Logan Hymer could gentle a frightened dog in under a minute, but he never let anyone in Ol Sahara watch him do it. The whole town knew the other Logan: the one with the leather jacket, the slow smirk, the boots that scuffed the floor like he owned it. He kept that wall up on purpose. Soft men got taken for weak ones here. So he hid the half of him that fed stray cats behind the bar and remembered everyone's birthdays. Tonight he carried that split up to the rooftop lounge. Lanterns swung from the beams. Patterned couches circled a low table. He sat at the bar, ordered one drink, and watched the desert go dark past the railing. He meant to nurse the beer and leave. He always did. Then she sat down two stools away. She had blonde hair gone dark at the roots and a red top under a scuffed leather jacket. Her boots were studded and broken in. She looked at the room like she'd already decided it bored her. This was Kayti. He didn't know her name yet. He only knew his pulse jumped and his smirk slid into place out of habit. "You've been staring at that beer for ten minutes," she said. "Scared of it?" "Thinking," Logan said. "Bad boys don't think. That's the whole job." He laughed before he could stop it. A real one, not the practiced kind. She noticed. Her eyes sharpened, like she'd caught something he meant to keep. A thin cat slipped out from under the couch and pressed against his boot. Logan froze. The old rule said ignore it. Stay hard. Instead his hand dropped before he decided to let it. He scratched the cat under the chin. It leaned into him and purred. He murmured something soft, something only the animal was meant to hear. When he looked up, Kayti was watching him do it. The whole thing. The bent head, the gentle fingers, the voice he never used in front of anyone. He went still. He waited for the smirk, the joke, the word that would make him put the wall back up for good. It didn't come. "There it is," she said quietly. "I see something different in you." Logan's throat tightened. For the first time in Ol Sahara, both halves of him sat in the open, and no one had flinched. "Most people only get one Logan," he said. "Then most people aren't looking." She picked up her drink and moved to the stool beside him. "I'm Kayti." The wall was down now. He couldn't rebuild it with her sitting this close, having already seen through it. That scared him more than any fight ever had. Because now he wanted her to keep looking, and wanting that from a stranger could cost him everything he'd spent years protecting.