Chapter Twelve
SOPHIA
Stepping out of the house into the Nevada heat, I’ve gone with the most practical thing I own for a day like this—denim shorts cut just above mid-thigh, a fitted black tank top, and my hair pulled up into a ponytail off my neck.
It’s usually about seventy-five degrees before ten in the morning, and the sun is already doing its absolute best with the heat right now.
Tate is waiting by the truck.
He has his cut on, keys in hand, dark sunglasses already in place against the glare. Memphis has reappeared from wherever he’d spent the morning and is sitting at Tate’s feet, looking thoroughly unbothered by everything, which seems to be his default state.
Tate looks at me.
I look back at him.
“Ready.”
His gaze moves over me, not slowly, not obviously, just a quick sweep that lasts maybe half a second longer than a purely practical assessment requires, starting at the shorts and working its way back up.
“You got something less…” he starts.
I wait.
He stops.
Then briefly looks up, as if the sky might offer him some assistance.
“Never mind. Let’s go.”
Pressing my lips together to keep the smile from going anywhere interesting, I follow him to the truck.
The drive to the clubhouse takes about fifteen minutes, out of the quiet desert roads and back toward the city, the Vegas skyline growing ahead of us as we drive.
Tate is still in that way of his, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the door, country music playing low on the radio in a way that suggests it is always playing rather than something he’d chosen.
Watching the city come back into focus through the passenger window, I think about what I’m walking into.
I’ve been in a clubhouse before. I know the energy, the noise, the leather, and the kind of controlled chaos that comes from a group of men who live by their own rules and have stopped apologizing for it somewhere along the way.
The Blood Brothers’ clubhouse in New York had eventually felt like home, after enough weeks of Jasmine pressing coffee into my hands and Tess pulling me into conversations I hadn’t expected to care about, and all of them slowly, quietly making space for me in a world I hadn’t grown up in.
But that was Ryan’s world.
This is Tate’s.
And Tate had made it very clear this morning that those are not the same thing.
‘You’re not stepping into Ryan’s life. You’re stepping into mine.’
“You nervous?” Tate asks without looking at me.
“No.”
He glances at me sideways.
“A little.”
The corner of his mouth moves. “Good. Means you’re paying attention.”
The Sinners’ clubhouse sits on a wide industrial street on the east side of Vegas, a long, low building with blacked-out windows and a row of bikes lined up outside that gleam even in the flat midday light.
A large Sinners’ patch is mounted above the entrance, dark and striking, nothing subtle about it.
Tate pulls the truck into the lot, kills the engine, and for a second, neither of us moves.
“Rules,” he says, turning to face me slightly.
At his words, I turn toward him.
His eyes are on me, dark and completely serious, the kind of serious that doesn’t leave room for negotiation. Standing this close, I’m reminded again of how much space he takes up without trying, how completely he fills whatever room he’s in.
“You stay with me or Luke. You don’t wander. You don’t ask questions about club business. You don’t touch anything that looks like it belongs to someone without asking first.” He pauses. “And if anyone gives you trouble, anyone, you come straight to me. You don’t handle it yourself.”
“Okay.”
He studies my face for a second like he’s checking whether I mean it.
“Okay.”
He climbs out, and I follow. The moment we push through the front doors, the noise hits me all at once, music thumping from somewhere, voices overlapping, the crack of pool balls from a table near the back, the smell of leather, cigarette smoke, and something cooking that I can’t identify but that smells surprisingly good.
The place is busy.
Men in Sinners’ cuts are everywhere, at the bar, the pool table, and clustered around a bike that is partially stripped in the corner.
Near the far wall, a woman in cut-off shorts is pressed against one of the club members, his hands low on her hips, pulling her in, neither of them concerned about their audience.
Another sits sideways across a man’s lap at the bar, his hand running slowly up her thigh while he talks to the man beside him like nothing is happening.
It isn’t as polished as the Blood Brothers’ clubhouse, rougher around the edges, louder, the kind of place that has never cared what anyone thought of it, but it has the same energy underneath. That same hum of brotherhood, loyalty, and men who would bleed for each other without being asked.
Every set of eyes in the room finds Tate first and then slides sideways to me.
Tate doesn’t acknowledge any of it. He moves through the room the way he always does, as if the space belongs to him, because it does, and I stay close.
