Chapter Twenty-Seven
TATE
I’m up early before the sun rises.
Sophia is still beside me, her hand warm against my chest, her breathing slow and even, and the desert completely quiet outside. I lie there for a moment and feel the weight of what today is going to be, sitting alongside everything else being carried.
Mexico.
With her, it had been different from the start. I wanted to take my time to learn every curve and print her to memory, making sure she felt everything, not just physically, but completely. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt like that. Possibly never.
Carefully getting up so as not to disturb her, I take a quick shower, change, and head to the kitchen.
I feed Memphis, make coffee, and stand at the window while it is still dark, letting the weight of what is coming to settle into me properly.
The phone buzzes on the counter.
Cable.
“Prez.” It’s that focused quality his voice gets when he has something significant. “I need you to come in. I’ve got something to show you.”
My eyes go down the hallway toward the bedroom.
“How urgent?”
“Urgent enough. It’s time, Tate. We’re ready.”
Putting the phone in my pocket, I get my cut from the back of the stool, and she appears in the kitchen doorway.
Her hair is loose, her eyes soft from sleep, and she reads my face the way she always does before I’ve said a word.
She looks at the cut, my keys, and whatever is in my expression that hasn’t been entirely contained.
“Who was that?”
“Cable. He needs me at the clubhouse.”
She watches as I pull my cut on.
“Club business.” Not a question. Just the quiet understanding of a woman who knows exactly what this world is and has decided to accept it.
“Yeah.”
She moves to the coffee machine, and I watch her, feeling the weight of what is waiting at the clubhouse and everything it means for the next two days.
“Sophia.”
She looks over her shoulder, and something shifts in her expression, warm, certain, and completely unguarded. “Go,” she says. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
Crossing the kitchen, I cup her face in both hands, tilt it up, and kiss her, fully and without hurry.
She kisses me back the same way.
When I pull back, she is looking up at me with those eyes.
“I’ll see you tonight.”
“I’ll be here,” she says. We have a brief last kiss before I pick up the keys and head to the door.
Memphis is sitting directly in front of it.
“Move,” I tell him.
Memphis doesn’t move.
“Memphis.”
One amber-eyed blink.
He doesn’t budge, so I step around him and head outside toward the bike.
The trip to the clubhouse is without incident, and Cable meets me at the clubhouse door with that focused stillness of a man who has been sitting on something significant and is ready to put it on the table.
“Come see this.”
We go to the back room, just the two of us, the clubhouse is quiet at this hour. He opens his laptop and turns it toward me.
Hacienda footage.
The familiar satellite image, walls, perimeter, guards moving in their patterns. But Cable has overlaid something new. It’s a complete security rotation map, every guard, every camera, every blind spot marked and timed.
“It’s done,” he says. “Full mapping. South, north, east, west, everything. Entry points, exit routes, patrol patterns down to the minute.” A pause. “The blind spot on the north wall holds for eleven minutes between rotations. Eleven minutes is enough.”
I look at the screen, the hacienda walls, and everything behind them. “And the movement? Getting us there without being tracked?”
Cable pulls up a second screen. Routes, border crossing points, and vehicle arrangements on the Mexican side. A timeline that moves two clubs from Las Vegas to twenty-five miles outside Mexico City without leaving a digital footprint anywhere that matters.
“We ride to the border in small groups, nothing that draws attention. Vehicles are waiting on the other side. We leave the bikes at a contact’s property on the US side… clean, untraceable, fast.”
Focusing on the screen for a long moment, I take in every detail.
Then Cable pulls up something else.
More hacienda footage, recent, timestamped three days ago. A figure moving through the inner courtyard, well-dressed, unhurried, moving with the ease of someone who belongs there.
“The man I flagged weeks ago,” Cable says. “Still coming and going regularly. Still can’t get a clean ID. The cameras don’t give me enough, but he’s significant. The way Clemente’s security moves around him, he’s not a guest.”
I look at the figure on the screen.
The build, the height, the way he moves…
Something tugs at the edge of recognition, faint and unformed, like a word on the tip of my tongue that won’t come, so I file it away.
“We go in, regardless.”
“Yeah,” Cable says. “Just wanted you to know he’s a variable.”
I nod, looking at the full picture and feeling the plan settle into something real and imminent.
