Page 4

Somewhere in the middle of everything a shard of glass has opened a cut along my forearm, bleeding steadily toward my wrist.

"You should get that looked at," she says.

She is already reaching before I can respond, both hands coming to my forearm without hesitation, one gripping above the wound and the other pressing firm and steady below it, controlling the bleed.

Her hands are warm, and her grip is strong and sure, the muscle memory of ten thousand similar moments in emergency rooms I am sure.

She is focused on the wound, eyes down, hair falling forward, and the proximity is doing something to the air between us.

I can feel the warmth she generates, can see the slight furrow of concentration between her brows, and the pull from earlier has not left. If anything it has sharpened into something specific and inconvenient, and the fact that she is being thoroughly professional about this is somehow making it worse.

"Pressure for another two minutes," she says quietly, eyes still down. "Then we'll know if it needs more than that."

"You do this a lot?" I ask, and my voice is lower than I intend.

She glances up then, just briefly, and we are close — close enough that if she moved two inches we would solve whatever this is that has been building since I walked those three stools down, and for a moment neither of us moves at all.

"Often enough," she says.

The door slams open.

Boots across glass. Grave comes through the destroyed front entrance at a controlled run, two prospects flanking him, his gaze sweeping the room with the speed of a man taking professional inventory. He clocks damage, positions, which of his brothers are standing.

Then his eyes find her.

The change in him is total and immediate. Every other variable in the room goes secondary in a single breath.

He crosses the space in four strides and drops into a crouch at the edge of the bar, and his voice when he says her name is an entirely different register from anything I have ever heard come out of him.

"What the fuck, Leah?"

She looks up from my arm with the first real surprise I have seen on her face tonight, not exactly scared, just caught. She sees Grave and the steadiness she has held through the entire last ten minutes shifts into something more vulnerable.

"Grave," she says.

I go still.

The understanding lands as one complete thing, all of it reorganizing around a single fact that reframes the entire last hour.

The way she read the room. The family she referenced with that half-second of discomfort. The way Grave is looking at her right now, with the gutted protective anguish of a man who has spent years keeping someone he loves outside of exactly this situation.

Grave's sister, who grew up away from the club, who built a life out of state, who he has never once introduced to this world because this world does things like put people in the path of gunfire on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday night.

Her hands are still on my arm.

Grave's eyes move from her to me, and I do not say anything.

There is nothing to say that would be useful right now, in this wrecked bar with the cold coming in hard and Leah still warm against my forearm and Grave looking at me like he is deciding where to file what he just walked in on.

Chapter 2 — Leah

I hear my brother's voice before I see his face.

It moves through the noise of the wrecked bar, low and controlled, with a particular tension underneath it that he never fully loses.

Some people's voices soften with relief. Grave's doesn't. Relief, for him, sounds almost identical to fury, and right now I cannot tell which one is winning.

I pull my hands from Hansen's forearm slowly. The bleeding has slowed. It does not need me anymore and neither, I suspect, does the moment.