15. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mustang
The clubhouse hit me like a closed fist — low ceiling, scarred leather couches pushed against wood-paneled walls, the whole place smelling like twenty years of motor oil and cigarette smoke baked into everything that couldn’t run away.
Patches covered every inch of wall space that wasn’t claimed by framed photos — men on bikes, men standing in front of this same building at different stages of its life, men with their arms around each other’s shoulders in the way of people who’d bled for each other and didn’t need to say it out loud.
A long bar ran along the back wall, lined with mismatched stools that looked like they’d been salvaged from half the dive bars in the county, and behind it, bottles glinted in the dim light like promises no one was in a hurry to keep.
Six men were scattered around the room when we came through the door.
I clocked them in the half-second before conversation died — Loch leaning against the bar with a pool cue balanced across his palms, his ice-blue eyes doing that thing where they didn’t quite land on you but saw everything anyway.
Socket and Screwball at a table near the far wall, coffee mugs between them, their postures the loose readiness of men who spent more time on guard than off.
J.D. stood near the door where a Prospect was supposed to stand, his expression carefully neutral, though something moved behind his eyes when he saw me — not judgment, not exactly. The look of someone recalibrating.
Then Mustang’s hand settled at the small of my back, warm through the leather of my jacket, and the room went quiet.
Not the polite quiet of strangers making space.
The dense, textured quiet of a room full of men who’d known each other for decades and were now watching their president walk in with a woman at his side — not a club girl, not a one-night ride, but me, in my jeans and boots and the jacket I’d borrowed from Mustang’s closet because mine had been left behind in a kitchen I wasn’t going back to.
My red hair fell loose over my shoulders, and I could feel every eye in the room tracking the way Mustang’s hand rested against my spine, proprietary and calm, like he’d already made his decision and was just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
He stopped in the center of the room. Didn’t step forward.
Didn’t raise his voice. Just stood there with his hand on my back and his shoulders square under his cut, and when he spoke, the words came out the way everything came out of Mustang’s mouth, flat, certain, taking up exactly as much space as they needed and no more.
“She’s mine.”
Two words. That was it. No explanation, no qualifying language, no softening for the men who’d known him when the phrase “old lady” was something he mocked other brothers for chasing. Just she’s mine, delivered to a room that had gone so still I could hear the fridge humming behind the bar.
The silence held for exactly two seconds.
Then Loch set his pool cue down on the bar with a click that sounded like a period at the end of a sentence he’d been waiting fifteen years to finish.
“So, this is what rock bottom looks like,” he said, deadpan, those ice-blue eyes finally landing on Mustang with the gleam of a man who’d been handed a gift he’d never expected to unwrap, “for a man who once told me, and I quote, ‘the day I let a woman run my life is the day you can put me in the ground.’”
The room broke.
Socket choked on his coffee so hard he had to set the mug down and pound his own chest, his face going red beneath the scar that ran through his eyebrow.
Screwball slapped the table hard enough to make both mugs jump, pointed a finger at Mustang with a grin that split his scarred face from ear to jawline, and barked, “You feel me now, Prez? You feel me?” , the question pitched high with a delight so genuine it bordered on reverence.
Other voices joined, someone from the back called out something about betting pools, another brother muttered “fucking finally” into his beer with the satisfaction of a man who’d been holding his tongue for years.
The sounds filled the clubhouse, rough and overlapping, the unruly music of men who loved each other enough to tear the walls down when the occasion called for it.
J.D. kept his expression neutral. Good Prospect.
But I caught the twitch at the corner of his mouth — a brief, involuntary curl that he killed almost immediately, his gaze dropping to the floor like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
Smart kid. Knew his place. Also knew, in the way prospects always knew, exactly how unprecedented this moment was.
Through it all, Mustang stood with his arms crossed and that slow, deliberate grin spreading across his face.
Not the tight smile of a man enduring ridicule.
