Chapter Thirty-Six
SAGE
Later That Night
The clubhouse is still buzzing when I walk in. Deek is halfway through a story nobody is buying, Ro is rolling her eyes behind the bar, and someone keeps trying to convince Bear another round is a good idea.
Then Sin stands.
And that is all it takes.
Ro kills the music, conversations die off around the room, and within seconds every set of eyes is on the president. Sin stands in the middle of the main room instead of the Chapel, and that alone is enough to make my pulse pick up. Whatever this is, he wants everyone to hear it. Not just brothers.
Everyone.
Ghost’s hand finds the small of my back, the way it always seems to know exactly when I need it there.
I lean into him without thinking, and across the room I catch Liam standing near the pool table, a beer halfway to his mouth, no idea yet that he’s about to become the only person in this building not breathing normally.
“Prospect,” Sin demands.
Liam sets the bottle down so fast it nearly tips. “Yeah, Pres?”
“Get over here.”
He heads across the room like he’s been called into Church, shoulders squared and ready for whatever is coming. Koa catches him with a solid clap on the shoulder as he goes past. Liam looks between the two of them like he’s missed a joke, which only makes Deek laugh harder.
Sin leaves it for a moment, then he gets on with it. “Two years ago this kid walked in here with nothing but a duffel bag and more attitude than sense,” Sin says, and the room laughs, because everyone remembers that time. “I told Koa he wouldn’t last a month.”
“And I said two weeks,” Koa adds.
“Even worse.” Sin’s mouth twitches. “Kid proved us both wrong.”
Liam’s ears have gone red. I’ve never seen him this still.
“Took a bullet covering our left flank when he had every reason to stay down,” Sin goes on, and his voice drops into something deeper. “Didn’t complain. Didn’t use it as an excuse to slow down once the leg healed. Went straight back to work like it was another Tuesday.”
Nitro nods once beside him, arms crossed, jaw tight in that way that means he’s feeling more than he’s letting show.
“And a few weeks ago, we put him on protection detail for the woman half this room would burn the state down for.” His eyes cut to me, just briefly, before returning to Liam.
“He took a hit doing that job too. Got dropped before he even saw it coming. Woke up in the bushes with the worst headache of his life, and the first thing out of his mouth wasn’t ‘Where am I?’ It was ‘Is Sage okay?’ ”
My throat goes tight.
I hadn’t known that.
Nobody told me that.
Liam shifts his weight, staring hard at the floor like it might open up and save him from the attention.
“That’s not luck,” Sin says. “That’s not obligation either.
That’s a man who puts himself between danger and the people he’s sworn to protect.
Every. Single. Time. Whether or not anybody’s watching.
” He lets that sit. “We watched. Church voted this afternoon.” His eyes find Liam’s again. “Unanimous.”
The room goes very quiet.
“So kid, you sure after all the shit you’ve been through prospecting you still want this?” Sin asks, like it’s a formality, even though everyone in this room already knows the answer.
Liam’s voice comes out rough. “Yes, sir.”
“Then get your ass up here properly. Prospects don’t slouch through the best day of their fucking life.”
A ripple of laughter breaks the tension, and Liam straightens like Sin has flicked a switch in his spine.
Nitro steps forward with the patches already laid across his palms, and the room settles into something respectful. I feel Ghost go still beside me, watching the same way he watches everything, quietly.
Liam reaches for the front of his prospect cut, hands shaking as he works the old patch loose. When he holds it out, Nitro takes it without ceremony, the way you’d take something precious without making a show of how precious it really is.
“Two years,” Nitro says, low enough that only the people closest catch it. “That’s a long time to prove yourself to people who already saw it in you the first month.”
Liam’s jaw works, but he doesn’t say anything. I don’t think he trusts his voice right now.
Nitro holds up the top rocker first. It reads…
DEFIANCE MC.
The room watches in absolute silence as the needle bites into leather, Nitro’s hands are slow and sure, and I find myself gripping Ghost’s arm without meaning to.
Beside me, Piper signs something to Ro that I don’t catch, both of them wiping at their eyes like they’ve been caught off guard by their own feelings.
