CUFFED TO THE ENEMY

What Preacher Saw Coming

Chapter 10

Nora rode to the clubhouse that night in her own car, parked two streets over the way Kane had taught her, and walked the rest of the way with her badge tucked into her jacket instead of pinned to her chest, feeling, for the first time, like the uniform itself was something she was hiding rather than something she wore with pride.

The compound looked different at night than it had the one time she'd seen it under duress, unconscious and carried rather than walking in on her own two feet. Bikes lined up in neat rows under sodium lights, a couple of prospects working on an engine in the open bay of the garage, low music drifting from somewhere inside the main building. It didn't look like the den of criminals her department's file had built in her head over three months of assumption. It looked like a neighborhood that had built its own rules because the ones on the other side of the river had never once protected it.

Preacher was waiting on the porch when she arrived, arms crossed, expression carved from the same granite as the night she'd first seen him standing in that doorway calling her a cop bleeding on their furniture.

"You've got nerve, showing up here twice in one week." He didn't move to let her by. "You know what you did today? You made every man in this club owe a debt to a badge. That's not a debt we know how to pay back clean."

"I didn't do it so anyone would owe me anything."

"Doesn't matter what you meant. Matters what it does." Preacher's jaw worked, some old anger sitting just under the surface of a man who'd clearly rehearsed this conversation before she arrived. "I've watched Kane carry his father's case for eight years like it was the only thing keeping him upright some days. I watched what obsession did to that boy's daddy before it got him killed, and I am not about to watch it happen twice because a cop with her own dead father decided this club was the fastest way to feel like she was doing something about it."

The accusation landed harder than she expected, mostly because some small, honest part of her recognized the shape of truth buried inside it.

"You think I'm using this. Using him."

"I think grief makes people reckless, and reckless people get other people killed." Preacher's voice dropped, quieter now, less like an accusation and more like a warning born out of real fear. "I buried my best friend's father because of a case like this. I am not burying his son the same way."

"Preacher."

Kane's voice, low and even, came from the doorway behind him.

"That's enough."

"Is it?" Preacher turned on him, and for a moment, Nora watched twenty years of brotherhood hold two men in a silence neither wanted to break first. "You tell me it's enough when you're not the one who has to explain to this club why our president's compromised over a woman who could put every one of us away with one phone call to Internal Affairs, whenever she decides she's done playing house with the enemy."

"I'm not compromised." Kane's voice stayed level, but something in his posture had shifted, a readiness Nora recognized from the night he'd found her bleeding on the shoulder of Route 9. "I'm doing exactly what I've always done. Following the truth wherever it leads, even when it's inconvenient. Even when it means trusting someone I was raised not to trust."

"That's not all this is, and you know it." Preacher's eyes cut to Nora, sharp and unflinching. "I've known you since you were a boy, Kane Ryder. I know what your face does when you're about something bigger than a case."

"Preacher—"

"Let me finish."

He held up a hand, and Kane, to Nora's surprise, actually did, some old deference between them that spoke of years she had no part of.

"I'm not telling you to stop. God knows I've never been able to talk you out of anything once you've decided on it, not since you were fifteen and decided you were riding whether your father liked it or not. I'm telling you to be careful, because careful is the one thing neither of you has been since the night you brought her here bleeding. And I'm telling her"—his eyes cut back to Nora—"that if this goes wrong, it's not just her badge on the line. It's every man in this compound who trusted their president enough not to ask why a cop keeps walking through that door."

"I understand what's at stake," Nora said quietly. "More than you think I do."

"Do you?"

Preacher studied her, something unreadable moving behind decades of guardedness.

"Because from where I'm standing, you're a rookie three months into a career, chasing a case that got a decorated detective killed, sitting in the middle of a war you don't fully understand yet between men who've spent longer keeping secrets than you've been alive."

The silence that followed stretched long enough that Nora felt her pulse in her throat, watching something pass between the two men that she had no right to interrupt.

Finally, Preacher shook his head, the anger draining out of him into something closer to resignation, and stepped aside from the door.

"I hope to God you both know what you're doing."

He walked past Nora into the dark without another word, leaving the porch to the two of them and the low hum of the clubhouse behind the door.

"He's not wrong to worry," Nora said finally, once Preacher's footsteps had faded.

"No," Kane agreed. "He's not."

He leaned against the doorframe, studying her with an openness she hadn't seen from him before, none of the careful calculation of their first meeting.

"But he's also not right about everything. I didn't bring you into this because I was lonely or because you look like your father. I brought you in because you're the only person in eight years who's looked at that folder and asked the right questions instead of the safe ones."

"That's not the only reason you're standing this close to me right now."

The words left her before she'd fully decided to say them, some reckless honesty she hadn't earned the right to yet, and she watched them land on him the way her name had landed on the phone earlier that day.

"No," Kane admitted, quiet, unguarded in a way that made her chest tighten. "It's not."

Neither of them moved for a long moment, the porch light buzzing faintly overhead, the whole compound gone still around them like even the club understood something was about to shift.

Somewhere behind the main building, a prospect laughed at something, low and easy, the ordinary sound of a world that had no idea how much had just changed on this particular porch.

Nora thought about every reason this was reckless—Doyle, Ruiz, Preacher's warning, the badge in her jacket pocket, the eight years of grief that had brought her to this exact doorway—and found, for the first time since she'd pinned that badge to her chest, that she didn't particularly care.

"This is a terrible idea," she said.

"Probably the worst one either of us has had all week." Kane's voice had gone rough at the edges. "Doesn't mean it's wrong."

"Everyone I trust is telling me to be careful. Reyes. My own training. Now Preacher."

She looked up at him, close enough now that she could see the exact place his composure had finally started to c***k.

"Nobody's told me to stop yet. I keep waiting for someone to."

"Maybe nobody who actually knows you thinks it would work."

He didn't close the distance between them.

He waited, some old restraint holding him in place, leaving the choice entirely hers in a way that told her more about the kind of man he was than anything in his father's file ever could.

Nora closed it herself.

Slow.

Deliberate.

Giving him every chance to be the one who stopped this.

He didn't.

Neither did she.

And for one suspended moment on a porch that belonged to neither of their worlds, the truth about her father's murder felt very far away.