Chapter 4 FOUR

I'd told myself the deal was simple. Salvi wants her, Salvi's had my brother's blood on his hands for six years, and now Salvi's debt has walked into my garage wearing a scraped-up jacket and a mouth that doesn't know when to quit. Keep her safe, use the leverage, make Vittorio bleed something other than money for once.

Simple. Except nothing about Nadia Kane had been simple since the second she'd hit the wet asphalt behind the shipping warehouses and looked up at

me instead of screaming, furious instead of frightened, already fighting instead of already broken. I found Jax in the garage office going over the numbers from the harbor pickup, and I closed the door behind me before I said anything, because some conversations weren't for the floor. "You know what I'm going to ask," Jax said, without looking up.

"Then save us both the time and answer it."

"Her old man's debt is real. I made a call this morning — quiet, nobody knows it was us asking — and it checks out. A hundred forty, give or take, accrued over almost a decade, laundering runs he did for Vittorio that went sideways more than once." Jax finally looked up. "It's real, Ghost. Which means she's real leverage. Which also means the second Vittorio realizes we're not just watching her, we're keeping her, this stops being a debt collection and starts being a turf war with a body

count."

"It was already headed there."

"Not on a clock." Jax leaned back, arms crossed, studying me the way he'd studied me for fifteen years, since before either of us had patches on our jackets. "I've watched you go quiet about the Salvi name exactly twice in six years. Once was Tommy's funeral. This is the second time. I need to know if I'm looking at my club president making a strategic call, or a man who lost his brother trying to save the first Salvi-adjacent woman who fell into his lap." The question landed harder than I wanted it to, because I didn't have a clean answer for it. "Both," I admitted. "Is that a problem?"

"It's a problem if it makes you sloppy. It's not a problem if it makes you careful." Jax's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "For what it's

worth, she talked back to you in the kitchen this morning like she'd known you a year, not a night. I haven't seen anybody do that and live to

do it twice since your mother."

"Don't compare her to my mother."

"I'm not comparing her to anything. I'm telling you what I saw." Jax stood, gathered his papers. "You want my actual advice, for free, since I know you're not going to take it either way — figure out what you're protecting her for before Vittorio figures it out first. Because right now even I can't tell if this is a hostage situation or a courtship, and you're the one running it."

He left before I could tell him it wasn't a courtship. I sat with the accusation anyway, alone in the office, because the truth was I'd spent the whole drive back from Fourth and Dockside — engine loud enough that I should have been thinking about nothing but the road and the Salvi car idling at the corner — thinking instead about the sound Nadia Kane had made laughing in my kitchen, small and surprised, like she hadn't expected herself to do it either.

Six years I'd run this club on a single organizing principle: nobody else bleeds for a debt that isn't theirs. I'd built the Ravage Kings around Tommy's ghost without ever quite admitting that's what I was doing, made every hard call, cut every corner that needed cutting, kept every member's family two steps back from the war I was fighting so none of

them would end up a name on a headstone the way my brother had.

And now there was a woman two rooms away who owed the Salvi family a debt she hadn't known existed, who'd looked me dead in the eye in a dark parking lot and told me the truth instead of what she thought I wanted to hear, who'd argued with me in my own kitchen instead of thanking me for saving her — and every rule I'd built the club around was suddenly negotiable in a way that scared me considerably more than Vittorio Salvi ever had.

I went to find her because I told myself it was strategy. I want that on

the record too, even if it wasn't true.

She was behind the club bar when I found her, taking inventory like she'd worked there for years instead of hours, counting bottles under her breath, and she didn't look up when I came in, which told me she'd clocked my footsteps before I'd cleared the doorway. Sharp. I filed that away with everything else.

"Your inventory system is a disaster," she said, by way of greeting.

"You've got three bottles of the same bad whiskey and no vermouth whatsoever. What do your men drink when they want to feel civilized?" "They don't."

"Tragic." She straightened, met my eyes, and something in her posture braced, like she expected me to be here about the debt, the danger, the leverage. "Did something happen?"

"No." I hadn't planned what to say next, which wasn't like me. "I wanted to know if you'd eaten."

She blinked. Whatever she'd braced for, that wasn't it. "That's what you came to ask."

"That's what I came to ask."

A long beat. Somewhere in the garage, an engine turned over and died, someone swearing at it good-naturedly. Nadia looked at me like she was recalculating something, the way I'd caught myself doing about her more times today than I wanted to count.

"No," she said finally. "I haven't eaten."

"Come on, then." I nodded toward the kitchen, and when she came around the bar to follow me, close enough that I caught the smell of the soap Elena must have loaned her, something in my chest did something I hadn't felt since before Tommy died — something that felt dangerously, stupidly, like hope.

Jax was right. I didn't know yet what I was protecting her for.

I was starting to be afraid I already did.

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