When the last stitch pulls tight, Nitro holds up the finished cut, turning it once so the whole room can see it properly.
Full patch.
DEFIANCE MC. LAS VEGAS.
He passes it back into Liam’s hands, and Liam holds it like it weighs more than leather has any right to weigh.
“One more thing,” Sin says.
Liam looks up, and for the first time tonight, he looks nervous instead of overwhelmed.
“Every man in this room earns a name that fits what he actually is, not what he was before he got here.” Sin crosses his arms. “You’ve been shot once and knocked out cold once, both times standing exactly where you were supposed to stand, both times too damn stubborn to stay down long enough to matter.
From here on out, you ride as Ricochet.”
The room erupts.
Deek whoops loud enough to startle the dog sleeping under the pool table, and Koa slaps Liam on the back with enough force to stagger him half a step.
Somebody starts a chant that dissolves into laughter before it gets past two syllables, and Liam stands in the middle of it with the cut clutched in both hands, grinning so wide it looks like it might actually hurt.
“Because bullets bounce off you?” Deek shouts over the noise.
“Because they shouldn’t…” Sin says, quieter, “… and he keeps getting back up anyway.”
I feel that in my chest more than I expect to.
Every time I close my eyes, I still see the motion sensor footage, the empty stairwell, the silence where Liam should have been.
I’d spent three weeks quietly furious with myself over it, like his getting hurt was something I should have prevented, some debt I hadn’t figured out how to repay.
Watching him shrug into that cut for the first time, full patch on his back, laughing while Deek tries to noogie him and gets shoved off for his trouble, something in my chest finally loosens.
He’s all right.
He’s more than all right.
Ghost’s arm tightens around me. “You good?”
“Yeah.” I lean into him, watching Liam get swallowed up by a dozen brothers all fighting for the chance to shake his hand first. “He almost died protecting me, and I never even said thank you properly.”
“You don’t have to.” Ghost nods toward the middle of the room, toward Bear pulling Liam into a hug that lifts him half off his feet, toward Koa already pouring the first shot into his hand. “That cut on his back, that road name he just got, that’s thanks enough, Sage.”
I watch a little longer, and I understand what he means.
Nobody in this room needed the speech to know what Liam did. They already knew. Tonight isn’t about telling them. It’s about making it permanent, stitching two years of proof into leather so nobody ever has to wonder again where he stands.
Ricochet.
It fits him better than I expect a nickname to fit anyone. This too-eager, too-loyal kid who once asked Millie’s store worker how to pronounce kouign-amann and then ordered two anyway. The kind of man who takes the hit without being asked, then gets up and asks if everyone else is okay first.
Someone presses a shot into my hand. I don’t even see who.
Sin raises his glass, and the whole room follows, bottles and glasses lifting in imperfect unison that somehow lands exactly right.
“To Ricochet,” Sin says.
“To Ricochet,” the room echoes, loud enough to rattle the windows.
Liam’s eyes find mine across the room, and for a second, the noise around us fades. He lifts his glass a fraction higher, just for me, and I do the same back, and neither of us needs to say the rest of it out loud.
Thank you.
You’re welcome.
I’d do it again.
And I believe him completely.
The party doesn’t slow down for another two hours. Somewhere in the middle of it, Liam ends up on Koa’s shoulders for reasons nobody can fully explain afterward, and Deek starts a rumor that the patch actually stands for Liam Never Learns, which earns him a pillow to the face courtesy of Ro.
Ghost keeps me tucked against his side through most of it, quiet in the way he always is at the center of chaos, and every so often I catch him watching Liam with something that looks almost like pride, though he’d never call it that out loud.
He is one of us now.
Not that he wasn’t before.
But now it’s stitched into leather, permanent, undeniable, the way this club makes anything true the moment it decides to.
Fuck, I love being a part of this.
I love being a part of Defiance.
I never saw my life being like this…
Bikers, chaos, undeniable love, and fierce friendships, but now I couldn’t imagine it any other way.
And thank fuck for that!