The clubhouse is loud as always — laughter rolling over the clink of glass, the low thump of a borrowed stereo, the smell of oil and smoke braided with warm beer. Flags hang from the rafters like tired sentries; faces glow in the half-light, familiar and dangerous in equal measure. You’re seated at the big table by the pool table, a cigarette pinched between two fingers, the halo of the tip bright as a warning. Chibs is beside you, his hand a heavy, comfortable weight on your knee, the way his thumb presses a slow, steady rhythm only you two understand.

It’s chaos in the best way. Jax is at the bar telling some story that gets louder every minute, Half-Sack is manning the playlist, and a sister charter’s crew has spilled in — loud, Broadway types, grins like they’ve never been told no. Most are harmless. A couple of them are not.

He comes too close from the off: a man with cheap cologne and greed in his eyes, swaggering up like he owns the room. He starts with a laugh, then a comment, then a lewd grin. The way his eyes linger on you isn’t casual. It’s deliberate. The jokes slide into the gutter easy, and the gutter is wet.

“Oi, love,” he slurs, leaning on the table, the words sticky with intent. “You look like you’d be fun in a bed — or a trunk.”

Heads turn. The air picks up a different kind of charge. Chibs’ fingers tighten on your knee; you feel the muscles roll under muscle, the wolf beneath the skin trying to move. He starts to lift.

You turn your head, slow as a gun being cocked, and catch his eye. It’s a look older than either of you, years of fights and making up and newborns and funerals wrapped into one. You don’t need to say anything. Your mouth does it for you.

“Stay.”

You say it flat, the single syllable soft but iron-lined. It’s a tone he knows — the one that pulls him back from a precipice and into the fold. Chibs pauses, a laugh threatening at the corner of his mouth, then presses back into his seat with a small smirk. Obedient. Not because he fears you — never that — but because that voice of yours is a command he treasures. He lets the wolf sleep.

The man misreads the small smirk as weakness. Up close, he reaches out like the room is his, hand heading for your arm, his grin widening as if fortune itself will pay out for him.

Time becomes a taut wire. You move before he can register displacement. Your fingers are slick with cigarette ash; the blade of your pocket knife flashes, a clean line of silver under the mucky light. It’s the smallest thing but heavy with intention. You don’t make a show of it. You place it — slow, precise — under his chin. The metal kisses the skin, an intimate, immediate promise.*

The room hushes, the laughter thinning to a hum. You look at him. Your voice is calm, dead-center calm.

“Try to touch me I’ll cut your cock off.”

It isn’t a threat; it’s a fact delivered like a verdict. The words land with the force of a hammer. The man’s smile dies mid-grin. His hand freezes halfway to your arm, then drops, clumsy, ashamed. Around you, a dozen eyes track the change in tempo — some impressed, some startled, none surprised.

Chibs’ smirk widens into something softer, almost proud, as if he’s watching a private flame that keeps everything warm and terrifying all at once. Jax’s laugh dies off at the bar, his attention snagging and holding. The sister charter lads shuffle back like they’ve been reprimanded. The room reclaims its noise, but the atmosphere has shifted; the line was drawn, and everyone knows which side of it they stand on.

You keep the blade at his throat a heartbeat longer, the metal steady, then ease it away. The man staggers back, hands up in apology that tastes like bile. You flick the knife closed with the practiced hand of someone who has kept threats and promises in equal measure.

Chibs leans in, voice a low rumble only you hear. “That’s my woman,” he says, pride and something softer threaded through the words.