“Two days.”
“Two days,” Cable confirms.
***
The call to Quill comes from the parking lot, the Nevada morning already warm around me, the sun properly up, the heat beginning to build. He picks up on the second ring the way he always does when he has been waiting for the call.
“Brother.”
“It’s time. Two days. Cable’s got everything, including the route, the entry, the timeline. We’re ready.”
A silence on the other end.
Not surprise or hesitation, but relief.
“I’ll tell Rhyder,” Quill says. The weight in those three words—a president who has been holding a very strong man back for a very long time and is finally able to let him go—says everything.
“How is he?”
“Ready. We’re all ready.”
We work through it together, border crossing point, timing, vehicles, and communication protocols. Two presidents, two clubs, one plan built carefully enough that nobody outside these two phone calls will know it is moving until it is already done.
When finished, Quill is quiet for a moment.
“Two days.”
“Two days.”
“Don’t be late.”
“Never am.”
Cable walks me to the door, staying behind to track the movement and make sure there are no surprises on this end.
“Come back.”
“That’s the plan.”
I stand in the parking lot for a long time afterward, thinking about Sophia making dinner tonight, not knowing yet what is coming. She deserves the truth. She has already been through this once with Tracker, and there is no version of tonight where she doesn’t get it.
Not telling her isn’t an option.
I’ll give her everything in my power to make this right. Everything.
I go inside to find Luke.
***
Riding out into the Nevada morning, the desert opening ahead, the city falls away in the mirrors. The air is still cool before the heat arrives. She’s still in my chest in a way that has nothing to do with distance.
I’m sorry, brother, thinking into the open road. And I’m not sorry. Both things at once. I think you understand that.
He probably did.
Tracker had always understood the complicated things.
The day runs long after that with Luke, logistics, and the kind of detailed work that eats for hours without you noticing. By the time I finally leave the clubhouse, the heat has broken, the light gone gold and low over the desert, and all I can think about is getting home to her.
The first thing I noticed when I pulled into the driveway was candlelight.
The warm amber glow of it is visible through the glass, something different about the house, a quality of light that isn’t the pool or the overhead.
I unlock the front door and stop in the doorway.
The table is properly set, a cloth not owned, candles never bought, and the scent of something extraordinary drifting from the kitchen.
Music is low somewhere inside. The flowers on the island are rearranged.
The whole house is transformed from the inside out by a woman who has decided tonight will be something worth remembering.
And Sophia…
She’s standing at the stove in a dress that makes my train of thought disappear completely. She turns when she hears me come in and smiles that smile she has when she is pleased with herself and knows she has reason to be.
Crossing the kitchen in four strides, I kiss her.
Properly, fully, and with both hands in her hair, nothing held back.
When I pull back, she is slightly breathless.
“Hello to you too.”
Looking at her in the candlelight, the dress, and the kitchen that smells like something extraordinary, I cup her face. “I could get used to this.”
Her smile widens. “Good. Sit down. Dinner’s almost ready.”
We eat by candlelight.
The roast is extraordinary. I tell her so, and she waves it off the way she does when she is pleased and doesn’t want to show it. I watch her across the table, think about two days, and feel the weight of it getting heavier with every minute that passes.
She talks about her day, a new development with Victoria Chen, the approval of the signage brief, and Trevor calling with congratulations. Her eyes do that thing they do when she is talking about work she cares about, lit up, focused, and completely alive.
I listen, ask questions, and watch her hands move when she talks.
And think about not coming back.
About her finding out the way she found out about Tracker.
I push it away.
Everything in my power, I tell myself. Everything.
She must see something in my face because she sets her fork down and directly looks at me with that focused blue gaze that never misses anything. “What is it?” she asks quietly. “You’ve had something on your mind all evening.”
I look at her across the candlelit table, at the dress, the candles, the roast, the flowers, and everything she has done to make tonight something worth remembering.
She knew. She planned all of this because she knew something was coming.
“I have something to tell you.”
She holds my gaze.
“I’m leaving in two days.”
The silence that follows is very quiet.
I watch her take it in, the understanding moving across her face, feeling everything completely, showing just enough of it, and holding the rest somewhere unseen.
“Mexico.”
“Yes.”
A beat.
“Two days,” she repeats.
“Yes.”