Dani

God, he was beautiful.

He had no idea. He was a little scruffy—a short beard like a lot of the guys wore, and his hair was a little long. But he didn’t have the sunburned look that the men of the club had, because he didn’t ride for hours in the sun like they did. He didn’t ride at all. From what I heard, Cavan Wilder was a nowhere man: not in the club, not out of it, living on its fringes without being bound by its rules. Without being bound by any rules.

And he was beautiful.

You really saw it when you were up close, like I was. His hair was light brown, lit with a few strands of gold. It was thick, brushed back from his forehead, curling on the back of his neck. His eyes were gray, set in a face that had not a single flaw in it: straight nose, high cheekbones, an angled chin. Not a baby face—a man’s face. A faint crease on his forehead, between the eyes, like he did a lot of thinking. Eyes that had seen things, most of them dark and maybe unhappy.

He didn’t have big muscles like most of the guys, but he was fit, his movements quietly graceful, the arms that showed from the sleeves of his t-shirt supple with muscles and tendons moving beneath his tanned skin. He was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt, not leather. He had a small silver earring in the lobe of one ear. He smelled like laundry and something spicy.

He sent me to a dressing room, and I pulled off my shirt and bra. My hands were shaking. I could do this. This was the plan. It had to work. It had to.

I held the sheet he’d given me over my chest and came back out, lying down on the chair again. He had prepped the drawing, so he could print it on my skin, and was getting his ink and tattoo machine ready. I watched him work. I’d heard some of the other old ladies talking about him—he could have had any woman he wanted, the girls who came and went from the club, but he rarely did. No one had ever seen him with a steady woman, and he certainly didn’t have a wife.

The club was like family, and everyone knew everyone’s business, but no one knew Cavan Wilder’s business. He was just their ink man, ready to do their ink at a moment’s notice, day or night. Outside of that, he was a mystery.

He was perfect.

“You want some music?” he asked, breaking the silence. I nodded, still too nervous to speak, and he put on the Black Keys, the volume low. He didn’t look in my eyes again, kept his averted. “Put your arm up, bent, like this,” he said. I did as I was told and he moved the sheet where he wanted it and bent to work without another word.

It hurt. I knew it would. I stared at the ceiling with tears leaking from the corners of my eyes, but I didn’t move.

“You want a break?” he asked after ten minutes.

“No,” I replied. “Keep going.” If we took breaks, if this took too long, McMurphy would think I’d fucked him. That was his default, that I fucked everybody. It didn’t matter what I did, how I argued, how I protested—he thought I fucked every man I met. He was getting violent about it. And it was getting worse.

“I’ve seen you before,” I said to Cavan after a while, lying with my arm above my head, staring at the ceiling. “You come to the club parties sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” he agreed, not raising his head. “I’ve seen you, too, from afar.”

From afar. I hadn’t heard a man use words like that in the seven months I’d been with McMurphy. They were also true, because until today McMurphy had never let me get within four feet of the club’s ink man, let alone introduce me to him, as if he thought I’d hump him like a bitch in heat the minute I got near. He wasn’t far wrong, and I didn’t care.

We kept going. After the first half hour he made me take a break, giving me a bottle of water. My skin was throbbing hard, but I didn’t mind. It meant I was being inked. It meant those birds would be on me forever, where I wanted them.

But time was spiraling away, and I was chickening out. It was just so nice, in that quiet room with him, smelling his nice smell, listening to the Black Keys and his breathing. No yelling. Not even any fucking. God knew he made my panties wet, and I was tempted to roll over and lick the collarbone that showed so deliciously above the neck of his t-shirt, but sex wasn’t what I wanted right now. It was just this. Just the quiet peace of his presence, and even with the eye-watering pain, I wanted it to go on forever. I wanted to forget the end would ever come.

But it was coming. McMurphy would be back, and my chance would be gone. So I screwed up my courage, put everything on the line, and said softly to him while he got to work again, “I want out.”

He didn’t even lift his head from where he was bent over my ink. Maybe he hadn’t heard me, or didn’t understand. But of course he did. “That so?” he said.

My heart soared. I felt like crying. That so? No shouting, no calling me an ungrateful bitch. Just That so? Listening. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had listened to me.

“I have to get out,” I said, staring at the ceiling. “He’ll kill me.”

“He might,” Cavan Wilder said. He took a cloth and dabbed at my weeping skin.

“I know he will,” I persisted. “He’s getting worse and worse, the paranoia. He’s using more than he used to. He’s losing control. He’s going to do it, and soon. You can help me.”

Still he worked, as if someone was watching us. But he sighed. “That’s not something I do.”

“You don’t help women who are about to get killed?”

That got me a glare, brief and beautiful. “You made your own choices,” he said. “Women make their choices the same way men do.”

I swallowed. I had. But I’d made the wrong choice, a stupid one, a mistake. The only thing you could do when you made a mistake was do your best to right it. In this case, right it before McMurphy decided one day that I really had fucked some guy, and either put me in the hospital or put an end to me altogether.

Or before he found out the one thing I was hiding from everyone.

“The thing is, you have to help me,” I said to Cavan. “You have no choice.”

Again he dabbed my skin, as if we were talking about the weather, except I could see his jaw was tight, his body tense. I wondered what it was like in bed, that body, what he did with it when he was with a woman. Whether it was good. “Tell me,” he said. “Why do I have no choice?”

“Because you’re Devon Wilder’s brother.”

Cavan went very still.

“You are,” I said. “Anyone who sees you both can tell. You don’t look exactly like him. Your hair is different, your eyes. But it’s the same face, the same name.” The words were coming out of me in a rush. The ink was almost finished, McMurphy would be back any minute, and this was my only chance. “You’re his brother. And if I can figure it out, then so can the club. And once they do, you’ll have to run, just like me.”

He looked at me. Emotion worked behind his eyes, anger and outrage and confusion and something else, something deeper I couldn’t name. “Dani,” he said, the first time he’d spoken my name. “When did you see my brother?”

So I was right, then. I’d been certain, but it still felt good to be vindicated. “In the news,” I answered him.

Now he looked shocked. “In the news?”

“You didn’t know?” He just stared at me, so I said, “Look it up, Cavan. Put your brother’s name in Google and see what you see. It didn’t make the national news, but it was big enough. Big enough for the club to find out, even here in Arizona.”

“Are you fucking with me?” he said, almost asking himself the question.

“Find out,” I told him. He had to put the pieces together himself, or this would never work. He didn’t know me, didn’t know if I was a liar. “Go look it up. There’s a boarded-up Sav-Mart on the edge of town. I’ll be in the parking lot at four o’clock tomorrow morning, my bags packed. If McMurphy finds out I’m gone, he’ll come after me and kill me. So be there, and save my life, or don’t be there. It’s up to you.”