Page 77 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies
“You fixed the door,” she says. It’s not a question.
“I fixed the things trying to pretend they aren’t broken,” I say.
“Add my brain to your list,” she says, aiming for light and landing somewhere careful.
“It’s already on there,” I tell her, deadpan. It gets me the ghost of a real smile.
I leave her with the boys a minute and slip back to the hall where our security screen lives in a recessed cabinet behind cookbooks.
I pull up feeds.
North yard: snow-quiet, pine boughs carrying it like old men carry coats.
West ridge: lens frosted opaque—needs a glove and a breath and a defog wipe.
South porch: clear, timestamp ticking the way it should, except for the bad part.
I scrub back to last night.
The time counter jumps forward three minutes.
No drift. No glitch smear. A skip.
Like someone introduced a blank where a face should be.
I call it out of habit, not panic. “Cruz.”
He’s there with a dish towel slung like a priest’s stole. Roman behind him, mugs in hand that look too small for our problems.
“Feed jump,” I say, pointing. “South porch. Three-minute gap, clean.”
Roman’s jaw ticks. “Anyone besides us with a repeater that could spoof our clock?”
“If they touched our time source, we’d see other clocks wobble,” I say. “This is local. Somebody walked the blind, not the backbone.”
Cruz scrubs a hand over the back of his neck and does a quick scan of our real room, the way a medic checks for breathing even after the chest rises. “We’ll walk the lines again at dusk. I’ll take Hox. Wren can hang lights along the south fence.”
“Lights will make them feel seen,” I say.
“Good,” Roman says. He doesn’t raise his voice either.
I could stay glued to the screens and let my head invent, but it’s too easy to become bad company with a monitor for a lover.
I shut the panel, slide the bookshelf back, and rejoin the living, which is sticky and loud and exactly what we’re defending.
We prep dinner like a small army that knows the value of fat and heat. Marisa leads without announcing it.
Polenta gets the second life only yesterday’s patience can give.
Cruz sears sausage in a cast iron that remembers better summers.
Roman slices bitter greens with a contempt for stems I’ve learned to admire.
I poach eggs like a man who hates runny whites and refuses to serve them.
The twins ride the kitchen on a rotation of arms and slings.
I stir while I bounce a knee that persuades Luca the universe likes him.
