Chapter Sixteen
TATE
The Blood Brothers arrive in the late afternoon.
The sound reaches us before they come into view, that low-rolling thunder of multiple bikes carrying down the street, the kind that gets into your chest before your ears have caught up with it. Luke and Flame stand on either side of me without a word. Some things are just instinct.
Five bikes come around the corner, the Blood Brothers’ patch visible from a distance, the late Vegas sun catching chrome, leather, and the road dust of four days riding.
Quill leads them in.
He cuts the engine and climbs off his bike, pulling his helmet free, and when those blue eyes find mine across the lot, something in my chest loosens that I hadn’t realized was wound that tight.
Crossing the distance between us, we embrace the way brothers do, hard and without ceremony, brief enough, and it still says everything it needs to.
When we pull back, I look at him. “Are we good?”
He holds my gaze, long enough that I feel the weight of everything between us, the call I’d made without him, all of it sitting in that one question.
Then he nods. “We’re good.”
The breath that leaves me is slow and quiet.
“How are you holding up?” His voice drops into something that has nothing to do with presidents, patches, or the business that brought us all here.
“Miss him every day. Every single one.”
Something moves behind his eyes, like grief, recognition, and the pain of a man who felt it, too, deeply and without pretending otherwise.
“So do I, brother.” Quiet. Like the words cost something.
Neither of us needs to hold it longer than it lasts, then it passes, and we turn to the rest of them.
Hawke appears first, blond hair loose from whatever he’d had it tied back in for the ride, rolling his neck side to side, that watchfulness already mapping the clubhouse, the lot, and the surrounding streets. We shake hands, and he claps me once on the shoulder, and that is enough between us.
Torch is next, enormous and steady, moving with the economy of a man who’d spent years being exactly where he was needed most. He grips my hand and looks at me with those calm eyes. “Good to be here, Tate.” And I know he means every word of it.
Trigger is behind him, nodding at Luke, who nods back. Those two had met before, during the Lexi situation, and the ease between them doesn’t need rebuilding.
And then Rhyder. Last off his bike, and slowly, not from exhaustion, though the ride had been long. He pulls off his helmet, runs a hand over his face, and when he looks at me, his jaw is set, and his eyes are dark and steady, which says everything his mouth doesn’t need to.
Walking across the lot, I hold out my hand, and he takes it, both of us gripping harder than necessary, holding it a beat longer than a standard greeting. It’s the kind of handshake that doesn’t need a single word to explain what it means.
“Rhyder.”
A beat.
“Tate.”
That is enough.
Inside, two clubs fill the room the way two clubs do, voices overlapping, bottles cracking open, the smell of cold beer, road dust, and leather, the loosening that happens when men who’ve been riding hard arrive somewhere solid and safe.
Luke and Torch fall into conversation at the bar almost immediately, something about a run through similar country years back, the easy shorthand of men from different clubs who somehow speak the same underlying language.
Trigger finds Remy near the pool table, and within twenty minutes, there is a game going on and genuine laughter coming from that end of the room.
Hawke settles near the bar with a beer, taking everything in while giving nothing away.
Quill moves through the room the way a leader does, with natural authority that never needs to announce itself, briefly checking in with each of his men, and making sure everyone has what they need. He eventually makes his way over to where I am standing near the back wall.
“How is she? Sophia?”
“Honestly, better than I expected.”
Raven arrives through the side door not long after.
She stops when she sees the room, both clubs, men she doesn’t know, the energy of a space that has already established its own order, and for just a second, something moves across her face that I can’t quite read.
Then she finds me and makes her way over, dark hair loose, dressed simply for once, her hands slightly open at her sides in a way that is less performance than usual.
“Heard there was something happening.” A pause, her voice dropping. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I just want to help.”
My eyes move over her for a moment. Not a girl trying to play tricks, just someone who has decided to be straight about it for once.
“Kitchen. Nothing else.”
She nods, no smile, no play, and turns toward the kitchen, and that’s when I notice Torch on the other side of the room. He has stopped whatever he was doing to watch her walk, the way a man watches something that has caught his full and undivided interest. Not subtle about it either.
