Chapter 9
SHELBY
My clothes are in drawers that belong to me.
Not a dresser in a clubhouse room. Not a bag I never unpack. Actual drawers, in an actual bedroom, in a house with a porch and thirty acres of desert and two horses I’ve already named, even though Saber told me they already had names.
They’re Butterscotch and Penny now. He’ll get over it.
Trapper and another prospect brought my things from the apartment yesterday. It took one trip. Two garbage bags of clothes, a box of kitchen stuff I bought at the thrift store, and some toiletries. That’s everything I own in the world, and it fits in the bed of a pickup truck with room to spare.
Kyle would say that’s pathetic. Kyle can go fuck himself.
I’m on the porch with my charcoal pencils and the big sketchbook, drawing the barn.
The roof slants on the left side, and the wood is silver-gray and splitting.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever put on paper.
I’ve been at it for an hour, shading the shadows under the eaves, when the screen door opens behind me.
Saber sits on the step next to me. He’s in jeans and a black t-shirt, no cut, and his hair is damp from the shower. He smells like soap and coffee, and the combination is messing with my concentration.
He sets a flat box on my lap. Plain cardboard. No ribbon.
I look at him. He’s watching the barn, not me. Open it, his jaw says, even though his mouth doesn’t move.
I open it.
The cut is heavy black leather. The front is plain—no rank patch, no title. I flip it over.
PROPERTY OF SABER in white stitching across the back. ASH VALLEY HELLBORN KINGS, beneath it in smaller letters.
Property.
My hands go still on the leather.
Weeks ago, that word would have sent me running. Kyle made me his property. But Kyle branded me without asking.
Saber is handing me a choice and waiting to see what I do with it.
I run my thumb across the stitching. The leather is stiff and new. It’ll soften with wear. It’ll smell like me eventually, the way his smells like him.
I put it on.
It’s too big in the shoulders and too long in the torso, and I don’t care. I pull it closed over my tank top.
I’m shaking.
Saber turns his head. His eyes move down the cut and back to my face. The corner of his mouth lifts, barely there, but I made his face do that, and I’ll never get tired of it.
He doesn’t say anything. He puts his arm around my shoulders, pulls me into his side, and presses his mouth to the top of my head. I lean into him and close my eyes and sit inside this moment, because it is mine. I chose it.
I chose it.
The party starts at six.
Saber told me it wasn’t a big deal—just the club, food, and drinks at the ranch. I believed him until Trapper showed up at four with a truck full of coolers and a grill the size of a small car.
By six, the yard is full. Bikes line the driveway. Music pours from a speaker Joker rigged to the porch railing. The grill is smoking. Prospects are manning it and serving up the guests.
I step off the porch in my cut. The leather is warm and heavy and mine.
Duke is the first one to clock it. He lifts his bottle. One inch. A toast so small you’d miss it if you weren’t looking.
I was looking.
Razor nods from across the yard. No smile, because Razor doesn’t do smiles, but the nod is enough.
Joker raises a hand without pausing his conversation.
Crash smiles. Trapper grins so wide I’m afraid he’ll catch the grill on fire, and then he almost does, and Razor has to put the flames out with a beer.
A group of six women finds me by the coolers, all wearing their own cuts. Old Ladies—the wives and girlfriends of patched members—and not one of them looks at me the way Crystal did.
A redhead named Bree hands me a drink and tells me the first rule of being an Old Lady is learning how to sleep through a 3 a.m. phone call.
A dark-haired woman named Sage says the second rule is always having bail money in an envelope in the kitchen drawer.
They’re laughing. I’m laughing. And I’m sitting in a lawn chair with a drink in my hand, and women around me who aren’t sizing me up or shutting me out, and this is so foreign that my throat aches with it.
I’ve never had girlfriends. Kyle didn’t allow it. Before Kyle, I moved so many times that I couldn’t keep anyone close.
Bree asks me if I have a job, and I tell her I’m enrolling in marketing and design courses at the community college in the fall, and the excitement in my chest is so big it leaks into my voice, and I don’t even try to flatten it.
Bree clinks her bottle against mine. “Good. This town needs someone with taste. Have you seen the sign on Bones and Bucks?” She takes a sip. “Saber’s little sister, Cassidy, is out in California for school. That girl tried to get them to fix that sign before she left. Nobody listened.”
I’ve seen the sign on Bones and Bucks—the bar the club owns. It’s terrible. I’ve already sketched a replacement.
Halfway through the night, I go looking for a quiet spot to breathe. The party is good—great, even—but my social battery died an hour ago. And if one more person asks me how I met Saber, I’m going to tell them the version with the water bottle and the dead body, and that’s not a party story.
I find the side of the barn. Dark, quiet, the music muted by the walls. And I’m not alone.
Duke is sitting on an overturned feed bucket with a beer he hasn’t touched.
He looks up. Not startled.
“Sorry. I didn’t know anyone was back here.”
“You’re fine.” He tips the bottle toward the empty bucket next to him. An invitation, or at least not a rejection.
I sit. We don’t talk for a minute. The music drifts around the corner, and someone—Trapper, probably—howls with laughter.
“You don’t like parties?” I ask.
“I like parties fine.” He picks at the label on the bottle, peeling it in a slow, deliberate strip. “I don’t like crowds.”
I understand the difference.
“He’s a good man,” Duke says. “Better than he thinks he is.” He peels another strip of label off the bottle. “When you find someone worth holding onto, you don’t let go.” His thumb presses the strip of paper flat against his knee.
He’s not talking about Saber and me anymore.
“I know,” I say. Because I do.
He nods. Then he drinks the beer and sets the empty bottle in the dirt beside the bucket.
We sit in the quiet until Saber comes around the corner of the barn, finds me, and extends his hand without a word.
I take it. He pulls me up and into his side, and I catch Duke watching us go. Not jealous. Not bitter. Hungry. Like a man staring at a meal he had once and lost, and can still taste.
Saber pulls me into his side and walks me back toward the noise. The music is louder here. The porch light throws gold across the yard, and Trapper is asleep in a lawn chair with a spatula in his lap.
“You want to call it a night?” His lips are still against my hair.
“I’m exhausted.”
His hand drops to my hip. His thumb hooks into the waistband of my jeans, and he pulls me closer. “Not too tired, I hope.”
The way he says it turns my exhaustion into something else entirely.
I tip my chin up. “Take me inside and find out.”
His hand slides to the small of my back. We pass the porch. Joker is dealing cards on the railing. Razor tells him he’s cheating. Joker tells Razor to prove it. Bree raises her bottle as we pass, and Sage whispers something that makes them both laugh.
Nobody asks where we’re going. Everybody knows.
The screen door closes behind us, and the party keeps going, and Saber’s hand is on my back, and the cut is on my shoulders, and I am home.