Bonus Epilogue
DOLL
Angel has been weird all day, and nobody else at this party has noticed.
Not quiet. He’s been talking, laughing at Maverick’s terrible jokes, hauling ice, letting Bandit put a paper crown on him at the horseshoe pit and leaving it there for a full twenty minutes.
Calm. Loose. My man is never loose in a crowd.
He reads a party before he parks his bike, and today he isn’t reading anything.
He’s also checked the clock four times.
The party is at full volume. September sun, the good kind, the last honest heat before the rain comes back for eight months.
The speakers are going in the lot, brothers arguing over the grill, Phoenix carrying two trays and no patience.
Birdie and Sweetheart have Bandit pinned at the end of the table, working out how many shifts she can trade before Christmas.
Darling in her chair, watching all of us like a woman admiring her investments.
Angel sets his beer down, announces to nobody that he needs a wrench, and walks off.
He’s a terrible liar. He’s a great liar to everyone else, and a terrible one to me. I love that so much I let him get thirty feet before I follow.
The garage door is open a foot. Music comes through the wall. Inside it smells like clean oil and warm concrete. His bike is up on the stand with nothing wrong with it.
He’s standing at the tool bench with his back to me, not looking for a wrench or anything else. Both hands flat on the wood.
I lived over a garage once. I lean in the doorway of this one because I want to be here, with him, and nobody on earth knows where I am. My choice, my minute, my man.
“You’ve been weird since breakfast,” I say.
He doesn’t jump. He just says, “Close the door.”
“Are you asking?”
“I’m always asking.” His shoulders drop. “Please close the door, Doll.”
I close it. The party drops to a bassline and a muffled roar when someone scores at horseshoes.
He turns around with a bundle over his forearm. Black leather. Small.
I go completely still, which is his trick, not mine.
“Jericho.”
“Give me a second.” He sets it on the bench like it’s a live thing, smooths it flat with one hand, and doesn’t look up. “I had this made six weeks ago. It’s been in that cabinet since. I’ve come out here to get it maybe nine times.”
“Nine.”
“Nine.” Now he looks up, and there it is, my unbothered VP, nervous down to his boots. “Every time I decided you’d say yes for the wrong reason. Because the club’s your family. Because you owe me. Because you’re happy and I’d be pushing on a happy woman.”
“And today?”
“Today Bishop told me I was being an idiot in front of Compass. Compass agreed. I’ve got no dignity left to protect.”
I laugh. He lets me laugh at him.
He picks the cut up and holds it. Not out to me. Holds it.
“You’re mine where it matters,” he says.
“I know it, you know it, everybody in the club knows it. That’s not what this is.
” He turns it so I can see the back. “This says it out loud, in the only language this club speaks. It’s my name on your back.
I don’t get to put my name on your back unless you decide to carry it. ”
I step closer. There it is, stitched clean.
Property of Angel.
A year ago that word would have gone through me like a spike. Property. I’ve been that. I was a line item, an unpaid decade, an asset handed across a desk to settle a debt I never took out.
I look at the leather and wait for the flinch. It doesn’t come.
It doesn’t mean he owns me. It means every one of these men takes a bullet before anything touches me. It means when I walk into a bar in this city, nobody has to ask who stands behind me, because I’m the one who picked him.
“You’re shaking,” I say.
“I’m not.”
“Jericho. You are holding a piece of leather like it’s a live grenade.”
“It’s worse than a grenade.” He means it. “So. Do you want the club to know it the old way? Stand with me. Wear my name because you picked it.”
“Yes.”
He blinks. “You want a minute to think about—”
“Jericho.” I put my hand over his on the leather. “I told you once. I made this decision at the dumpster.”
He breathes out like a man setting down a load he’s carried up a hill.
He shakes it open and holds it up behind me. I turn around and shrug into it. Heavier than I expected. Leather always is.
He smooths it down my back with both palms. He breathes rough at the base of my neck. He stands there a second longer than the job needs, and I let him.
I turn around in his arms. “Well?”
“Turn around again.”
“Rude.”
“Doll.” Wrecked. “Turn around.”
I do, slow, arms out, and catch myself in the wing mirror of his bike, the same mirror he watched me button a borrowed flannel on the first day, when everything I wore belonged to somebody else. Black leather squared to my shoulders. Nothing in the reflection is borrowed anymore.
When I come back around, the nerves are gone out of him. What’s left is hungry, and it’s catching.
“You should get back to the party,” I say. “Prez’ll notice.”
“Prez can wait.”
“Somebody could walk in.”
“Door’s shut.” He gets his hands on my hips and walks me backward into the bench. “You want me to stop, you say stop.”
“I want you to stay loud,” I tell him.
He laughs into my mouth.
Then neither of us is laughing.
He kisses me like a man who’s been waiting six weeks, which he has. He gets his hands under my shirt, up my ribs. The bench is warm at my back. Outside, somebody wins at horseshoes and forty people lose their minds. I barely hear it.
“Not taking this off you,” he says against my throat, and his hands go under the cut instead of over it. I laugh. He groans. My zipper goes down.
He lifts me onto the bench. A wrench hits the concrete and rolls off under the bike. Neither of us goes after it. I get his belt open while he’s busy at my ear, telling me in that low voice exactly what he thought about across the whole six weeks, in detail, until I’m the one saying hurry up.
“Still with me?” He’s grinning. He already knows.
“Way ahead of you,” I say, and pull him in.
It’s fast and greedy. I bite down on his shoulder because the whole club is forty feet away through a wall.
He holds my hips. I hold his neck. The bench takes it.
Leather creaking, my name in his mouth, both of them, Doll and Sloane.
By the end I’ve got my teeth in him to stay quiet and it isn’t working.
After, he keeps me right where I am, forehead to forehead, both of us wrecked, one of his hands flat between my shoulder blades on his own name.
“They’re going to know,” I say.
“They’ve known for a while.”
He fixes me. Zips me, straightens the cut on my shoulders, smooths my hair with the same hands that were pulling it. Then he holds out his palm, open. He’s been doing that since the first day.
I put mine in it.
We walk out into the noise. Every pair of eyes in the lot finds the leather before it finds my face. Phoenix hollers first, Birdie screams, and then Phoenix stops mid-holler and points at me with her whole arm.
“She had today. She put money on TODAY. At breakfast.”
The lot loses its mind twice. Prospects groan like dying men. Levi demands an investigation.
“He checked the clock four times before ten a.m.,” I say. “I can read tells.”
Angel leans down to my ear. “Forty of that pot’s mine. I bet on myself Tuesday.”
We took a club legend and turned it into a tradition.
Bishop lifts his beer two inches and puts it down. From him, that’s fireworks.
Darling doesn’t clap. She looks at me over her tea and nods once, like she knew months ago and was waiting for me to catch up.
Angel’s hand stays around mine.
I walked in here on my own feet, closed the door because I wanted to, and put my arms through the sleeves myself.
Mine. Every last bit of it.
Ihope you enjoyed your Seattle visit.
If you did, I would love it if you left a review on your favorite site to help other readers find me.
And when you’re ready to hit the road again, you can visit other Thunder Bastards MC Chapters.