Chapter 3 THREE

Nadia

I woke up to the sound of engines.

Not one — a dozen, maybe more, a rolling thunder of them starting up in sequence somewhere below the room Elena had put me in, a small clean space with a bed that smelled like fabric softener instead of motor oil, mercifully. For a groggy second I thought I was still in my apartment on Girard Street and the noise was construction. Then I remembered the bar, and Vittorio's card, and the wet asphalt, and Damien Cole's face going somewhere dark and far away at the sound of a name, and I remembered exactly where I was.

I found Elena in what passed for a kitchen — a long room off the garage with a coffee maker that looked older than both of us and a table scarred with cigarette burns and ring stains going back decades.

"Morning," she said, sliding a mug toward me without asking if I wanted one. "Fair warning, that's Jax's coffee, which means it's basically diesel with flavor added as an afterthought."

"I'll take diesel." My voice came out rough. I hadn't slept so much as lost consciousness in self-defense somewhere around four a.m.

"They're running a supply pickup," Elena said, nodding toward the noise. "Nothing exciting. Damien likes to personally lead anything that goes near the harbor road since it's technically contested territory. Contested meaning the Salvis think it's theirs and we think they're wrong."

"Contested territory." I turned the mug in my hands. "Is that a euphemism for something I should be more scared of?"

Elena considered the question with more honesty than I expected. "A little. Ironport's split up the way it's been split up for thirty years — us on the harbor and the old shipyards, them on the east side with the restaurants and the — " she made a vague gesture — "legitimate businesses, quote unquote. Nobody crosses the line without a reason. You crossing it last night, that's a reason."

"Great. I'm a reason."

"You're a good reason, if it helps. Damien hasn't looked that focused about anything Salvi-related in six years. It's honestly a little bit terrifying to watch, if you're me and you remember what he was like right after Tommy."

I opened my mouth to ask her more — about Tommy, about six years, about what exactly "focused" meant on a face that looked permanently carved from something unyielding — when the garage door rolled up loud enough to end the conversation, and the bikes came home.

Damien walked in ahead of the others, helmet under one arm, and even from across the room I could see something coiled tight in his shoulders that hadn't been there the night before.

"Trouble?" Elena called.

"Salvi crew was parked at the corner of Fourth and Dockside. Just parked. Just watching." Damien's eyes found mine across the kitchen and something in them sharpened. "They know she's here."

My stomach dropped the coffee mug's worth of warmth right out of it. "How."

"Doesn't matter how. Matters that Vittorio's not going to sit on his hands waiting for an RSVP to Sunday dinner." He crossed the kitchen, close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes, close enough that I could smell leather and cold morning air on him. "You're not leaving this building without one of us until I say otherwise. Not the bar, not your apartment, nowhere."

"You don't get to tell me I can't leave a building," I said, even as some small traitor part of my chest was warming at the idea that he cared whether I did. "I have a job. I have a life that isn't — " I gestured at the garage, the bikes, the whole enormous fact of him. "This."

"You have a life that had a hundred-and-forty-thousand-dollar target painted on it before you ever walked in here," Damien said. "I'm not telling you what to do with your life, Nadia. I'm telling you what happens on the four blocks between here and the Salvi family's patience running out, and I'd like you alive to be annoyed with me about it later."

Jax, coming in behind him and peeling off his gloves, snorted. "Careful, boss, that's almost charming."

"Shut up, Jax."

I should have been angrier than I was. I filed that away too, next to Ghost and four seconds and honest maybes — the growing, unwelcome catalogue of things about Damien Cole that were making it very hard to keep him filed under problem.

"Fine," I said. "I'll call Sofia, tell her I need someone to cover my shifts. But I'm not going to sit in this garage decorating it for however many days you decide are enough. If I'm staying, I'm useful. I've got two hands and I already know how to pull a beer for men who look exactly like the men currently standing in this kitchen."

Something in Jax's expression shifted — not quite approval, but the start of it, the first stone of a bridge. Damien just looked at me a long moment, jaw working like he was chewing on an argument he'd already lost.

"There's a bar downstairs," he said finally. "Club's, not open to the public. You want to make yourself useful, you can start there."

"There's a bar inside the clubhouse."

"Motorcycle club," Elena said, deadpan, sipping her coffee. "It tracks."

For the first time since Vittorio Salvi had walked into the Rust Bucket, something in my chest loosened enough to let a laugh out — small, surprised, mine. Damien's eyes caught on the sound like it had physically struck him, something unguarded crossing his face for exactly as long as it took him to notice I'd seen it, and then the wall came back up, brick by brick, right in front of me.

Interesting, I thought. Very interesting.