I Left My Cheating Fiancé for the Biker Next Door

What Riot Taught Him

I didn't move. The poker was heavy in my hand, heavier than it looked, and I gripped it so hard my knuckles ached.

The floorboard creaked again, slower this time, like whoever was out there had shifted their weight to test how much sound the wood would give up. I stood with my back to the counter, watching the window I'd been looking through moments ago and now couldn't bring myself to look at again.

"Flower lady," Finn whispered.

I turned. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, pancake forgotten, eyes huge in a face gone very still. I pressed a finger to my lips and held out my other hand. He crossed the room without a sound, small and quick, and slid his hand into mine. His fingers were sticky with batter. I didn't care.

We moved toward the bedroom together, my hand still wrapped around the poker, his still wrapped around mine. Every step of the floor groaned, and every groan felt like it could be heard from wherever the footsteps had gone. I pulled the door shut behind us, slow, careful with the latch, and for a moment we just stood there in the dim light, listening.

Finn sat on the edge of the bed, knees pulled to his chest, so still it hurt to look at him.

"What does Dad tell you when someone comes?" I asked, barely above a breath.

Finn swallowed. "Hide. Don't answer. Don't cry."

"Good," I whispered. "Do exactly that."

He nodded, and something about how fast he did it, how easily the instructions came to him, made my stomach drop. This wasn't the first time. He had a plan for this because someone had made him practice it, until the words came out of him like a rhyme instead of something he was afraid of.

I sat beside him and put my arm around his shoulders, and he let me, which told me more than anything he could have said. He leaned into my side, small and warm, and I felt the tremor running through him even though his face stayed still.

Outside, the footsteps kept moving, unhurried, circling. I heard them pause near the bathroom window, a long pause, and then they continued toward the back of the cabin. Snow crunched under boots, steady, patient. Someone desperate would have been looking for a way in. Whoever was outside wasn't desperate. They already knew they'd find one.

The flip phone buzzed from the other room. I froze. Finn's fingers tightened on my sleeve.

I couldn't leave him to check it. Not yet. I eased off the bed, pressed a finger to my lips again, and dragged the reading chair in front of the closet, something Finn could duck behind if the door opened before I could stop it. It wasn't much. It was something.

A second buzz came, then a third, and I counted the silence between them, my heart matching the rhythm until I couldn't tell which was which.

It didn't stop for a long time. When the footsteps finally moved off the porch, when the crunch of snow faded past hearing, I eased the bedroom door open and crossed to where the phone sat glowing, still half-tucked under the folded map.

*Too late.*

Too late for what? Riot? Me? Finn? I cut the thought off before it could become something worse. My hand shook hard enough that the poker knocked against the doorframe. I set the phone down and went back, where Finn hadn't moved an inch.

"Was it them?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said, because it was the only honest thing I could say, and something in his face told me he'd rather have that than a comforting lie.

We stayed there a long time, the light through the curtains changing from grey to something closer to white, the snow finally starting to thin. I kept the poker across my lap, but I didn't just sit with it. I worked out where we'd go if the front door gave, whether the window over the dresser opened wide enough for both of us. It didn't make the waiting easier. It made it feel less like waiting and more like preparing.

Finn fell asleep against my shoulder somewhere in the middle of it, worn out from being scared for so long that his body simply gave out on him, and I let him.

I don't know how long I sat there before I heard the engine.

Distant at first, then closer, tires grinding through unplowed snow. I held my breath until headlights swept across the window, cutting through the curtains in a long pale stripe, and something in my chest loosened for the first time since the knock at the door.

Finn stirred, lifting his head, blinking hard against sleep. "Dad?"

"I think so," I said, and for the first time all morning I meant it the way he needed me to.

We went back out together, Finn moving faster than me, already at the window by the time I caught up. I set the poker against the wall before he could see it and ask why I'd been holding it. The truck stopped hard, half-skidding near the porch, and Riot was out of it before the engine had fully died, moving fast, eyes already cutting across the porch, the windows, the tree line, before his boots hit the steps.

My knees almost gave out. He was here. He was actually here.

Then I remembered the footprints, and the relief vanished as quickly as it had come.

A door slammed. Heavy boots hit the porch, fast, urgent, nothing like the boots that had circled the cabin all morning.

Finn smiled for the first time all morning, the whole terrified stillness of him breaking apart at once. "Dad."

I wasn't smiling.

Because whoever had been circling the cabin hadn't come from the road.