Epilogue
A month after everything, summer finally backed off enough to give us a decent morning, and I was on my knees in the empty corner of the garden digging holes for something I’d sworn for six years I had no use for.
Useless flowers.
Lilacs, specifically, which had no damn business in Charleston and would probably make me regret every cent I’d spent getting them here.
I’d been reading about them half the night, looking for varieties stubborn enough to take the heat, and the six little plants lined up beside me didn’t look like much for all that trouble.
Mostly sticks in pots. A few leaves. Hard to believe any of them had a field of purple in them.
Wrong time of year to plant them too.
I knew that. Everything I’d read said wait until the real cool came, give them the best chance, do it right the first time. I’d spent enough of my life waiting for the right time.
So I wasn’t putting them in for good yet, but I was getting the bed ready along the south fence, working sand and compost into the dirt, building them a place they might survive when I finally did.
If I had to baby the damn things through every summer for the next twenty years, then that’s what I’d do.
They wouldn’t bloom for a while. Couple years, maybe. The field I’d promised her would take longer than that. That was alright. I had time now.
That still felt strange to think.
For six years, everything in this garden had earned its dirt. Something for pain, something for fever, something to stop bleeding or settle a stomach or get a man through a night he had no business surviving. I didn’t grow much just because it looked good. Never saw the point.
My mother had.
She’d have hated how neat I’d made the place, for one thing. Would’ve walked in here, looked at all these straight rows and useful plants, and told me I’d managed to make dirt depressing.
I could hear her saying it.
Gavin, honey, not everything alive has to work for you.
I sat back on my heels.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I know.”
“Telling the plants your problems now?”
I looked over my shoulder.
Amy stood in the cabin doorway wearing one of my shirts and nothing on her feet, purple hair going six directions from sleep.
She’d started doing that lately, waking when I left the bed and wandering out to find me without bothering to get dressed first, and I hadn’t yet figured out how a man was supposed to get any work done with that walking around his property.
“Thought you were asleep.”
“I was.” She rubbed one eye. “Then you weren’t there.”
There wasn’t any accusation in it.
Didn’t need one.
She slept most nights now. Not every one. The bad dreams still came sometimes, and I figured they always would in one form or another, but they didn’t keep her awake six nights straight anymore. When she woke from one, she didn’t sit alone until morning and pretend it hadn’t happened.
She reached for me.
And of course she still has school and Sawyer.
Once, Amy called him before eight in the morning, he answered the phone by shouting, “If you’re dying, give me one second to put pants on.”
Boy just don’t seem right sometimes.
But he’s out here most weeks now, usually in some shirt Spinner found offensive on principle.
Nobody reached for a gun when his little hatchback came through the gate anymore, and Gearhead had recently decided Sawyer needed to learn how to change his own oil, which mostly meant Gearhead did the work while Sawyer asked questions specifically designed to shorten a man’s life.
Josie fed him. Horse pretended not to like him. The rest was already done. Family.
Amy came down the steps, saw the row of pots beside me, and stopped.
Her face changed. “Rune.”
I looked back at the dirt because seeing that much feeling on her at once was still enough to make me stupid.
“What?”
“Those are lilacs.”
“That’s what the tag says.”
She came closer. “You’re really doing it.”
“Told you I would.”
“I thought you meant someday.”
“Someday’s got a bad track record with me.”
That got her.
She dropped down beside me in the dirt, my shirt riding up around her thighs while she picked up one of the little pots and looked at it like I’d handed her something rare.
“It looks dead.”
“It’s not dead.”
“It looks extremely dead.”
“It’s dormant.”
“It has three leaves.”
“Four.”
She counted. “Three and a half.”
“Still alive.”
She looked at me over the top of it, and I saw the tears already starting.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re gonna cry.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Shut up.”
I reached over and wiped one tear off her cheek with my thumb.
“Won’t flower for a couple years,” I told her. “Maybe longer if the heat beats the hell out of ’em. Probably lose a few learning what works.”
Her hand tightened around the pot. “But they’ll grow?”
“If I do my job.”
She looked out over the empty stretch along the fence. “And the field?”
“That’s gonna take us a while.”
“Us?”
Amy went still. Sometimes I forgot how much one little word could cost her.
“Yeah,” I said. “Us.”
Her mouth trembled before she got it under control. “Okay.”
