Chapter Eighteen
Diane built a bouquet at three in the morning because her hands wouldn't do anything else.
The compound was quiet around her. The old ladies had drifted to their rooms an hour ago, after the phone calls came and the news settled—Raymond Hebert was dead, the brothers were riding home, nobody was hurt badly enough to need more than stitches and bourbon.
Jolene had squeezed Diane's hand before she left, a single gesture that carried more than any words could have.
Now Diane stood in her flower corner, alone with her buckets and her scissors and the wild, shaking relief that hadn't fully landed yet.
She chose wildflowers. The ones she'd been picking along the fence line every morning for two weeks—purple coneflower, black-eyed Susans, goldenrod that blazed yellow even in the dim light of the garage bay.
Nothing cultivated. Nothing arranged for a purpose.
Just the things that grew along the edges of a motorcycle compound because the Delta didn't care what you built on top of it.
She wrapped the stems in burlap from the supply shelf. Tied them with twine instead of ribbon, because ribbon was for funerals and weddings and this was something else entirely.
This was for a man coming home.
The engines reached her before the headlights did.
That thunder—the one she'd learned to read the way she read weather, counting bikes by the depth of the rumble—rolled across the flat country and through the compound walls.
She set down her scissors. Picked up the bouquet.
Walked out into the lot with burlap and wildflowers in her hands and gravel under her boots.
The gates opened.
They came through in formation—Cottonmouth at the head, Outlaw beside him, the brothers filling in behind with the practiced spacing of men who'd been riding together long enough to breathe as one. Headlights cut across the lot, throwing long shadows over chrome and brick.
And at the back, where he always rode, Burial.
He pulled in last. Killed the engine. Sat for a moment on the bike, his hands still on the grips, his face unreadable in the wash of light from the garage.
Diane walked to him.
She didn't run. Didn't rush. Crossed the gravel with the steady pace of a woman who'd spent two weeks proving she didn't panic, didn't fold, didn't need saving—and who was done proving anything to anyone.
She stopped in front of his bike and held out the bouquet.
Burial looked at it. At the wildflowers wrapped in burlap, tied with twine, built from the things that grew along his own fence line. His hands came off the grips slowly, like a man letting go of something he'd been holding too long.
He took the flowers.
His fingers closed around the burlap the way she'd seen him hold everything—carefully, with the specific gentleness of hands that knew their own strength. He brought the bouquet to his face and breathed in, and something in his expression cracked open in a way she'd never seen.
"You built this while I was gone," he said.
"I build things. It's what I do."
He swung off the bike, the bouquet still in his hand, and pulled her against him with his free arm.
She pressed her face into his chest and breathed leather and road dust and gunpowder and the faintest trace of river mud, and under all of it the scent that was just him—warm skin and worn cotton and the particular stillness of a man who'd finally stopped running from what he wanted.
"Front door," she said against his cut.
"Front door."
Around them, the compound erupted.
Brothers shouting, engines revving in celebration, the sharp crack of bottles being opened and the low roar of men releasing the tension they'd been carrying for weeks.
Someone cranked a radio and slide guitar spilled across the lot, mixing with laughter and the clink of glass and the specific joy of a club that had just taken back its territory.
Diane let herself be swept into it.
She'd expected to feel like an outsider—the florist at the biker party, the civilian who didn't quite fit.
Instead, she found herself pulled from one conversation to the next by brothers who clapped her shoulder and told her the map was good, the timing was perfect, the alleys were exactly where she said they'd be.
"Your girl drew us a goddamn treasure map," Crossroad told Burial, loud enough for half the lot to hear. "I've been riding those streets for three years and she knew them better than I did."
"She delivers flowers," Burial said. "She knows every door."
"She knows every back door." Crossroad grinned. "No wonder you two fit."
Diane laughed—a real laugh, full and surprised, the kind she hadn't made since before her shop window exploded.
Crossroad winked and disappeared into the crowd, and Burial's arm tightened around her waist with the casual possessiveness of a man who'd stopped pretending he wasn't exactly what he was.
Hers.
The party filled the courtyard around the fire pit.
Someone had built the flames high, and the light danced across leather and chrome and the faces of men who'd ridden into violence and come home whole.
The old ladies emerged from wherever they'd been waiting—Jolene appearing at Cottonmouth's side, Nora finding Outlaw, the others filtering in with the ease of women who'd done this before and would do it again.
Megan found Diane at the edge of the firelight and pressed a beer into her hand.
"You survived your first war," Megan said.
"I survived a lot of things before this."
"I know. That's why you're still standing." Megan clinked her bottle against Diane's. "The ones who break don't make it past the first week. You made it past the first week and redecorated."
Diane smiled. "The compound needed flowers."