Noting that, I go back to my beer.
Rhyder finds me later that night.
The room has settled into something easier by then, road tiredness catching up with some of the men, conversations dropping to a lower register, bottles getting worked through at a steady pace.
He sits beside me without ceremony, beer in hand, and for a moment, neither of us speaks, just two men letting the noise sit around them.
Rhyder turns his beer in his hands. “How are you doing with everything?”
The jaw on him, the stillness, the controlled fury that lives just underneath all of it, and underneath that, something softer. Something that asks because it genuinely wants the answer.
The beer bottle turns in my hands. “Every morning I wake up, and he’s the first thing in my head.
That hasn’t changed.” I pause while I find the rest of it.
“But I’ve got my club and a promise to keep.
And Tracker…” I stop. Let it settle. “Tracker will never be forgotten. Not by me. Not by anyone in this room.”
Rhyder is quiet for a long time. “He saved Lexi.” Something needing air. “Him and me, side by side in that place, and he never hesitated. Not once.”
“That was Tracker.” Simple and certain.
Rhyder nods, then lifts his beer. I lift mine, and our necks touch in a toast that nobody else in the room notices, and neither of us needs to explain.
It gets late into the night when I show the Blood Brothers to their rooms. They are basic rooms that are clean, functional, and have no pretense about what they are.
I walk each man through until I get to Torch’s door, where he stops me with one hand on the doorframe and turns back, something purposeful in his expression.
“That woman.” He leans against the frame. “The dark-haired one.”
“Raven.”
“Anything between you two?”
Holding his gaze, I give the question the weight it deserves before answering, “She’s not mine, Torch.”
Something brief and sharp moves in his expression and is filed away immediately. “Good.” The door closes.
Standing in the corridor, I think about Raven crossing that room while Torch undressed her with his eyes, and the idea of the two of them together doesn’t bother me a damn bit, not even slightly.
She isn’t ol’ lady material, not the kind of woman I’d have on the back of my bike or take to bed every night, and if I am being honest with myself, maybe I’d always known that.
Maybe I’d just needed tonight to make it clear.
I go to find my keys and slide on my bike.
The desert road home is dark and quiet, the Vegas lights falling away in the mirror as the city gives way to open road, and the house comes closer in the distance.
Pulling up to the gate, I cut the engine and sit there for a moment in the dark, just the tick of the cooling engine and the vast Nevada silence beyond it, before I get off.
Memphis is at the door when I walk in, pressed against it, his tail moving once in that understated way of his that says he’d been there a while.
After feeding him, I move through the dark kitchen without bothering with the lights and stand in the hallway for a moment.
Sophia’s door is closed.
Standing there beside it for just a second, one hand resting lightly against the wall, I notice the quality of the house with someone sleeping in it, something fuller than the empty version of this place had ever managed to be, something that has crept up on me so gradually I’ve stopped being surprised by it.
I have had a long day. Heavy in some places, full in others.
By the time I’ve stood here long enough to register all of it, I am running on empty.
And head to bed.
***
It is five in the morning when I get up, the desert is still dark outside the windows, and the house is completely silent around me.
Moving through the kitchen, the coffee is brewing, and Memphis is sorted.
I do everything with the care of a man who is conscious of every sound he is making and doesn’t want to be the reason someone’s sleep ends early.
Standing at the counter with the mug warming both hands, I find the notepad and pick up the pen.
Gone to the clubhouse early.
Back tonight.
There’s coffee.
Propping it against her mug, the white one with the small chip in the handle that she’d never mentioned and never switched out for one of the others, I pick up the pen again and look at what I’d written for a moment, so I add…
Don’t go anywhere without Remy.
Standing there a moment longer than I need to, the house quiet and dark around me and her door closed down the hall, I put the pen down and leave.
***
Church is the fullest the room has ever been.
Both clubs are around the table, my men on one side, Blood Brothers on the other, Quill at my left, the way it should be between presidents who respect each other.
I take the time to look at each man around that table, every face, both clubs, all of them here because of what Clemente had taken from all of us.
The weight of it settles properly into the room for the first time.