Chapter Twenty-Eight
TATE
The following day is quiet.
No club, no calls, no Mexico sitting on the surface of everything, just underneath it, the way it has been for weeks, except closer now and more real.
There is a quality to the day that knows what is coming and has decided to be gentle about it, the light softer than usual, the desert still, the house holding itself in a particular kind of hush that has nothing to do with noise.
There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
She doesn’t ask me to stay.
I just don’t leave.
We move around each other in the easy way developed over these months, her at the island with The Ember project, me on the back deck with my phone, and Memphis stretched across my feet in the Nevada heat, the house cool and quiet around us.
She makes lunch, appearing in the doorway to tell me it is ready the way she does most things, simply and without fuss, like it has always been part of how this house works.
At some point in the afternoon, the sliding door gets fixed.
It has been sticking for weeks, that particular catch and drag that you notice every time and forget every time, so I crouch down in front of it with a screwdriver.
At the same time, she stands in the kitchen doorway watching with her coffee, her hip against the frame, completely unbothered by the fact that she is winning something.
“I’ve been waiting for you to do that for a month.”
“You could have said something.”
“I did.”
She had, actually. More than once. And each time there had been an ‘I’ll get to it’ followed by not getting to it, because there was always something else, and now she is looking at me with the smile of a woman who has just won an argument without raising her voice.
I look back at her and feel something move in my chest that is warm, uncomplicated, and entirely real.
“Fair enough.”
She smiles into her coffee and goes back inside.
In the late afternoon, Memphis and I take the desert trail behind the house, the one that winds up into the scrubland and opens out into a view of the whole valley if you go far enough.
Out there in the open with the heat pressing down and the city small in the distance, I let myself properly think about tomorrow.
The plan is settling into my bones with every step.
Cable’s eleven minutes.
The north wall blind spot.
Rhyder’s face in that church room and the promise made in the heat of the parking lot.
The unknown figure moving through the hacienda courtyard, something familiar in the way he carries himself that still won’t resolve into anything certain.
And underneath all of it, Sophia.
The weight of what is being ridden toward sits alongside the weight of what is being ridden away from, and both of them are real, and neither of them cancels out the other, and that is just what it is.
When I come back, she is on the back deck in the last of the sun with a book she isn’t reading, her legs tucked beneath her in the chair, her eyes somewhere in the middle distance beyond the page.
I sit beside her without saying anything.
The desert goes slowly gold around us, the mountains catching the last of the light, Memphis dropping heavily between our chairs with a sigh of pure contentment.
Neither of us says anything about tomorrow.
We don’t need to. It is already in everything, in the quality of the light and the particular stillness between us, in the way she reaches over after a while and places her hand over mine on the arm of the chair without looking up from the book, and in the way my hand turns over beneath hers and holds on without making anything of it.
Just present, both of us, for as long as we have left of today.
***
In the morning, she is already up when I come out of the bedroom, dressed and ready, her bag sitting by the door with the quiet finality of something decided.
“I’m coming with you. To the clubhouse. To properly say goodbye.”
Looking at her, the bag, the set of her jaw, and the blue eyes that are steady and entirely decided, I pick up the helmet from the counter and hold it out without a word.
She takes it the same way.
We ride through the Vegas morning in the silence of two people who have said everything and have nothing left to add to it.
Her arms are around me, and her cheek is against my back, the city moving past on either side, and the clubhouse getting closer with the weight of a goodbye that neither of us is ready for, sitting quietly between us in the warm desert air.
The Sinners are already there when we pull up.
Luke, Flame, Cable, and Diesel are standing in the lot with their bikes ready and their cuts on, carrying the focused energy of men who have been waiting for this moment and are ready to move.
They look up when I pull in, and then they see Sophia on the back of my bike.
I feel the shift move through the lot, that quality of attention that changes when men register something significant.
It’s not surprise exactly, but something closer to recognition, the acknowledgment of something that has been building for a long time and has finally been named.
Luke catches my eye across the lot and says nothing, but something moves in his expression that is quietly and completely approving.
We get to work with last-minute details and final checks.
Cable goes through the timeline one more time with the focused calm of a man for whom thoroughness is its own kind of care.
Sophia stands slightly to the side and watches without making it into anything more than what it is, a woman who understands the world she is standing in and knows her place in it without needing to be told.
She has always understood this world. Always knew she would.
We say goodbye at the bike.
My men have moved inside with the discretion of people who understand that some moments aren’t for an audience, and it is just the two of us in the lot with the Vegas sun climbing, the desert stretching beyond the city, and the bikes lined up, ready to go.
She stands in front of me and looks up with those blue eyes that hold everything she feels without apology or concealment. It’s the fear, love, and the fierce determination of a woman who has already survived the unsurvivable and is being asked to face the possibility of it again.
