Chapter Twenty-Nine #3
Then I say what has been sitting in my mind from the moment he was found in that villa. “How could you do this?” Not loud and not only angry, something more complicated underneath it, the exhaustion of a man who has been carrying something for a very long time and is finally putting it down.
Tracker is quiet.
“To Sophia,” I say. “To us. You were gone, brother. We buried you. She—” I stop, feeling the weight of it sitting in my chest, all of it, every day of the last months compressed into this single moment.
“I had to bring her back from the dead. Do you understand that? She was barely here. And I had to—”
I stop.
He lets me stop, doesn’t rush it, doesn’t fill it.
“How could you choose this over her? Over all of us?”
The ocean moves.
Tracker looks at his hands for a moment. “I had to be part of bringing them to justice. Lawrence, Clemente, everything they did, to Lexi, to Sophia, to the club. I was already in the system. Sam gave me a choice, and I chose this… and I chose Riley. She was alone in there.”
“At what cost?”
He is quiet for a long time. “I know what it cost.” He turns and meets my gaze.
His eyes are brown, not green, a stranger’s eyes, fitted over the only ones I’d have ever known, and the weight of it is there, not regret exactly, but something more complicated than regret.
“I’m sorry, Tate. For what you had to carry.
For what Sophia had to carry. I’m sorry for that. ”
I stare at him, at my dead brother sitting alive beside me in Mexico. “I don’t know if I can forgive you for this. Not yet. You tore our hearts out.”
He nods, doesn’t argue or defend, just takes it, which is the most Tracker thing he could have done, and somehow makes it harder to stay angry.
We sit in the silence for a while, while the ocean moves.
Then, quieter now, with something shifting in his voice. “Sophia. How is she? Really.”
The question lands somewhere specific.
“She’s good. She’s living her life. Working. She got a big client, a hotel in Vegas.”
Tracker is quiet, looking out at the ocean, then he turns and looks at me with those eyes that have always seen more than is comfortable.
“Is she hurt? Is there something you’re not telling me?”
I hold his gaze and say nothing, because there is nothing adequate, nothing fair to Sophia, to Tracker, or any of us, nothing that can be said in the dark outside a Mexican villa at the end of all of this with my brother sitting alive beside me and the question of whether she will still choose me pressing down on everything.
“She’s good.”
Tracker looks at me for a long moment, weighing the words, the silence, and the quality of what isn’t being said. I watch him decide not to push, not here and not tonight. “Okay,” he says.
But he doesn’t entirely believe it.
And we both know it.
***
We ride back to the border in the dark, the vehicles quiet around us with Luke up front and Flame beside him and Quill in the seat to my left, carrying his own version of everything we’ve just been through.
Looking out at the Mexican dark going past, I think about Sophia, the house, everything built in the months since she arrived, and about coming home and my brother, alive, coming home beside me.
Will she still choose me?
The question sits in my chest the whole way back without an answer, because it doesn’t belong to me.
Sophia loved Tracker with everything she had.
He was her person before he was ever a Blood Brother or anyone’s road name, and now he is coming back from the dead, and there is no way of knowing what that means for what is between us.
I only know what is felt.
And knowing that feeling doesn’t guarantee anything.
Everything in my power, I think into the dark.
But this isn’t something power can touch.
This is Sophia’s, whatever comes next, entirely and completely hers.
***
Tracker wants to come to the house, and I talk him out of it.
“Give me time. I need to tell her first.”
He looks at me for a long moment, those eyes reading something in my face that I’m not ready to explain, and then nods. “Okay.”
So instead of going home, I drop him at the Sinners’ clubhouse and drive straight to the house, knowing only that nothing about what comes next is going to be simple.
The house is quiet when I let myself in.
Too quiet.
Memphis doesn’t come to the door, and standing in the entrance for a moment, I feel the absence of something that should be present before moving through to the kitchen.
New flowers on the island. She’d replaced them before she left. The painting is still on the wall. Her coffee mug is on the shelf beside mine. And on the counter, a folded piece of paper is propped against the coffee machine where she knew it would be found.
Standing there for a moment before picking it up, already knowing its weight, understanding it before the paper is unfolded.
Her handwriting is small and careful, the neatness of a designer’s hand.
I’m sorry.
I think I was wrong.
About all of it.
— S
Standing in the kitchen with the note in hand, the new flowers on the island, the painting on the wall, and something dropping out of the bottom of my chest, and not stopping.
She is gone.