Something warmer. Something that reached his eyes and stayed there, crinkling the corners, turning the scar along his jaw into a line that looked almost soft in the clubhouse light.
He didn’t defend himself. Didn’t deflect.
Didn’t offer a single word of the lectures these men had been hearing for fifteen years about women and liability and the specific dangers of letting someone get close enough to matter.
He just stood there and took it, arms crossed, grin steady, owning every second of his own hypocrisy with the quiet certainty of a man who’d found something worth the cost of his pride.
I stood beside him and watched it happen.
My green eyes moved from face to face, Loch’s sardonic satisfaction, Socket’s recovering cough, Screwball’s pointing finger still extended like he couldn’t believe his luck, and something settled in my chest that hadn’t been there before.
Not relief, not exactly. Something closer to recognition.
These men were teasing him because they loved him.
They were tearing into his contradictions because they’d watched him build those walls brick by brick and were genuinely, viscerally delighted to see them come down.
The laughter wasn’t cruelty. It was celebration disguised as mockery, the oldest language men like this had for things they couldn’t say out loud.
My fingers curled once around the hem of my sleeve, a brief, involuntary tell, the only one I allowed myself, and then I straightened.
Lifted my chin. Met Loch’s gaze across the room and held it until his smirk shifted into something that might have been respect, if respect and amusement could occupy the same expression without canceling each other out.
The noise around us began to settle, laughter fading into something warmer, the room finding its new equilibrium with me in it.
Mustang’s hand was still at the small of my back, his thumb moving in a slow, absent circle against the leather of my jacket, and I didn’t look at him because I didn’t need to.
I could feel what was happening in the press of his palm against my spine — steady, certain, the same way he’d sealed a window gap at five in the morning or fixed a wobbly chair while I slept.
Not a performance. Not a declaration. Just a man who’d found something worth keeping and was keeping it, regardless of what his brothers thought or said or how loudly they laughed about it.
I belonged here. The realization didn’t arrive with fanfare. It settled, the way important things usually did — quiet, inevitable, already true by the time I noticed it was there.
The laughter hadn’t fully died when Mustang moved.
One hand left the small of my back, a brief absence I felt like a draft, and he crossed to the bar where something lay folded on the polished wood.
Leather. Black, worn at the edges the way good leather gets when it’s been handled by the same hands for long enough.
He picked it up with both palms, the way you pick up something that has weight beyond its physical mass and turned back toward me.
I knew what it was before he unfolded it.
Property cut. Mine. The patches were already stitched — “Property of Mustang” across the top rocker in crimson thread, the Wicked Mayhem emblem beneath it, the bottom rocker declaring allegiance to a brotherhood I was still learning the shape of.
Someone had done the work while we were elsewhere, Socket, probably, or one of the prospects with steady hands, and the stitching caught the light when Mustang held the vest open toward me, arms extended, his expression offering nothing beyond the simple fact of the gesture itself.
No ceremony. No speech. Just leather held open, waiting.
I shrugged out of my jacket, Mustang’s jacket, technically, borrowed from his closet that morning, and let it fall across the back of the nearest chair.
The clubhouse air was cool against my arms, raising goosebumps along my skin, and then I was sliding into the vest, arms through the sleeves, shoulders settling under leather that smelled new and old at the same time, like something that had been waiting for me specifically without knowing my name.
Mustang’s hands found my shoulders. His palms smoothed the leather flat across my back, fingers working the material into place with the same focused attention he gave everything that mattered — a wobbly chair leg, a window gap, a woman standing in his clubhouse wearing his cut for the first time.
His thumbs adjusted the collar, once, twice, getting it right.
Then his hands rested on my shoulders, heavy and warm through the leather, and he didn’t move them.
I looked down. Ran my thumb across the stitching of the “Property of Mustang” patch, feeling the raised thread under my skin, the texture of something that had been made by hand for a specific purpose.
