Page 75 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

Four words.

Not artful. Not brave. Not complicated.

You should have stayed gone.

My breath leaves like someone opened a door.

The pantry tilts and rights itself. I stand there with sugar behind me and spice in my hand, and the old part of me that learned how to smile when people say cruel things almost smiles out of habit. I do not let it.

I refold the paper and keep my eyes open because the room is not allowed to change shape while I am in it.

I look up reflexively, through the pantry door, through the kitchen, toward the back door I thought had done its job, and for the first time since I woke I understand what their faces had been hiding.

14

DEACON

Cruz gives it to me straight and quiet, like a medic handing off a patient he already stabilized.

A folded parchment from the cake this morning. Another message later in the pantry, tucked among cinnamon sticks, this time passed to me by Marisa.

Two different places. Same rot.

I don’t talk. Talking scatters focus.

I slide the first note into a zip-top evidence pouch from the clubhouse kit and push all the air out until the plastic clings like a second skin.

Black Sharpie across the top:KITCHEN CAKE—AM. I label the cinnamon onePANTRY—LATE AMand snap both into the hard case we keep with the first aid.

My brain paces in a tight loop like a shepherd behind a weak fence; my hands keep it from chewing the door.

“Door latches were set,” Cruz says, eyes on me, voice easy for the room and not easy at all for me. “No frost disturbance on the sill. Nothing obvious.”

“Nothing obvious is still something.” I don’t raise my voice. With men like us, the volume dial stays on low or something breaks you didn’t intend to.

The pantry is my first stop.

I breathe the room the way you walk a framing job—corners, seams, where the light sneaks through.

No pry marks on the door trim.

Hinge screws are still buried, paint undisturbed.

I run a flashlight along the jamb, see dust where dust should be, not a swipe, not a finger.

The floor shows a mess a good house should show: faint flour, sugar crystals like salt spray on old wood.

I drop to a knee and check the toe space under the bottom shelf. Spiders, crumbs, a lost Cheerio from a year ago, and—there—half-moon silver that doesn’t belong to cookware or sense.

I coax it out with the flat of my knife.

A button.

Not plastic. Nickel-silver, with a ridge and an undercut shank. Stamped sunburst pattern like a cheap saint’s medallion tried to be fancy and failed in a particular way.

I have seen this make before.

Not common.