Chapter Eleven
Lennox
The county courthouse smelled like floor wax and burnt coffee and something older underneath, the stale must of government buildings that had been repainted too many times without anyone bothering to open the windows between coats.
We’d been legally -- illegally? -- married already, but Rogue insisted on giving me some sort of ceremony.
He’d introduced me to Shield and the poor man had tried to explain things, but essentially what I’d gathered was that he’d hacked into government records and created a marriage license and certificate.
I had no idea how any of that worked. Regardless, Rogue didn’t want me to feel cheated out of a ceremony.
We’d compromised on the courthouse. I’d insisted it wasn’t necessary, but he’d been adamant.
I stood in the hallway outside the clerk’s office with my hands at my sides and watched Rogue sign the form the woman behind the counter had slid across the laminate, his pen moving in the same unhurried script I’d seen on motorcycle maintenance logs and coffee shop receipts.
The fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting everyone in the flat, unflattering white of a hospital waiting room.
Through the single window at the far end of the corridor, the afternoon sun was doing its best with what little it had to work with -- a narrow strip of Tennessee sky the color of a dirty nickel, and the top branches of a maple that had given up on its leaves a week ago.
Rogue handed the pen back. The woman took it without looking at him.
She had the weary expression of someone who had processed too many marriage licenses in a career that had started with optimism and ended in laminate, and she nodded toward the door to our right with the practiced indifference of a tour guide who’d said the same sentence ten thousand times.
“Room three. Whenever you’re ready.”
We’d been ready since the night on his couch, since the morning in the garage with his hands next to mine on the bike frame, since the moment in the alcove at the gala. The formality of a room with a number on the door was just the paperwork version of a thing that had already happened.
I went in first.
The room was smaller than I’d expected. Plain wood benches in two short rows, the kind you’d find in a high school auditorium that had stopped caring about comfort sometime in the Reagan administration.
A small desk at the front where the clerk would stand.
A single American flag in the corner, the kind that came folded in plastic from a catalog.
The fluorescent hum was louder in here, a persistent electrical whine that nobody in the building had ever thought to fix.
Along the back wall, the Reckless Kings stood in a loose line.
They weren’t a crowd. They were witnesses.
Brick with his arms crossed and his jaw set the way it always was, like he was holding something in that wanted out.
Beast beside him, his gaze moving from me to Rogue with the quiet assessment of a man who’d seen a lot of things begin and not all of them ended well.
Behind them, a few more cuts -- I didn’t know all the names yet, wouldn’t for months, but I recognized the postures, the way these men stood when they were somewhere they didn’t belong but had decided to be anyway.
They didn’t talk. They didn’t shift their weight.
They just stood along the wall with their hands at their sides or tucked into their pockets, and the room felt different for their being in it -- heavier, the air taking on the charge of a space claimed by people accustomed to getting their way.
Rogue came in behind me.
He was still wearing his cut. Dark leather over a black button-down I’d watched him iron that morning with the focused impatience of a man who regarded clothing as a necessary inconvenience.
The cut was creased at the elbows, worn soft at the shoulders, the patches catching the fluorescent light in dull flashes of color and thread.
He didn’t take it off. He didn’t hang it on the back of a chair or fold it over the bench.
This was who he was, and I was marrying all of it -- the leather, the patches, the man underneath who had pulled me onto the back of his bike in a gas station parking lot and hadn’t once asked for anything I wasn’t willing to give.
My dress was simple. The club women had helped me pick it -- Danica with her practical eye, Monica with her hands on my shoulders in front of the mirror in Beast’s guest room, turning me this way and that under the overhead light.
Navy blue, knee-length, nothing that would catch or tangle or require me to explain myself to anyone.
Nothing like the cathedral-length gown I’d fled in, the one that had weighed twenty pounds and cost more than most people’s cars and had been chosen for me by a woman who had never once asked what I wanted to wear on the day I promised my life to a man I was afraid of.