Cupping her face in both hands, I tilt it up and kiss her, fully and without hurry, and she holds onto it with both hands in my cut, pulling me closer, holding on with everything she has. I feel her shake slightly, just once, the tremor of someone holding themselves together by sheer force of will.
When we pull back, her eyes are bright, she blinks once, and holds it together.
“Everything in your power,” she says.
“Everything in my power.”
She nods, releases my cut, and steps back. I make myself turn away from her, walk myself to the bike, throw my leg over it, and start the engine. When I look back one last time, she is standing in the lot with the sun in her hair, her arms wrapped around herself, and her eyes steady on mine.
I hold her gaze for just a moment longer than I should.
Then I ride.
Sophia
Watching him until he can’t be seen anymore, the sound of the bikes fades into the Vegas morning, and the lot falls empty and quiet. There is nothing left of him except the echo of engine noise, the smell of exhaust, and the particular weight of everything he has taken with him.
Standing there in the empty lot just breathing, I hold it together the way I promised myself I would, the way I held it together when Ryan left for the mansion that last time, not knowing it was the last time, not knowing that holding it together was all I would have left of that goodbye.
This time, it is known, and I hold it together anyway, because he needs to go without carrying my fear on top of everything else he is already carrying, and telling him ‘Everything in your power’ was the only honest thing either of us could say.
Not come back. Not I’ll be here. Just that, just ‘Everything in your power,’ the rest sitting out of both our hands where neither of us can reach it.
Turning to go inside, I almost walk straight into Raven.
She is just inside the door in the hallway that leads to the kitchen, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and her dark eyes steady on mine.
She says it almost conversationally, with the particular ease of a woman who has decided she has nothing left to lose in this conversation and is going to say exactly what she means. “You couldn’t wait, could you?”
The composure on her face is doing a great deal of work, holding together something underneath it that is raw, hurting, and has clearly been sitting on this for a long time.
“Your man is barely cold in the ground,” she says. “And you’re already in his brother’s bed.”
The words land exactly where she means them to, and I let them, standing there looking at her, at the dark eyes, the set jaw, and the pain of a woman who has wanted something she was never going to have and has just watched it walk out the door on someone else’s arm.
That pain is understood, and I almost feel sorry for her.
Almost.
“You had one brother,” she says. “He died. So, you found another one.” Her eyes don’t waver. “Tell me how that’s different from what I do.”
Holding her gaze for a long moment, I say nothing because there is nothing to say that would reach her right now.
She is hurting, and hurting people say the sharpest thing available to them, and the sharpest thing available to her happens to be the question I have been quietly asking myself for weeks.
Then I turn and walk into the kitchen.
Standing at the counter with both hands pressed flat against the cool surface, the kitchen is empty around me, just the muffled noise of the clubhouse beyond the door, and Raven’s words sitting in the quiet with me, taking up considerably more space than I want them to.
‘Your man is barely cold in the ground.’
‘You found another one.’
Is that what happened? Is that what the last two days were, grief reaching for the nearest familiar shape, comfort disguised as something more, the vulnerability of a woman who attaches herself to the only person who shows up?
The thought sits in my chest like something cold.
I press my hands harder against the counter and breathe, trying to find the truth beneath the cruelty of it, the fear, doubt, and devastation of having the ugliest possible version of something said out loud.
And what I find is this.
I don’t know.
Not with the certainty I need.
And that terrifies me more than anything Raven has said.
Remy arrives so quietly I don’t hear him, just suddenly there in the kitchen doorway, taking in the scene and taking in me, his face doing the thing young faces do when they are trying to work out what has happened and how to respond to it.
He crosses to the counter and stands beside me without asking whether that’s what I want, because Remy has always understood that some moments don’t need an invitation.
“He’ll come back.” He said it like that is what the tears are about, like he has already decided the only useful thing he can do is be certain, so I don’t have to be.
Not correcting him.
“My prez is the strongest man I know. The best man I know. And he’s coming back…” A pause, young, genuine, and completely certain. “I’d bet everything on it.”
Looking at him, at this young man who had worked construction in Phoenix, found his way to a motorcycle club in Vegas, and had spent weeks driving me around this city, talking to me like I was worth talking to and meaning every single word of it, I feel something loosen slightly in my chest.
“Thank you, Remy.”
He nods, looks at the counter for a moment, and then back up. “You want to go home?”
I think about the house, the flowers on the island, the painting on the wall, the pool light moving slowly across the ceiling at night, and the quiet of a space that had become home without me deciding it would. His home with me in it.
‘Your man is barely cold in the ground.’
“Yeah,” I say. “I want to go home.”