Claimed By The Outlaw のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 5

The truck broke down on a Tuesday, which felt exactly right.Tuesday was the kind of day that never promised anything good. Tuesdays were when your landlord called about the rent. Tuesdays were when doctors delivered the kind of news that rearranged your whole understanding of your life. Tuesdays had never once done Sloane Vega any favors, and the engine giving one last asthmatic shudder before going completely silent on a mountain road outside a town she had chosen by closing her eyes and pointing at a map felt like Tuesday being Tuesday.She pulled the truck as far onto the gravel shoulder as it would coast, turned off the headlights, and sat in the dark for a moment with both hands still on the wheel.Outside, the Colorado sky was doing something almost aggressively beautiful. The last of the sunset was bleeding out across the peaks in shades of orange and deep pink that no painter would dare use together because no one would believe it was real. Pine trees crowded the road on both

Sloane stopped on the third step from the bottom.The woman at the bar had her back turned. She was maybe forty, dark hair pulled into a neat braid, and she was talking to Pearl in the low focused way of someone conducting an interview. The photograph was face up on the bar. Even from across the room Sloane could see it clearly: a photo taken outside her apartment building in Chicago, maybe three months ago, on a day she had been wearing the grey coat she had eventually left behind.The smart thing was to go back upstairs. Pack the bag. Leave through the window if she had to and worry about the truck later.She did not do the smart thing. She had never been very good at the smart thing when someone was threatening to take something from her, and apparently that included this room, this town, and the first decent night of sleep she'd had in nearly two weeks.She came the rest of the way down the stairs.The woman heard her footsteps and turned, and in that same moment Sloane saw what w

She did not run.She wanted to. Every instinct she had spent the past two weeks sharpening told her to move, to be gone before that conversation in the parking lot ended, to be back in the truck and down the road before Colt came inside with whatever that man had told him about who she really was.She stood in the hallway beside the supply closet and breathed.Think. If that man worked for Garrett, this was already over. He would not have needed to show Colt her photograph. He would have simply told Colt to hand her over, and the question was whether Colt would, which she could not answer because she had known him for four days and four days was not enough to know what someone did when it cost them something.But if that man did not work for Garrett.She thought about what Cross had told her: the cartel had been pressuring the Iron Vow MC for eighteen months. She thought about suits that did not belong in mountain towns. She thought about Garrett's firm being the legal nerve center of