6. Kane #2
"I thought wanting you meant taking one more thing from Red. Then I told myself protecting you was about the club, because duty was easier to carry than the truth."
A tear slips down her cheek.
"The truth is I went to the Landing because it was you. I put you in my room because it was you. I told Dekker I'd tear his world apart because it was you."
Her mouth trembles.
"I can't separate you from the club," she says.
"No, you can't."
"I don't want to live like this."
"I won't ask you to."
"You're the president."
"I know what I am."
"And if it comes to me or them?"
"It already did."
She closes her eyes. The first sob catches her by surprise. She presses a hand to her mouth, but more follow, years of grief breaking loose in the middle of the ruined cafe.
I stay where I am until she reaches for me. Then I cross the last step and pull her against my chest.
She cries for the Landing. For Red. For the fire and the men who forgot him. Maybe for King too, in the complicated way we both grieve men who hurt us. I hold her through all of it.
When she finally looks up, her face is wet and emotional.
"I've always been here for you.” I tell her.
Her hand closes around the front of my shirt, directly over the pendant. I lower my forehead to hers.
"I can't tell you I'm a good man."
A broken laugh leaves her. "No. You really can't."
"I can tell you that I'll always be a good man to you."
She searches my face. I offer no promise about leaving the club, no lie about becoming harmless and no claim that the world behind those gates will ever be clean. Only the truth I can keep. "I don't need you to be reformed," she whispers.
"What do you want?"
Her fingers tighten in my shirt. "You."
Then she kisses me in the ruins of the Landing, and it feels like grief and homecoming in the same breath.
EPILOGUE
BELLA - THREE WEEKS LATER
Rourke's Landing still smells like smoke.
Even with the burned paneling stripped out and the windows boarded, it's in the floorboards, my hair and every box I carry to storage.
The repairs will take several months at best. I'm arguing with a contractor about the wiring when Kane appears in the doorway.
"You busy?" he asks.
"I'm just being told the phrase catastrophic failure shouldn't worry me."
The contractor sighs. "That was about the panel."
Kane's mouth shifts and he looks downward, stifling a laugh, and I point at him. "Don't encourage him."
"Wouldn't dare." He waits until the contractor leaves, then holds out his hand. "Come with me."
"Where?"
"The compound."
I fold my arms. "You're getting all presidential again."
"Yeah, I am." Something quiet in his face stops me from pushing, so I take his hand.
The clubhouse is full when we arrive. It isn't full the way it is on a Friday night. But every patched brother stands in the common room, cuts on and beers in their hands. Judge is near the church-room door, with Tank and Cash beside him and Wilder, Gray and Colt filling out the line beyond them.
Griz is there too, while Chains stands near the wall, silent and unreadable. Nobody explains why I've been brought here before Kane walks to the center of the room.
He's carrying a cut made of old leather, worn soft at the shoulders and cracked along the edges. I know it's my father's before he turns it around. For a second, I can't breathe.
KINGDOM COME curves across the back again. The bottom rocker is there too, reading MC. His rank patch has been sewn back into place, the old stitching matched so carefully I can barely see where King's men tore it away. RED, his road name patch, has been replaced too.
I look at Kane.
"Red Rourke gave thirty years to this club," he says. "It ended wrong."
His gaze moves around the room. "It ends right today."
Nobody argues or even shifts.
Kane holds the cut out in front of him. "Red Rourke dies a brother of Kingdom Come."
The room answers as one with a toast of beer cans raised.
"Brother."
The word hits me harder than the fire did.
Griz looks at the cut with his jaw clenched. His face is rough with grief, maybe regret. Maybe both. He rode beside my father before either of them had gray in their beards.
When he looks at me, he dips his chin. It isn't an apology. It's something older than that.
I cover my mouth, but the sound still gets out.
Kane crosses the room and places the cut in my hands. The leather is heavier than I remember.
My father wore it until it shaped itself around his shoulders. I can see every crease his body left behind, every faded patch where sunlight touched it on the road.
Kane doesn't tell me not to cry or try to turn the moment into something easier. He simply holds me close while the club gives my father's name back.
I find Kane in his office later. My father's cut is folded carefully over my arm. I should take it home, but I'm not ready to put it away yet. Not after spending so many years looking at the bare leather where the patches used to be.
Kane looks up from his desk when I step inside.
"You don't need to thank me," he says.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were going to though."
I close the door behind me. "You went to my house."
"I did."
"For this."
My fingers tighten around the worn leather. I don't have to ask how he knew where I kept it. He's known me my whole life and understood without being told that nobody else had the right to touch what was left of Red Rourke. He went himself.
"You found the patches," I say.
"They were in a drawer in my father's office."
"And you had them sewn back on."
His gaze settles on the leather in my hands. "They should never have been taken off."
My throat tightens. "Kane--"
"My father shouldn't have done what he did." His voice is quiet, stripped of everything except the truth. "Red needed help, not punishment."
It can't give me my father back or erase the years he spent drinking himself into the ground, but it changes something anyway.
"You made him a brother again."
"He always was."
My eyes burn, and I turn away before the tears can fall. That's when I notice the frames stacked on the corner of his desk.
The frames are old wood and tarnished metal, one cracked along the bottom edge. I move closer.
My father grins out from the first photograph, twenty-eight and fearless, his arm thrown over King's shoulders. In the next, half the club stands in the rain beneath the collapsed clubhouse roof. They're every missing picture, every piece of Red that King removed from the wall.
"The photos--"
Kane leans back in his chair. "I think they've stayed in the closet long enough, don't you?"
I look from the photographs to my father's restored cut, then to the man sitting behind the desk. The Landing is being rebuilt, my father's name is back where it belongs, and Kane's kingdom looks nothing like his father's.
"Yeah," I say. I walk around the desk, settle onto his lap and kiss him. His arms close around me, and one hand slides up my back to cradle the nape of my neck.
"I think they have."
The End