Chapter Seven
SOPHIA
Here I am standing in my living room staring at the suitcase by the door.
It makes everything feel real.
I’ve gotten Trevor’s approval to work remotely from Vegas.
He’s been more than accommodating, on the condition that I check in every week with a full briefing and make a genuine effort to bring in new clients.
That part I’m not worried about. Vegas is full of businesses that need advertising, and if anything, Trevor had sounded quietly excited about expanding the agency’s reach.
I called Tate the day after our phone call and told him I was coming.
He hadn’t made a big deal of it, just said he’d have everything ready, that I could arrive whenever I wanted.
What I hadn’t expected was to find out he’d already sorted a room for me, bought furniture, and made it a proper space.
That had caught me off guard more than anything else.
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting from a motorcycle club president, but it wasn’t that.
Going back to the bedroom one last time, the apartment already feels emptier.
The surfaces are cleared, drawers are shut, and there’s the quiet of a place being left behind.
The photograph is still on the nightstand where it has lived for the past two months.
Ryan is laughing at something off camera, his face completely unguarded and entirely himself.
I leave it where it is.
It belongs here.
Mom has known about Vegas from the moment I agreed to go.
I’d called her the night I decided, needing to tell someone before I talked myself out of it.
She’d fought me on it at first, gently but clearly, telling me my family was here and that we could get through this together.
But when I told her I needed a change, that staying in Vixen Falls was slowly suffocating me, she’d gone quiet for a long moment and then softly said, ‘Okay, baby.’ That had been harder to hear than the argument.
She’d kept it from Dad as I’d asked her to because I wanted to tell him myself.
Mom is already on the couch when I come back into the living room, a dish towel twisted between her hands, her knuckles pale. She’d had two weeks to make her peace with it.
Dad hadn’t.
He stands by the window, arms crossed, jaw tight, and his dark hair, shot through with gray, catches the afternoon light.
I find myself staring at it for a moment.
When had that happened? When had the gray crept in so far?
I’ve been so buried in my own grief that I haven’t really looked at my parents in weeks, not noticing what worrying about me is costing them.
The guilt of that settles quietly somewhere in my chest and stays there.
Annie leans against the wall across from me, arms folded, watching the room the way she always does, calm and sharp, taking everything in before she commits to a single word.
She hadn’t heard any of this yet. Annie got no warning call, no gentle heads-up.
Whatever she thinks about Vegas, she’s forming it right now in real time.
I take a breath.
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Mom’s head snaps up even though she’d known it was coming. “Tomorrow?” Her voice comes out smaller than she intended.
Dad’s expression hardens slightly, but he stays by the window.
Annie raises one eyebrow.
“Where exactly are you going, Sophia?” Dad asks.
“Vegas.”
Silence drops across the room.
“With whom?” Mom asks carefully, even though she already knows the answer.
I swallow. “Tate.”
Dad’s jaw tightens visibly.
“Tracker’s brother?” he asks.
“Yes.”
Mom looks at me with those tired, worried eyes. “The brother who has his own motorcycle club?”
“That’s the one.”
Dad runs a hand slowly over his face. “You’re moving across the country to live with a biker you hardly know?”
“He’s not a stranger,” I say, holding my ground.
“You’ve met him what… three times?”
“More than that, actually.”
“That’s not helping your case, Sophia.”
Annie pushes off the wall and crosses the room toward me, stopping just in front of me with those level, steady eyes. “Do you trust him?” she asks.
I meet her gaze without flinching. “Yes.”
She studies my face for a moment, reading it the way only Annie can, like a map she needs to memorize before navigating it in the dark. “Why?”
I hesitate for just a beat.
“Because Ryan trusted him. And so do I.”
That quiets the room in a way nothing else had.
Mom’s voice comes out trembling. “Honey, you’re grieving.”
“I know.” My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to, and tears start tracking down my face before I can stop them.
“Grief makes people make decisions they normally wouldn’t.”
I wipe my face with the back of my hand. “Maybe.”
Dad slowly shakes his head, his gray-streaked hair catching the light again as he moves. “Didn’t Ryan live in New York? I’m surprised that’s not where you want to go.”
“I did want to go there. Tate convinced me otherwise.”
“So Vegas is a better option.” It isn’t really a question. Dad’s voice has that flat quality it gets when he’s working very hard to stay measured. “What can he give you that we can’t, Sophia?”