We started with the first one.
I dug while she loosened the roots with her fingers, careful about it because she’d picked up more than she thought from watching me.
Around us, the compound started waking up.
Somebody fired a bike near the shop. Josie shouted through an open window that whoever had used his good knife and left it dirty was about to lose a finger.
A few yards beyond the fence, Fiona crossed the yard slow with one hand on her belly, Bolt was five feet behind her carrying something she could’ve carried herself and pretending he wasn’t watching every step she took.
Amy followed my eyes. “He’s ridiculous.”
“Yep.”
“It’s cute.”
“Didn’t say that.”
“You thought it.”
“Didn’t.”
She bumped my shoulder.
Brenda came out behind them with a basket of yarn under one arm, already arguing with Lucy about something, and Horse was on the porch watching her.
He did that a lot lately. Less hiding in it too. Brenda noticed.
Hell, everybody noticed.
Didn’t mean either one of them had done anything useful about it yet. Some people need more time than others. I had no room to judge.
“Think they’ll ever figure it out?” Amy asked, following my eyes.
“Who?”
She gave me a look.
“Probably.”
“When?”
“Could be Today. Could be fifteen years.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“Talking about Horse.”
“Fair.”
I went back to the hole.
There were other things moving around the club too.
Gearhead had gone strange the week Chain’s little sister Briar came through the gate with Ash by the hand.
Most people would’ve missed it. I didn’t.
Gearhead had watched that woman like a man watching a road he’d once decided not to take, and Briar had looked everywhere except at him.
Hadn’t asked.
Wasn’t my business.
For once, I’d learned that lesson before doing any damage.
And farther out than all of it sat Drago. Still alive. Still federal property. Still capable of making trouble from a cage if the right kind of man answered the phone. Mystic knew it. Devil knew it. Every patched man at that table knew we hadn’t heard the last of him.
That was tomorrow’s problem.
Today I had dirt under my nails and Amy kneeling beside me arguing about whether a plant with three and a half leaves counted as alive.
I’d take today.
“Alright,” I said. “Set it in.”
She lowered the little plant into the hole, and I helped steady it while she pushed the dirt back around the roots.
Our hands met in the middle.
Neither of us moved away.
Amy looked down at them, then at the plant. “This is really the first one.”
“Yep.”
She sat back on her heels, and for a minute she just stared at it. I had to admit it looked a little pathetic. One thin green thing sitting in a lot of fresh dirt.
“It looks like nothing,” she said.
“For now.”
“No, I know. I just...” She laughed and wiped at her face, leaving dirt across one cheek. “I thought it would look more important.”
“Most things don’t at the start.”
That came out before I thought much about it.
She smiled.
I caught her around the waist and pulled her into my side, and she came easy, fitting herself against me while I put my mouth against the top of her hair. Lilac. Her hair smelled faintly like it.
“I like it,” she said.
“The plant?”
“The start.”
I looked down at the little thing we’d just put in the ground.
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
We sat there a while with the morning coming up around us, the clubhouse getting louder behind us and the first cool air we’d had in months moving through the garden.
I’d spent a long time thinking love was mostly about what you kept somebody safe from.
Turns out a lot of it was smaller than that.
Her smile went soft, and she leaned over and kissed me, dirt on both of us and the first lilac between our knees. Then she picked up the next pot and handed it to me. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got five and a half sticks left.”
I took it from her.
And we went back to work.
THE END
The Devil’s House MC: South Carolina will continue in Book Eight.
Coming October 2026
GEARHEAD’S CHAINS
He can fix anything with an engine in it. People were always the thing he couldn’t.
Gearhead spent years telling himself he did the decent thing by Briar Riggs.
A man who runs cold every time something matters has no business chaining the best woman who ever walked into that clubhouse to a mechanic who can’t promise he’ll stay warm, so he let her go.
Told himself she deserved better. Told himself he’d be okay.
She left. Took whatever he’d cracked in her and stayed gone.
Now she’s around the clubhouse again, running the animal shelter across town, and she’s not alone. Every time Ash sets a hand on her like he’s got the right to, something Gearhead spent years bolting shut tears loose in his chest.
He had his shot. He’s the one who walked away from it.
Briar’s coming back. And Gearhead’s about to learn that the chains he ran from his whole life were the only thing that ever could’ve held him.