Page 135 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

Not a threat.

Not a gloat.

A single line from the same quiet network Roman used, the punctuation we were promised and did not ask to see.

Pickup complete. Silence applies.

I put the phone away and breathe the kind of breath a man only gets to take after choosing the right kind of violence.

I walk toward the kitchen and the warm blue light, and I let the night shut behind me like a door that knows how to keep.

We do not wake her.

We just make coffee, crack eggs, slice oranges, and set places where there used to be none.

When she wanders in an hour later, hair asleep and eyes bright, she will find us already halfway through pancakes, sugar dust in the air, twins hiccupping around grins, Isla asking if croquembouche can ride a motorcycle.

She will not ask what time we came home.

She will look at our faces and decide it is safe to put her heart down for a minute.

We will let her.

And if the phone hums again tonight with a location that belongs to a man who sold old tricks to cowards, we will step out quietlyand do what men who love do when love deserves clean walls and clear air.

For now, I turn the flame lower under the kettle because yelling is for bad tea and worse people.

I take down the good mugs.

I reach for the honey.

I hear footsteps on the stairs, light and familiar, and I smile at the sound that has already made a home behind my ribs.

26

CRUZ

EARLY SPRING

Sweet Claim smells like orange zest and firewood and promises I intend to keep.

The windows fog and clear, fog and clear, every breath of the oven drawing a lazy heart on the glass before the mountain air erases it.

Sugar cools in spirals along the marble.

Dough rises like it learned patience at church.

The sign over the door, Roman’s handwriting carved into oak, still makes my chest loosen when the bell rings and another neighbor steps in like they are walking into a warm memory.

The boys own the low country beneath the counter.

Luca does wide-bellied laps, slapping the boards with palms that sound like applause for himself.

Gabe scouts each corner like it might be planning something, pausing to squint at the flour bin, the broom, my boots, the small world that belongs to him because his mother decided it would.

Every now and then he lifts his face and gives me that serious look that says,I am cataloging you, Papa, and you remain acceptable.

Isla folds napkins with the kind of martial precision that would put a drill sergeant out of work.