A man near the bar with a Sinners’ patch and too much confidence lets his eyes travel over me in a way that is slow, deliberate, and not even slightly subtle.
Tate catches it without turning his head and leans toward the man. “Eyes forward.”
The man looks away immediately.
A large man with a shaved head and forearms like bridge cables detaches himself from the group near the bike and crosses toward us. He is wide, solid, and permanent, with sharp dark eyes that assess everything in the time it takes most people to blink.
“Diesel,” Tate says with a nod.
Diesel looks at me. Then back at Tate. Then back at me.
“This her?” he asks.
“Sophia. Tracker’s woman.”
They knew I was coming. Of course, they did.
Something shifts in Diesel’s expression, not softness exactly, but something close to it. He gives me a single nod that conveys both acknowledgment and respect, requiring no further elaboration.
“Ma’am.”
“Hi.”
From across the room, a familiar face appears.
Luke, pushing off the bar where he’d been leaning and making his way over with that slightly careful gait he’d had since the mansion, one arm no longer in the sling but still held differently than the other, as if the memory of the injury lives in the bone.
“Sophia.” He says my name like he is genuinely glad to see it attached to a person who is upright and functioning, which, given the last time we’d technically been in the same world, feels about right.
“Luke,” I say and smile at him properly. “You look better.”
“Wasn’t hard to do,” he says drily, and I laugh.
Tate says nothing, but I catch the look on his face.
A younger man appears at Luke’s shoulder, early twenties, dark hair, and restless energy coming off him in waves like he hasn’t quite figured out what to do with himself yet. He is looking at me with an interest that is just a fraction too direct.
“Who’s this?” he asks, grinning.
“Remy.” Luke’s voice carries a note of warning.
“What?” Remy says, unbothered. “I’m just asking.”
“This is Sophia,” Tate says, and something in his tone makes Remy’s grin recalibrate almost immediately into something more appropriate. “She’s under my protection. You’d do well to remember that.”
Remy nods, quickly and genuinely, and takes a small but deliberate step back. “Yes, Prez. Sorry.”
One word from Tate, and Remy’s entire demeanor shifts. I make a note of that.
Near the back of the room, slightly removed from the main noise and activity, a man sits alone at a small table with a laptop open in front of him, two phones side by side, and what appears to be an empty beer bottle he hasn’t noticed is empty.
He is lean, almost wiry, with a shaved head and the focused stillness of someone whose brain is doing several things simultaneously and has no capacity left over for the room around him.
He looks up when Tate approaches, blinking slightly like he is returning from somewhere a long way away.
“Cable,” Tate says.
“Prez.” Cable’s eyes move to me, assessing, quick, and then back to Tate. “She’s here then?”
“She is.”
Cable looks at me again, and this time there is something in his face that is less assessment and more something quieter. Something that recognizes a connection without needing it spelled out.
“Tracker talked about you. A lot.”
Not prepared for that.
“He talked about you too,” I manage. “He said you were the best at what you do.”
Something moves behind Cable’s eyes, brief and quickly controlled. He gives a single nod and looks back at his screens.
“Working on something?” Tate asks, his voice dropping.
“Always,” Cable says. “Our target’s people have been quiet since New York. Too quiet. I’m tracking some movement that doesn’t add up yet, but it will.” He pauses. “I’ll have something for you by tonight.”
Tate nods once and straightens. “Good.”
He places a hand briefly on Cable’s shoulder, just for a second, the way you touch someone you trust completely, and then he moves on.
Glancing back at Cable as we walk away, he is already back in his screens, both phones lit up, unreachable.
He reminds me a little of Tracker. Not in the way he looks or carries himself, they are completely different in that regard, but it’s in the way he sits inside his own focus, like it is a room only he has the key to.
It’s that quality of a man whose mind never really stops working, even when everything else does.
Turning back to the room, I swallow the ache that comes with that thought.
Tate looks around properly.
And his expression changes.
The clubhouse is a mess.
Not catastrophically, but enough. Bottles on surfaces that aren’t bars. Ashtrays that need emptying. A general air of a space that has been lived in hard, cleaned reluctantly, and not recently enough.
“Where are the girls?” Tate asks, directing the question at no one in particular.
“Around,” Flame says from behind the bar, appearing with two beers and setting one in front of Tate without being asked.
Tate looks at the bar surface.
Then at the room.
