9. Cassidy
CASSIDY
The door hits the wall, and I’m awake.
Daylight. My room. Crash’s arm heavy across my waist, his gun on my nightstand, and my brother standing in the doorway with his key still in his hand.
Nobody moves. I look at the clock. It’s past lunchtime.
Saber’s eyes go from me, to Crash, to the boots by my bed, to the gun on the nightstand, and back to me.
He crosses the room in three steps, fists Crash’s shirt with both hands, and rips him off my bed.
“Whoa!” That’s all Crash gets out.
The punch lands flush. Crash goes into my dresser, catches the edge of it, and stays down on one knee. He doesn’t get up. He doesn’t put his hands up either. He spits blood onto my floor and stays exactly where my brother put him.
“Stop!” I’m out of the bed, blanket gone, in my T-shirt and shorts with my hands out between them. “Saber, stop!”
“You’re supposed to protect her.” Saber is yelling. “I gave you one job. One. We talked, and you told me she was fine, and the whole time you were—” He cuts himself off. His jaw works. “Get up so I can knock you down again.”
“Stop it.” I plant myself in front of my brother. “Look at me. Saber. Look at me. I’m a grown woman. He didn’t do anything wrong. I love him.”
Saber looks at me like I slapped him. Then he laughs, one short ugly sound with nothing in it.
“You love him.” He points past me without taking his eyes off mine.
“Cass, I’ve known that man for most of my life.
I’ve watched him charm half the county out of their pants and forget their names by breakfast. He’s my best friend, and I’d die for him.
But listen, I’m telling you, as the person who loves you most on this earth, he could never love you.
He doesn’t have it in him. He’s never had it in him. ”
“You’re wrong,” Crash says from the floor.
He gets up slowly, one hand on my dresser, blood running from the corner of his mouth, and he doesn’t wipe it. He stands there in front of the man who hit him and doesn’t square up, doesn’t grin, doesn’t crack jokes to defuse the situation.
“I didn’t want you to find out about us like this.” He looks at me when he says the rest. “You’re wrong, Saber. I do love her.”
For just a moment, I forget my brother is in the room.
Crash has never said it. Not on the ridge, not in this bed, not in the dark when it would’ve been easy. He said mine and yours. But he didn’t say love—until now.
He loves me. He said it. He said it out loud.
Saber stares at him. “Out of all the fucking women throwing themselves at you,” Saber says, “you pick my little sister.”
“I didn’t pick her. You think I’d choose this? You think I wanted to want the one woman guaranteed to cost me my best friend?” Crash shakes his head once. “It’s her. It was always going to be her. I just didn’t know it until she came home.”
Saber’s hands open and close at his sides.
And then his phone buzzes, and I watch Saber read the screen. His shoulders set. When he looks up, the fury is still there, but something else just happened. That’s what this life does—it doesn’t even let him finish being angry.
“We’re at war, and I don’t have time for this shit.
” He points a finger at Crash. “And if it weren’t for that, I’d fucking kill you.
And you’d let me, because you know you’ve got it coming.
But right now, I need my VP more than I need to beat the shit out of my best friend. Get dressed. Church. Five minutes.”
He walks out. He doesn’t look at me again, and that hurts more than anything he said.
Crash picks his boots up off my floor. There’s already swelling along his cheekbone, and his lip is split.
When he stops in front of me, I reach up and wipe the blood off his chin with my thumb.
“You heard that,” he says. “What I said.”
“I heard it.”
“I wanted to tell you differently. Not like this.” His hand comes up to the side of my neck, thumb along my jaw. “I’ll fix it. After.”
“Go.” I push him toward the door. “Your Prez needs you.”
He kisses me once, fast, copper on his mouth, and he’s gone down the hall with his boots still in his hand.
The sun is dropping behind the western range when there’s a knock, and it’s Trapper, and his expression is all wrong.
“Pack a bag, Cass. You’re leaving in ten minutes with the others.”
“What’s happening?”
“All the women and kids are moving. Safehouse.” He’s already looking down the hall toward the next door. “Clubhouse isn’t safe enough. Everybody knows where it is, and Saber wants you all someplace different. Ten minutes, okay?”
He’s gone before I can ask anything else. Not that he’d answer. Club business.
I pack the way I was raised to pack in situations like these—fast, essentials first.
Downstairs is controlled chaos. Shelby is directing traffic with a duffel bag over her shoulder. Violet has Leo on her hip and a suitcase in her free hand. Eden and Bree are helping organize. The other Old Ladies are managing kids or helping out where needed.
Jinx works his way down the line with a box of small black fobs, zip-tying one inside Leo’s backpack, handing one to each woman.
“Trackers,” he says when he gets to me, pressing one into my palm. “Everybody carries one. Pocket, not the bag. Extra precaution.”
“Precaution against what?”
“Pocket, Cass.”
I put it in my pocket.
We take cars, not bikes—too many people, too much luggage, and too many car seats. My sedan ends up third in the caravan, Bree riding shotgun in the car ahead of me, brothers on bikes bracketing the whole column like a moving fence.
Jinx and Trapper left to meet up with Saber.
Acorn is on the lead bike. Crash is nowhere in the line, and I don’t get to know where he is instead.
The clubhouse shrinks in my mirror.
The desert slides by.
We’re forty minutes out, on a two-lane stretch with nothing on either side, when the lead bikes brake hard.
Brake lights. Bree’s car is swerving. A truck where no truck should be comes off the shoulder fast.
It hits my passenger side like the world is ending.
There’s glass. The seatbelt cutting into me. The horizon rolling over itself, sky then dirt then sky.
Then nothing at all.