Page 3 of Hawk's Secret
"And Bree?" He waited until I met his eyes. "Don't get creative. Don't get brave. You know what's on this phone, and you know what happens if you stop being useful. I'd hate for it to get out into the world with you performing like that."
The engine kicked to life. He pulled out, his headlight sweeping across the empty lot, across my car, across me, standing alone in the dark with my hands buried in my pockets and my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached.
The taillights shrank. Disappeared. Silence filled the car park, thick, heavy, pressing against my ears.
I got in my car. Put my hands on the wheel. Sat there.
The brightness was gone. Stripped away, left behind in the coffee shop booth with Lena's warm hands and easy laughter. This was the other side. The side nobody saw, the side that lived in hardware store car parks and shame and a man's voice telling me what I was worth.
I was going to walk into Angel's Rest by the end of the week. I was going to smile, make friends, learn names, pour drinks for men who'd fought wars and built a brotherhood and earned each other's trust with blood. I was going to stand behind that bar and be the bright, likeable, easy girl everyone thought I was, the girlLena had vouched for, the girl Hawk had known since she was sixteen.
And I was going to betray every single one of them, but I had no other choice.
The dashboard clock ticked over to ten. I started the engine and pulled out of the lot.
I drove home, and I let myself think about Hawk for exactly thirty seconds. The way I always did, at the end of these nights, when the shame was so big I needed something else to hold against it. His face. His hands. The low sound of his voice when he talked, patient, steady, the kind of voice you could anchor yourself to in a storm.
I'd been in love with him since I was sixteen years old. Fifteen years of wanting, compressed into a joke, performed for an audience, never once spoken aloud in the voice it actually lived in.
And now I was going to use that wanting as a doorway into his world and burn it down from the inside.
Thirty seconds. That was all I gave myself.
Then I put him away. Locked the box. Drove home.
TWO
HAWK
Lena called on a Wednesday night.
I was in the workshop, elbows deep in a transmission rebuild that had been fighting me since Monday, a job that required patience I didn't naturally possess and focus I was grateful for because it kept my brain from wandering. My phone buzzed on the bench. Lena's name on the screen. I wiped my hands on a rag and picked up.
"Hey, little sister."
"Hey, big brother. I need a favour."
She never called without a reason, which I respected. She said what she needed, I said yes or no, we moved on. I’d never been great with small talk.
"Bree needs a job," she said.
The name landed in a place I didn't want it to land. I let it sit there for a beat, then shoved it somewhere it couldn't do any damage.
Bree. Lena's best friend since they were teenagers. The bright one, the loud one, the girl who'd been underfoot at every family dinner and holiday since Lena was sixteen. Always laughing, always warm, always filling whatever room she was in with a noise that should have been annoying but wasn't. She had a wayof looking at you that made you feel like the only person in the room, and she'd been looking at me that way since she was old enough to know what it meant.
I'd pretended not to notice. For fifteen years, I'd pretended not to notice, because she was younger, then she was Lena’s friend, and she was just a civilian who didn't belong anywhere near the world I lived in. The unpredictable military life where I could get called away at a moment’s notice. The reasons shifted over the years, but the distance stayed the same.
I hadn't seen her in a while and I'd noticed that too.
"What kind of job?" I asked, keeping my voice flat, practical.
"Bartending, waitressing, anything. She lost her temp gig and she's struggling. Is there anything going at Angel's Rest?"
There was, actually. One of the girls had quit last week, something about a boyfriend in Billings, and the shifts hadn't been covered yet. I could talk to Marcy, the woman who managed the day-to-day. Easy. Done.
"I'll sort it," I said.
"Thank you. She's good, Hawk. She's really good with people. She'll be an asset."