Then back at Flame with a look that communicates several things at once without a single word.
“Get them out here,” he says. “This place needs sorting. Sophia’s going to be around regularly, and I want it kept to a standard. A decent one.”
Flame raises an eyebrow, just slightly, but nods and disappears.
I lean close to Tate. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, I did,” he says and hands me the beer.
Maybe forty minutes in, perched on a barstool nursing my beer, I watch Tate move through the clubhouse the way presidents do, while he has brief, low conversations with various members, with a quiet authority that needs no announcement when I feel it.
That shift in the energy of a room when someone walks in who changes it.
Turning, I see her immediately.
She is stunning.
Dark hair, loose around her shoulders, olive skin, dark eyes that sweep the room with the ease of a woman who knows exactly what she looks like and has made her peace with the power of it a long time ago.
She is wearing a short white dress that shows off every curve, and she moves through the clubhouse like she owns it, or at least like she owns the most important thing in it.
Her eyes find Tate across the room.
And then they find me.
The smile on her face doesn’t exactly disappear… it just changes. It becomes something cooler and more deliberate, the kind of smile that’s really an assessment.
I look back at my beer as she crosses the room to Tate, and from the corner of my eye, I watch as she reaches him, sliding one hand onto his chest and leaning up to press her lips to his jaw like she is signing something.
Something tightens in my chest that I have absolutely no right to feel. Could she be his girlfriend? I look back at my beer before the thought can go any further.
“You’re back,” she says, her voice low, warm, and directed entirely at him.
Tate’s eyes cut sideways to me, just briefly, while something moves across his face.
“Raven,” he says.
“I missed you,” she says, her hand still on his chest, her eyes still on his face. “You didn’t call.”
“I was dealing with things.”
“I heard.” She glances at me then, openly and deliberately, the kind of look that’s meant to be seen. “I see that.”
I keep my expression neutral and take another sip of my beer.
She is beautiful, territorial, and she has every right to be both, and I have no right to feel what I am currently feeling, which I am choosing not to examine too closely.
Sliding off the barstool, I make my way to where Luke is standing near the pool table.
“You okay?” he asks, reading me with the efficiency of a man who’s been in enough rooms to know when something is happening underneath the surface of one.
“Fine. Completely fine.”
He looks at me for a second. “Sure,” he says in a tone that suggests he finds this about as convincing as I’d intended it to sound.
Tate appears at my shoulder, beer in hand, face giving nothing away. “Come with me.”
I follow him to a quieter corner of the room, away from the pool table, the bar, and the general noise of the clubhouse.
“I should have told you,” he says.
I look at him. “Told me what?”
“About Raven.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation about your personal life, Tate.”
“Maybe not,” he says. “But you’re living in my house, you walked in here without knowing, and that wasn’t fair.”
“Is she your—”
“No.” Flat and immediate, cutting me off. “It’s not like that.”
“She seems to think it might be,” I say, glancing over to where Raven is standing, her eyes fixed on me with a look that could cut glass. Turning back to Tate, his jaw tightens slightly.
“I’ll handle it.”
“Tate.” I keep my voice careful. “I don’t want to cause trouble between you and her. If my being here is going to create problems, if you want me to step back and give you space to—”
“No.” His voice is firm enough that I stop talking. “You’re not going anywhere. And you’re not stepping back from anything.” He holds my gaze. “I told you, you have a place here. That doesn’t change because of Raven.”
I nod slowly, something unspoken passing between us, before he straightens.
“Give me five minutes.”
Watching him cross the room back to where Raven is standing, I turn deliberately away and look at the pool table instead, because whatever happens in that conversation is not something I need to witness.
Luke appears beside me and holds out a fresh beer. “You want to play?” he asks, nodding at the table.
I take the beer. “I’m terrible,” I say.
“Good,” he says. “Me too. We’ll be terrible together.”
Smiling genuinely, I take the cue he offers.
I don’t see what passes between Tate and Raven, but when Tate comes back twenty minutes later, Raven is gone, and whatever had needed to be said has clearly been said.
The set of his jaw tells me it hadn’t been a comfortable conversation for either of them.
He comes and stands beside me at the pool table, watching Luke miss an embarrassingly straightforward shot with the kind of quiet judgment that requires no commentary.
“You good?” he asks, without looking at me.
“Yeah.”
“Good.”