"The compound needed you." Megan's voice softened. "The flowers were just how you announced it."
The hours blurred. Diane moved through the celebration the way she moved through her shop—practically, efficiently, making things better by being present.
She brought more wildflowers from her corner and scattered them across the tables.
She built a small arrangement for the bar from whatever she could find, and two prospects stared at it like she'd performed surgery on the countertop.
She refilled drinks and cleaned up spills and argued with Grace about whether barbecue counted as cuisine, and somewhere in the middle of all of it she realized she'd stopped thinking of the compound as a place she was staying and started thinking of it as a place she lived.
The shift was quiet. Unremarkable. The way most permanent things were.
Burial was there through all of it—not hovering, not guarding, just present in the way she'd come to understand as his truest form of affection.
He talked with brothers. Accepted their nods and handshakes.
Let Hollow clap him on the shoulder with a force that would have staggered a smaller man.
But his eyes found hers across the crowd every few minutes, checking, confirming, making sure she was still there.
She was always still there.
The party wound down past midnight. Brothers drifted toward their rooms in pairs and clusters, the energy shifting from celebration to the quiet satisfaction of men who'd done hard work and were ready to rest. The fire burned low.
The radio played something slow and bluesy, slide guitar weeping into the Delta night.
Diane found a seat on the loading dock, her legs dangling over the edge, a half-finished beer warming in her hand. The compound stretched before her—the gravel lot, the bike rows, the converted cotton gin with its brick walls and corrugated iron roof catching moonlight.
Home.
The word kept surfacing, and she kept letting it.
Burial appeared beside her, settling onto the loading dock with the easy grace of a man who'd finally stopped carrying more than his own weight.
He sat close, his thigh against hers, the bouquet of wildflowers still in his hand.
He'd carried it all night. Through the celebration, through the toasts, through every conversation and handshake.
He'd held her flowers the way he held everything she gave him.
Like it was the most important thing he owned.
"The shop," she said. "I'm going to start rebuilding tomorrow."
"I know."
"New cooler. New window. New display cases." She ticked the list off on her fingers. "Insurance will cover some of it. The rest I'll figure out."
"The brothers will help."
"I know that too." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "Crossroad already offered to source a van. Levee said something about knowing a guy with commercial coolers."
"Levee knows a guy for everything."
"Does he know a guy for flower suppliers? Because I lost my wholesaler when the shop went down, and rebuilding a supply chain from scratch is going to take—"
"Diane."
She stopped. His voice had shifted—still soft, still unhurried, but carrying something underneath that made the air between them change.
"Yeah?"
He set the bouquet down on the loading dock between them. His hands—scarred, calloused, the hands of a man who'd dug graves and killed men and held her like she was sacred—rested on his knees.
"I want you to stand for claiming."
The words landed in the quiet between slide guitar notes.
No performance. No theater. No grand gesture or public declaration. Just a man sitting on a loading dock with wildflowers beside him, asking the woman he loved to let the world know she was his.
"At the fire pit," he continued, his voice barely above the music. "In front of the brothers. I want to stand in front of every man I've ever ridden behind and tell them that I found something I'm not willing to bury."
Diane's vision blurred. She blinked hard, twice, and refused to acknowledge the heat behind her eyes.
"That's the most words I've ever heard you say at once," she managed.
"I've been saving them."
She laughed—wet, broken, completely undone—and pressed her hand over her mouth because if she didn't, the sound that came out would be something the whole compound heard.
"You're asking me to be your old lady," she said.
"I'm asking you to be my everything." His eyes held hers, dark and steady and burning with a certainty she'd never seen in him before. "The flowers and the fire pit and the room I come home to. The front door. All of it."
"Jonah." His name, whispered, because some words only worked in the real.
"Yeah?"
She picked up the bouquet from the dock between them. Held it against her chest with both hands, the burlap rough against her skin, the wildflowers brushing her chin.
"Yes," she said. "With dirt under my nails and tears I'll deny later. Yes."
His hand found the back of her neck and drew her forward, and the kiss that followed tasted like beer and wildflowers and the specific sweetness of a man who'd finally found something he wanted to keep alive.
They sat on the loading dock in the moonlight, foreheads together, breathing the same air.
The compound hummed around them—low voices from open windows, the tick of cooling engines, a freight train calling from somewhere south.
The fire pit smoldered in the courtyard where they'd sit together in front of the brotherhood, and the wildflowers she'd picked from the fence line were crushed between them, fragrant and stubborn and refusing to die.
"Saturday," he said.
"Saturday," she agreed.
Three days to build the arrangements for her own claiming ceremony. Three days to turn a fire pit in a converted cotton gin into something worthy of the word permanent.
Her hands were already planning.