Thor. A Knight's Legends MC

Sabine

I counted exits the way other women counted calories.

Every room. Every building. Every situation I walked into — three seconds, maybe four, and I already knew exactly how I was getting out.

The Sons of Death clubhouse had two.

Front door — too exposed. Too many bodies between me and the street. Men who answered to Victor before they answered to God or common sense.

Back door — kitchen corridor, past the bar storage, left at the broken freezer that nobody had fixed in six months. Forty-two steps if I walked at a normal pace. Thirty if I didn’t.

I knew because I’d counted.

I knew because knowing kept me alive.

I stood behind the bar moving glasses that didn’t need moving, wiping surfaces that were already clean, keeping my hands busy so nobody looked at my face. My face was the problem tonight. Victor had been drinking since noon and his aim had gotten better over the years which was something I’d never anticipated when I married him at twenty-two and believed every word he said.

I was good at believing things once.

I wasn’t anymore.

The bruise under my left eye was covered. I was skilled at that too — concealer, foundation, the particular angle you held your chin so the light didn’t catch it wrong. The women here had stopped offering sympathy eighteen months ago. Not because they didn’t care. Because sympathy had a way of getting back to Victor and none of them could afford that tax.

I understood.

I didn’t blame them.

I just never forgot it either.

“Sabine.”

His voice came from across the room and my body responded before my mind did — shoulders straight, chin up, expression neutral. Not blank. Blank made him suspicious. Neutral was the target. Neutral said everything is fine, I am fine, we are fine without a single word.

I looked up.

Victor stood near the pool table with two of his captains, glass in hand, eyes already on me with that particular quality of attention that had nothing warm in it.

Ownership.

That’s what it was.

Not love. Not even desire.

Just the cold assessment of a man checking on his property.

“Bring the bottle over.”

I reached for the whiskey without hesitation, moved around the bar, crossed the room at exactly the right pace — not too fast, which read as eager, not too slow, which read as defiant. I had learned this language the hard way. I was fluent in it now.

I set the bottle on the table beside him.

He didn’t look at me.

He was already talking again, already back inside whatever conversation I’d interrupted, and I stood there for exactly three seconds — long enough to not seem dismissive, short enough to not seem like I was listening — and then I turned and walked back to the bar.

My hands were steady.

They were always steady now.

That was the thing nobody told you about surviving something like this — it didn’t make you fragile. It made you precise. It stripped everything unnecessary away and left only what worked.

What worked was stillness.

What worked was patience.

What worked was knowing exactly which door was thirty steps away and never letting yourself forget it.

My phone vibrated once in my pocket.

I didn’t reach for it. Not here. Not with Victor in the room.

But I knew who it was.

And I knew what it meant.

Tonight.

The word had been sitting inside my chest for three weeks like a coal — hot, heavy, dangerous. The plan had been built carefully, slowly, in whispered conversations and coded messages and the particular kind of hope that you kept very very small so it couldn’t be taken from you.

Tonight it either worked —

Or I stopped counting exits altogether.

I picked up a glass and started polishing it.

Steady hands.

Neutral face.

Forty-two steps to the back door.

I wasn’t a victim.

I was a woman who had been waiting for exactly the right moment.

And tonight —

It was finally here.