Chapter 24
The compound had never looked like this.
Seventy bikes filled the gravel lot, chrome catching the late-afternoon sun in a field of white light that made Buckshot squint as he came down the cabin steps.
The deck over the cove was strung with lights—the same ones from the cookout, plus a hundred more that Maggie and the old ladies had added without asking permission, because asking permission was not a thing old ladies did when a claiming was happening.
Smoke rose off the pit in a thick, sweet column that drifted across the cove and settled over the water.
Every brother and old lady and prospect and hanger-on in the Ozark Ridgerunners was on the property, and the noise of it—laughter, music, someone's kid screaming off the dock—filled the hollow like a living thing.
Buckshot stood at the bottom of the steps and looked at all of it and felt his chest go tight in a way that had nothing to do with nerves and everything to do with the thing Still had said on the deck rail a week ago: this is the whole thing.
He was wearing his cut and a clean shirt and boots he'd actually polished, which was something he hadn't done since he'd earned the patch.
The property patch was in his inside pocket—the leather rectangle that would go on Tamsin's shoulders and tell every man in the Ozarks that she was claimed, protected, and part of something bigger than either of them.
He touched it through the leather. Felt the weight of it.
Understood what it meant in a way he hadn't understood when he'd watched other brothers claim their women—that it wasn't about ownership.
It was about standing up in front of every person you knew and saying this one, this is the one I chose and the one who chose me, and you will treat her the way you treat me or you will answer for it.
"You look like you're about to throw up," Cottonmouth said from the deck rail.
"Shut up."
"I'm just saying. Green is not your color."
"I'm not nervous."
"You polished your boots."
Buckshot looked down at his boots. Looked at Cottonmouth. The cold-eyed sergeant at arms was leaning on the rail with a beer and an expression that was—impossibly—close to fond.
"She's going to say yes," Cottonmouth said. "She already said yes. You're putting a patch on a woman who's already yours and everybody knows it. Relax."
"Since when do you give advice?"
"Since you polished your boots. It's unsettling. Stop it."
Buckshot almost laughed. Almost.
The old ladies had Tamsin. He hadn't seen her since morning—Maggie had collected her from the cabin at seven with the authority of a woman who ran a BBQ joint and ran everything else, and Tamsin had been disappeared into the kitchen and the back rooms and the world of women who had done this before and knew exactly how it was supposed to go.
He didn't know what they were doing in there. Didn't need to. The old ladies had their rituals the way the brothers had theirs, and a man who interfered with either one learned fast that some things were not his to manage.
Still found him on the deck at five.
The president was in his cut, clean shirt, the same quiet authority he wore whether he was running chapel or running a cookout.
He stood beside Buckshot at the rail and looked at the cove going gold in the afternoon light and said nothing for a while, because Still understood that some silences were more useful than words.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"Then let's do it."
The brotherhood gathered on the deck.
Not formal—the Ridgerunners didn't do formal.
But ordered, in the way that men who lived by hierarchy ordered themselves: officers first, patched members behind, prospects at the edges, the old ladies standing with their men.
Maggie beside Still. Jolene with Limestone.
Darcy with Current. Tessa with Cottonmouth.
Carmen with Proof. Bree with Tailwater. Nadine with Spillway.
The women who'd been through this themselves, who knew exactly what the patch meant because they wore one, standing with the men who'd put it on their shoulders.
Buckshot stood at the center of the deck with the cove behind him and the whole club in front of him and the property patch in his hands.
Tamsin came through the clubhouse door.
She wore jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled past her forearms and her keys on her belt loop, because she was Tamsin Foley and she wasn't going to pretend to be someone who dressed up.
Her hair was down—the dark blonde catching the light, the scar through her eyebrow visible, the gray eyes steady.
She walked through the gathered brotherhood the way she walked through everything—squared-off, direct, weight set on both feet—and the brothers parted for her without being asked.
She stopped in front of Buckshot.
The deck was quiet. Seventy men and women, silent, the only sound the water lapping the cove pilings and the smoke rising off the pit.
Still stepped forward.
"Buckshot claims Tamsin Foley as his old lady," he said.
His voice carried across the deck, the cove, the whole compound—patient, unhurried, the voice of a man saying words that had been said in this club for decades and would be said for decades more.
"She rides under his protection, stands beside him in this brotherhood, and carries the Ridgerunner name on her shoulders.
Any man who touches her answers to him. Any man who disrespects her answers to the club.
