Page 46 of Steel's Secret
Another message comes seconds later.
Aria: You left fast. Just… let me know you’re alright.
My thumb twitches over the screen.
Behind me, voices echo down the hallway. Brothers moving, talking, listening. Always listening.
I shove the phone back into my pocket like it’s contraband.
President first. Man second. Because if they ever know the truth, she becomes a target. And I become a liability.
By late afternoon, the walls feel too tight. The air is too thick. My brothers’ eyes are too damn sharp.
I grab my keys, nod at no one, and walk straight out the side door into the cold.
The sky’s bruising into dusk. The wind tastes like snow. My SUV sits under a thin sheet of frost, headlights catching the dying light.
I pull the door open and climb in, the leather of my cut creaking as I settle behind the wheel. The engine rumbles to life, deep and steady, vibrating through the cabin, grounding me in a way nothing else does. Not even her.
Windshield wipers screech across the ice, loud in the quiet. The heater coughs before warm air finally spills out. My breath fogs the glass. My fingers tighten on the wheel. White knuckles, red skin, ring mark burning.
I drive until the clubhouse fades into trees, until the world narrows to headlights and frost and the steady thrum of the engine. The SUV’s cabin is freezing, the wheel biting into my palms, the cold snapping my thoughts back into something that almost feels like control. But it can’t clear her. It never does.
The trees blur past in streaks of black and white. Every shadow looks like something waiting. Someone waiting. Tama’s voice haunts me again.“Something’s always coming, boy. Don’t you forget it.”
I pull onto an empty stretch of road outside town, kill the engine, and sit there in the silence. Snow drifts lazily across the asphalt, pale in the fading light.
Something presses against my ribs. It’s not fear, but a warning. The same feeling I used to get right before a fight went bad. Right before a bullet was meant for me.
I take a breath.
Then another.
Then I whisper into the empty Michigan winter. “I’m already soft, she’s the proof.”
The words frost in the air, hang there, then disappear. Just like she will. If I’m not careful. If I don’t choose. If I don’t break something first.