The words were mine now. Not in the way ownership usually worked, not as possession, not as something taken, but as a choice I’d walked toward through thirteen days in a cabin and a firefight in a courtyard and the particular certainty of standing beside a man who fixed broken things without asking to be thanked for it.
When I looked back up at him, my eyes were steady. No hesitation. None of the questions that had lived in my chest since the first night had disappeared, exactly, but they’d found their place, not gone, just answered by something more solid than words.
From across the room, Loch raised his beer. Not a dramatic gesture. Just the bottle lifted, his ice-blue eyes holding mine for a beat before shifting to Mustang.
“To the man,” he said, his voice carrying the gravel that came from years of things he shouldn’t have smoked, “who spent fifteen years telling us love was a liability.”
Socket lifted his mug from the table. “And the woman,” he added, the corner of his mouth pulling up beneath the scar through his eyebrow, “who apparently didn’t get the memo.”
The room lifted. Mugs, bottles, coffee cups, whatever was in hand, raised toward the center where Mustang and I stood under the weight of leather that now belonged to both of us.
Someone in the back, I couldn’t see who through the forest of raised arms — called out “Wicked Mayhem!” and the room answered, rough and overlapping, the words crashing together into something that wasn’t quite a cheer and wasn’t quite a prayer but lived in the territory between both.
Mustang kept his eyes on me through all of it.
One hand still resting on my shoulder, his thumb moving in that slow, absent circle against the leather, and when the noise peaked — when the sound of his brothers welcoming me into the fold hit its highest point and began to settle back toward the ambient hum of a room that had found its new normal — he leaned down.
Close. His mouth near my ear, his breath warm against my skin, the words meant for me alone.
“You sure about this?”
Not doubt. I heard the difference immediately — the same unshaken conviction that lived in every word out of Mustang’s mouth, but underneath it, something quieter.
The promise he’d been making since the cabin, since the first night he’d laid a blanket across my bound wrists without being asked: your choice.
Always. Even now, with the vest on my shoulders and his brothers’ voices still echoing off the wood-paneled walls, he was giving me the out.
The door. The chance to say this was moving too fast, that the world he lived in was more than I’d signed up for, that loving a man who carried guns and broke contracts and fixed window gaps at five in the morning was more complicated than either of us had planned for.
I reached up and covered his hand with mine where it rested on my shoulder. Pressed it flat against the leather, my palm over his knuckles, feeling the ridges of scar tissue and the cool metal of those heavy silver rings beneath my fingers.
“Ask me again,” I said, my voice low enough that only he could hear it, “and I’ll start charging you for the question.”
His chest shook. Once, twice — a short, genuine laugh that started somewhere beneath his sternum and came out unchecked, the sound rougher than I expected, deeper, the kind of laugh a man doesn’t perform because he doesn’t know how.
I felt it through his hand under mine, the vibration traveling up my arm and settling somewhere behind my ribs, and when I looked up at his face, the grin had reached his eyes completely, crinkling the corners, turning the steel-gray into something warmer than I’d ever seen it.
Across the room, Loch caught it. I saw his head turn, those ice-blue eyes narrowing on Mustang’s face with the focus of a man witnessing something he’d bet against for years, and he leaned toward Socket without taking his gaze off us.
“We are never going to let him live this down,” he said, quiet enough that I shouldn’t have heard it but did, the clubhouse had good acoustics for things people thought were private.
Socket raised his mug, coffee sloshing dangerously close to the rim. “Not even a little.”
The vest weighed exactly what leather was supposed to weigh.
Not light, not heavy — present, the way important things usually were.
Mustang’s hand stayed on my shoulder, and the room around us had already moved on, conversations picking up where they’d left off, the novelty of the moment giving way to the steady rhythm of a Tuesday afternoon in a place where men came to drink and talk and exist in each other’s company without needing to explain why.
I belonged here. The leather said it. Mustang’s laugh said it. The way Loch was already scheming, his eyes bright with the promise of years of ammunition, said it better than any formal welcome ever could.