The county clerk came in with a folder.
She was mid-fifties, hair pulled back in a bun that had started the day tight and was coming loose at the temples, and she positioned herself behind the desk, a tired expression on her face telling me she’d rather be home than here. She opened the folder. She began to read.
The script was what you’d expect. Dated language about joining together, about solemnizing, about the laws of the state of Tennessee.
Her voice was flat and practiced, the dry monotone of civic duty performed at volume just loud enough to be heard over the fluorescent hum.
I stood beside Rogue and let the words wash past me, and my attention drifted to his hands -- the scars across the knuckles, the clean line of his wrist where the cuff of the button-down ended, the way his thumb was tapping once, twice against his thigh, a small unconscious rhythm that was the only tell he’d given all day.
Then she got to the vows.
Rogue turned to face me.
Not the partial turn of a man following protocol.
A full turn, his shoulders squaring to mine, his eyes finding mine and holding.
He reached for my hands and took them both, and his grip was firm -- not the controlling grip Grant had used at the bar, not the performative gentleness my father had mastered for public occasions -- just his hands wrapped around mine with the steady pressure of a man who had decided something and was no longer negotiating the terms of it.
The clerk was still reading. Something about cherishing and honoring. Rogue’s voice dropped low.
“Nobody’s taking you from me,” he said. “Ever.”
His knuckles went white around my hands. I watched it happen -- the tendons in his wrists, the shift of muscle under the skin, the way his jaw set as the words left his mouth. Not a threat. A fact. The kind of fact that lived in bone and didn’t require volume to carry its weight.
My chin lifted. I didn’t plan for it to lift.
It just did, the way my body had been making its own decisions around him for weeks now, learning a language my mind was still catching up to.
I held his gaze. I didn’t flinch, didn’t look away.
Somewhere in the back of my consciousness was the ghost of the girl who used to brace for every touch, who used to calculate the cost of every kindness before accepting it, who used to stand in dressing rooms while women she didn’t know fastened her into clothes she hadn’t chosen and told her how lucky she was.
That girl was not in this room.
Rogue reached into his pocket.
The ring came out in his palm -- a titanium band with the small sapphire set deep.
He took my left hand and slid the ring onto my finger, and the metal was cool at first and then warm, and his thumb dragged slowly over my knuckle once it was seated, a single stroke that lingered a beat longer than it needed to.
My turn.
The clerk was waiting. The brothers along the back wall were waiting. Rogue was waiting, his hands still holding mine, his gaze still on my face. I took a breath.
“I choose you,” I said. My voice was steady. No tremble, no performative softness, just the words as they came. “Every day. However it looks. I’m not going anywhere.”
From the back wall came a low sound -- not quite a grunt, not quite a word, the particular noise of approval that men like these reserved for moments they respected and weren’t inclined to prettify.
I didn’t look to see who it was. I kept my gaze on Rogue’s face, and I watched something move behind his eyes -- the same thing I’d watched move there on the side of the road when I’d pulled the bike up in front of him, the same thing I’d felt in the dark of his bedroom when his forehead had pressed against mine -- and I knew what it was now, had known for a while, was only now allowing myself the vocabulary for it.
The clerk pronounced us married. The words were the same words she’d said eleven times already that day, delivered with the same flat efficiency, and they should have felt small. They didn’t.
Rogue’s hand came up to cup my jaw.
His palm was warm against my cheek, his fingers curving along the line of my ear, and he bent his head and kissed me.
Not the brief, performative kiss the clerk had probably seen a thousand times from couples who were already thinking about the restaurant reservation.
Not the kind of kiss that ended when the photographer stopped taking pictures.
His mouth was gentle against mine, and his hand held my face the way he’d been holding it since the first time in his kitchen, and I felt my fingers find the lapels of his cut and curl into the leather, and I held on.
Behind us, the brothers knocked their knuckles against the wood benches.