Page 25 of Nitro
Tyre, our treasurer, tapped the table. “The budget for new shocks is still a mess, but that’s a fight for later.”
Kane leaned back, decision settling in his bones. “We’re done. Keep your heads on a swivel. If the Skulls sniff around for any reason, I want eyes up and hands ready. If they find out about Jana’s connection to us, they might decide to try to use her. I don’t want her dragged into the middle of shit she has nothing to do with. Drift, you coordinate tails if we need ’em fast.”
Drift tipped two fingers. “Copy.”
“Dismissed,” Kane finished, and the room stood as one, chairs scraping and boots beating a steady exit.
Edge caught my arm as I turned, voice pitched low enough to be private. “You break, you tell us before the pieces hit the floor.”
I snorted. “I’m not the one who breaks.”
“Fair,” he conceded, mouth twitching. “Just remember—if you need to put a hole in a man, I call first shot.”
“Get in line,” Axle murmured as he passed, deadpan, and the three of us almost smiled—dark, thin, the kind you share with men who’ve bled with you and might again by dinnertime.
Kane’s voice followed me to the door. “Nitro.”
I looked back.
He didn’t stand or change his expression. “Keep her close. And if anything smells like Skull, you bring it in-house before you blow it in the field.”
I nodded. We both knew he wasn’t talking about explosives.
The women were sitting with coffee cups on the table, and a plate of something sweet half eaten lay between them. Jana sat cross-legged, her hands wrapped around a mug as if it could anchor her. The second I shadowed the doorway, she looked up, her green orbs searching my face.
“You’re good.”
Her shoulders lowered a full inch.
Savannah smiled, and Ashlynn lifted her cup in a toast. “Welcome to the circus.”
Jana’s mouth tipped at one corner. “Thanks for not making me juggle.”
“We only let Nitro play with fire,” Savannah said, her tone as dry as the desert. “Union rules.”
That pulled a short, honest laugh out of Jana—small but real. Music to my ears.
I touched her shoulder. When she slid her hand into mine and stood, I gave the women a nod, then guided mine to the front door.
On the porch, the heat hit like a welcome punch. Bikes winked in the sun as we walked to my truck. I helped her up, then jogged around to the driver’s side and got in.
As we drove out of the compound, I mentally drew a circle around us that I dared the whole world to cross. If the Broken Skulls so much as breathed in our direction, I’d answer with something louder than breath. And if anyone in our orbit tried to make Jana pay for a patch she never wore, they’d find out fast why my brothers didn’t argue with me when I said I’d handle it.
Jana had chosen us. And I’d choose her—over and over, without blinking. The kind of choice you built a future on. One created by refusing to let the past write your next lap.
I’d erase anyone who tried to rewrite hers.
With interest.
11
JANA
Iwoke in Torin’s arms, his scent surrounding me—leather and something musky that was all him. He was stretched out in my bed like he’d always belonged there, with his hands splayed across my belly. Beams of the early morning sun filtered through the gauzy curtains, casting delicate patterns across the four-poster bed that barely fit the two of us. The humid air carried the faint scent of azaleas from the open window, but his nearness overwhelmed everything else, his warmth igniting a restless heat deep inside me.
For a long moment, I just lay there, staring at the ceiling and trying to process the weight pressing against my chest.
I had told him about my family. Something I’d sworn I’d keep locked inside me forever. But the betrayals from my father and brother had spilled out of me like I’d been waiting all these years for him to hear it.
