LOGINCole let himself into his trailer as calmly as a man could after having his entire life torn open and rearranged in the space of a single night.He had slipped out the back of Satan’s Bar because he couldn’t face the thought of having to explain any of what had happened to his MC brothers. The engagement party had still been raging when he left, laughter and music spilling through the walls while Ice and Vixen celebrated the beginning of their forever, and the irony of that had almost made Cole laugh as he walked alone across the gravel lot toward his bike.Forever.Christ.He had believed in that once.The trailer was dark and cold when he entered, smelling faintly of smoke and coffee. He locked the door behind him and stood there for a long moment, keys still in hand, staring at the narrow kitchen, the worn couch, the boots lined by the door, the empty space that had never really stopped being empty no matter how many years he lived in it.Then he went straight to the bathroom and t
The motel room smelled faintly of old carpet, industrial lemon cleaner, and the kind of stale cigarette smoke that no amount of repainting ever fully erased from walls. Despite the rather yucky environment, Luna had fallen asleep within seven minutes of climbing beneath the stiff floral comforter, which made the place suddenly feel like the best hotel in the entire goddamn world.Nala stood beside the bed for a long time after that, watching her daughter sleep curled on her side with one hand tucked beneath her cheek and the other wrapped around the stuffed bear that Cole had won at the state fair more than a decade ago.The bear looked ridiculous now, worn nearly bald in spots, one button eye slightly looser than the other, the tiny fake leather jacket cracked along the seams from years of love and travel and being dragged through childhood. Nala had attempted once, when Luna was four, to replace it with something newer and softer and less heartbreaking, but Luna had cried for nearly
Nala froze, her hand on the office door. Slowly, she looked back over her shoulder at Cole, and when she answered, her voice finally broke completely.“No.”Cole wasn’t surprised, but it fucking hurt like hell anyway. “Did you ever talk to her about me?”Nala sighed. “She used to ask me why her dad didn’t want her.”The words hit Cole like a bullet straight through the chest, and for a second, he genuinely forgot how to breathe. He could suddenly see every single year of his daughter’s life laid bare in front of him with brutal clarity.Real days, real nights. A little girl asking questions Nala had no good answers for. A little girl watching other fathers at school events and birthday parties and grocery stores and soccer games and quietly realizing that she was missing something everybody else seemed to have naturally.And Nala carrying all of it alone.Jesus fucking Christ.Cole pressed the heel of his hand hard against his sternum like that could somehow stop the crushing pressure
Nala stared at Cole in stunned silence, the words still hanging between them like smoke.And I’ll hand you the matches, baby.Baby.God. It should not affect her the way that it did, not after everything that’s happened between them, after eleven years of fear and grief and loneliness and anger layered so thickly over old love that sometimes she honestly couldn’t tell where one emotion ended and the next began.But the second the word left his mouth, something inside her reacted instantly and treacherously, some deeply buried part of herself remembering exactly what it had once meant to belong to this man completely.Baby.She used to hear it murmured against her skin in the middle of the night while his arms tightened around her half-asleep. Used to hear it spoken with quiet amusement every single time she got herself worked into one of her little tempers about something. Used to hear it growled softly into her hair when he came deep inside her. And for one horrifying second standing
Nala looked down immediately, but not before tears slipped free, silent and furious against her cheeks. That was how she cried, he remembered suddenly with a force that made the years between them feel terrifyingly thin: never loudly, never dramatically, never asking anyone to notice, just tears escaping despite how much she clearly hated the loss of control. He remembered the way she turned her anger inward first because vulnerability offended her, the way she had once stood in his kitchen in nothing but one of his shirts and told him she was not a romantic person while leaning into his hands like she wanted to live there. Eleven years disappeared frighteningly fast standing this close to her, and the fact that love could survive that kind of distance felt less beautiful than cruel.Somewhere deep beneath the grief and rage and betrayal, another realization began taking shape inside him slowly, terrible in its clarity. Wheels hadn’t just destroyed his marriage, he hadn’t simply tak
Cole swallowed painfully, his gaze shifting briefly toward the narrow crack in the office door where warm yellow light spilled into the hallway, because somewhere beyond it slept the little girl he should have known from the moment she took her first breath.The little girl whose first words he had never heard, whose first steps he had never seen, whose birthdays had arrived and passed ten times without him even knowing what kind of cake she liked, or whether she was afraid of thunderstorms, or whether she woke cheerful in the mornings or needed time to become human.His daughter was twenty feet away from him, wrapped in his cut, exhausted and frightened because someone had tried to take her, and yet somehow the oldest wound in the room was still Nala standing across from him with eleven years of silence in her eyes.“Why didn’t you try to contact me after I got out of jail?” he asked, and though he tried to keep his voice steady, the question came out rough anyway, scraped raw by too
Shocked, stunned, teary at those words, Nala shook her head. “Don’t say things like that, Cole. Don’t make promises that you can’t keep.”“Promises?” he echoed, suddenly furious and not at all sure at what, or whom. “You want to talk about those, Nala?”She paused, and Cole already regretted his wo
“Anyway,” she continued quickly, chattering to distract herself. “I got downstairs to Luna through the dumbwaiter.”Cole blinked. “The what?”“The old service lift built into the walls, it goes between my bedroom and the kitchen. The realtor thought I liked the ‘historic charm.’” A humorless laugh
Cole couldn’t remember crossing the parking lot.One second he was standing against a brick wall with a cigarette burning forgotten between his fingers, staring at a woman he had loved for fifteen years, and a child who looked so much like him it physically hurt to look at her. The next, he was in
Cole barely paid attention at first, assuming another late arrival had finally found the engagement party, but something about the car made him look twice. It was a rental, and it had out-of-state plates, from New York. It was moving slowly, almost cautiously, like whoever drove it was forcing them