She is family, from this day, by his claim and her acceptance. "
Still looked at Tamsin.
"Do you accept?"
"I do."
Two words. She said them standing straight with her shoulders squared, the same way she'd said them in chapel when she'd asked for a vote she had no standing to ask for—direct, certain, a woman who'd earned this through fire and blood and the refusal to be anything less than what she was.
Buckshot stepped forward. His hands were steady—the hands that loaded shotguns and spread damage wide and had come through a wall to get to her—and he opened the property patch and placed it on her shoulders.
The leather settled against her back. His hands smoothed it down, and he felt her shoulders shift under his palms—not flinching, not adjusting. Settling. Taking the weight of it the way she took everything: straight on, without apology.
The deck erupted.
Not polite applause—noise. Brotherhood noise.
Fists on the rail, boots on the deck, a roar that came up from the men and women gathered there like something that had been waiting to be released.
Cottonmouth hit the rail with his palm so hard the boards shook.
Proof whistled through his teeth. Spillway nodded once, which from him was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
And the old ladies claimed her louder than the brothers did.
Maggie was first—pulling Tamsin into a hug that lifted her off her feet, which was something because Tamsin was not a small woman.
Then Jolene, then Darcy, then the rest, each one pulling her in with the fierce, possessive warmth of women who understood what the patch meant because they lived it every day.
They touched the leather on her shoulders and said things in her ear that Buckshot couldn't hear and didn't need to, because the look on Tamsin's face—the crack in that composure, the brightness in her gray eyes, the tremor in her jaw that she was fighting to control—told him everything.
Maggie pressed a set of keys into Tamsin's hand.
Cabin keys. A compound cabin she hadn't asked for and wouldn't be allowed to refuse, because old ladies didn't live in their man's bachelor quarters.
They had their own space and their own key and their own place in the compound hierarchy, and that started now.
Tamsin looked at the keys. Looked at Maggie. Looked at Buckshot.
"I already have keys," she said, and held up the ring on her belt loop—eighteen room keys and a master, the keys to the motel she'd built and defended and refused to give up.
"Now you have more," Maggie said.
Buckshot watched his woman get pulled into the middle of his family, and the thing he'd been slow about all along finally finished settling into place.
She was never going to be something he kept safe.
She was never going to be the woman behind the wall, the old lady in the cabin, the possession he guarded.
She was going to be something he stood next to—on a deck, in a parking lot, in a chapel, in a fight. Beside him. Not behind.
The party unfolded the way compound parties unfolded—the food came off the pit, the beer came out of the coolers, the music got louder, and the sun went down behind the bluffs and the lights on the deck came on and turned the cove into something that looked like it belonged on a postcard from a world that didn't exist anywhere else.
Buckshot danced with her. He didn't dance—hadn't danced since before the buckshot and the patch and the man he'd become—but she took his hand and pulled him into the middle of the deck and put her arms around his neck, and he put his hands on her hips where the property patch met the waistband of her jeans and they moved together to a song he didn't know the name of while the brotherhood drank and laughed around them.
"Nice boots," she said.
"Shut up."
"You polished them."
"Cottonmouth already told me."
She grinned up at him. That grin—wide, open, the one that had appeared in a parking lot four days ago and hadn't left—and he felt it in his chest the way he felt everything about her. Like a round going off. Like the moment he'd decided that falling was a choice and gotten up.
The party ran down to the fire pit and the last light on the water.
The kids fell asleep in laps. The music went from loud to low.
Brothers drifted off to cabins and the bunkhouse, and the old ladies gathered the plates and the empties with the practiced efficiency of women who'd done this a hundred times.
Buckshot found Tamsin at the fire pit with the last of the beer and the last of the light.
She was sitting on a log with the property patch on her shoulders and the fire casting shadows across her face, and she was looking at the lake with an expression he'd never seen on her before.
Not watching for threats. Not counting bodies.
Not scanning the perimeter or checking the tree line or doing any of the thousand things her brain had been trained to do in every space she entered.
She was just looking.
He held out his hand.
She took it. Stood. The fire cracked behind them and the lake stretched out dark and still and the compound lights made a warm glow against the hillside above the cove.
Buckshot took his old lady's hand and walked her away from all of it—the fire, the party, the brothers, the noise—up the gravel path toward the cabin on the hill, with the property patch on her shoulders and the stars coming out overhead and nowhere in the world they needed to be except together.