“Dad.” I keep my voice as steady as I can.
“Tate is Ryan’s brother. He promised Ryan he would protect me.
And right now, being near someone who is a part of Ryan, someone who knew him, loved him…
that means something to me that I can’t fully explain.
This isn’t about control. This is my decision, and I need you both to understand that. ”
Annie comes and crouches in front of me as I sink onto the couch, her eyes level with mine.
“Why aren’t we enough?” she asks.
I look at her, really look at her, and tell her the truth. “Because staying here feels like pretending Ryan never existed.”
Annie’s eyes fill with tears, and when I look past her, I see Mom’s have too. Mom sets the dish towel down and crosses the room, sitting beside me and taking both my hands in hers.
She doesn’t try to talk me out of it again. She’d already had that conversation with me, already lost it, and she loves me too much to put me through it twice.
“You could stay,” she says softly. “We can help you heal.”
I shake my head. “I’m not healing here, Mom.”
Annie tilts her head slightly, the way she does when she’s thinking something through to its end. “Are you running away from something…” she asks, “… or toward something?”
I meet her gaze. “I don’t know yet.”
Annie nods slowly, accepting that for what it is, honest, and the best I have.
Dad sighs deeply and heavily, the sigh of a man accepting something he can’t change and isn’t happy about. He pushes off the window and walks toward me, and I stand to meet him.
“If this Tate gives you any trouble…” he says, his arms coming around me, “… I’m on the next flight to Vegas.”
I laugh softly against his chest, the kind of laugh that lives right next to tears. “I think he’s more scared of breaking his promise to Ryan than anything else.”
Dad holds me for a long moment without saying anything else. Then Mom wraps her arms around both of us, and for a minute, the three of us stand there in the middle of my living room while everything quietly shifts around us.
Then Annie steps forward and doesn’t hug me straightaway. She stands in front of me and studies my face one last time, like she’s committing it to memory. “You want my honest opinion?”
“Always.”
“Motorcycle club presidents aren’t exactly low-risk environments.”
I smile. “You’re literally a Marine.”
“Exactly.”
That makes me laugh, really laugh, and I realize with a small, startled jolt that it’s the first time I’ve laughed properly in weeks. Since before Ryan. Since before everything.
Annie pulls me into a tight hug that doesn’t leave much room for argument. “Call me for anything,” she says into my hair. “Any time. Any hour. I don’t care.”
“I will. I promise.”
She pulls back and looks at me with those sharp, steady eyes.
“And if that biker messes up, you’ll fly to Vegas too?”
“Try and stop me.”
***
The Vegas heat wraps around me the moment I step outside the airport.
It’s like walking into a furnace. I feel the heat immediately, and it’s completely unforgiving.
Standing there on the sidewalk with my carry-on, I blink against the brightness while the air shimmers off the asphalt in visible waves, the sky above so blue and vast it feels almost aggressive.
Shielding my eyes against the glare, I scan the pick-up area.
And then I see him.
Tate is leaning against a black truck with his arms crossed and dark sunglasses hiding his eyes, completely still in the middle of all that noise and movement, like the heat doesn’t touch him, and the chaos around him simply doesn’t register.
Even from across the lot, he looks exactly like what he is.
Tall.
Broad.
Covered in tattoos.
Authority rolling off him like a second skin.
When his eyes find mine, he straightens and starts toward me, closing the distance with that long, unhurried stride of his.
He’s wearing light blue ripped jeans, a white tank top with his cut over the top, and he moves through the crowd the way men like him always do, as if the space around them belongs to them by default.
He reaches me, pulls off his sunglasses, and that’s when the resemblance hits me properly.
He smiles a gorgeous, easy smile, and my stomach drops.
Because I’ve seen that smile before.
It lives in the same place on Ryan’s face. Comes from the same corner of the same mouth. Reaches the same depth in the same green eyes.
The resemblance knocks the breath out of me. For a second, I can’t breathe around it or decide if seeing Ryan in Tate’s face is the most comforting thing in the world or the most frightening. Maybe both. Maybe that’s always going to be the answer.
Forcing myself to breathe, I smile back. “Hello, Tate.”
“Hello, Soph.”
Soph. Ryan used to call me that. I hadn’t realized until just now how much I needed to hear it.