had everyone tense but satisfied.
Red was buried in diagnostics, Trigger was cleaning his guns with obsessive focus, and Bones was arguing with Pearl over whose whiskey was whose. Capone and Danyella, Blayze and Monica, Derange and Jezebelle, and Torch and Daisy had all slipped off for privacy.
I was in the garage tuning my bike when Syvannah walked in, grease on her cheek and that half-smile that always caught me off guard.
“Need a hand?” she asked.
“Always,” I said, and I meant it in more ways than one.
We joked about nothing for twenty minutes, and every time she said my name, I had to remind myself I was supposed toprotect her, not want her. Then her phone buzzed, and the air shifted.
She said Nadia needed a ride. Something about a late studio repair. She waved, grabbed her keys, and promised she’d be back by midnight.
She didn’t come back.
By the time we realized the call hadn’t come from Nadia, her phone was dead, and the highway cameras showed her car heading toward the desert, right into Lattimer’s hunting ground.
Capone’s roar from Church could’ve shaken heaven itself. “Nobody sleeps until she’s found!”
We rode through the night, tearing down highways and backroads, checking motels and rest stops from L.A. to Barstow. Trigger punched a wall until his knuckles bled. Torch shattered a bottle against his own bike. Bones nearly got himself shot, starting fights with strangers. It stopped being strategy and became desperation, loyalty mutating into something feral and reckless.
At dawn, we had nothing. Capone called us back, his voice raw with exhaustion, and when his gaze locked on mine, he didn’t need to say much.
“She was under your watch.” His tone was not cruel, just factual, yet it hit me hard. Guilt swarmed in my stomach. Another one I failed to protect.
Two days later, we heard the engine before we saw the headlights.
Torch was on the porch, cigarette burning low between his fingers. I was half asleep in the garage when I heard him shout, “Capone! Get out here!”
I ran for Trigger and came back with him at my heels, the gravel crunching under our boots as her dust-coated car crawled through the lot like it barely had the will to move.
The driver’s door opened, and Syvannah stumbled out barefoot and shaking, a blanket wrapped around her naked, bruised body.
Torch moved first, gun drawn, scanning the perimeter. Capone’s voice was sharp and low. “Get Derange! Now!”
I moved before I thought, before anyone could stop me. Syvannah saw me, and she just… collapsed.
I caught her before she hit the ground. Syvannah folded into me, cold and trembling, her skin slick with sweat and blood. She tried to speak, and only one word came out. My name.
“Easy, baby girl,” I whispered, pulling her against my chest as the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. “You’re home.”
Her breath hitched. “He said… he said to tell you…” She tried to warn me, to repeat whatever message he’d planted in her mouth, but I held her tighter because the only thing that mattered in that moment was the fact that she was breathing.
I shook my head. “Don’t. You’re safe now.”
She started crying then, quiet at first, then harder. I held her tighter. I didn’t care that my shirt was soaked through with blood, that Capone was barking orders in the background, or that Trigger was already kicking over barrels in a rage.
