Chapter Eight
TATE
Two ribeye steaks are on the counter. Standing there for a second, I look at them before opening the marinade.
For years, I’ve cooked for one, a single man who appreciated his own company and didn’t particularly miss the alternative.
Now and then, one of my brothers shows up, and I throw something extra on the grill, but most nights it’s just Memphis, me, the desert, and the quiet.
After a full day at the clubhouse, coming home to the silence of this place is exactly what I need.
Grabbing the steaks, I head outside to the grill.
The desert air wraps around me, warm still, but cooled slightly now that the sun has dropped behind the mountains, the heat of the day releasing itself slowly into the darkening sky.
My backyard stretches out into nothing but sand, rock, and open space.
No neighbors or traffic, just silence and sky.
Exactly how I like it.
Firing up the grill, I lay the steaks down with a loud, satisfying sizzle.
The smoke and the smell of seasoned meat rise immediately into the night air.
While they cook, I watch the horizon shift, orange bleeding into purple, Vegas glittering faintly in the far distance like something from another world entirely.
Turning, I look back through the large glass windows into the house. The hallway light is still glowing, the one I’d left on in case Sophia woke up and needed to find her way out. Her door sits at the end of the hallway, closed and still.
Looking at it a second longer than necessary, I mutter, “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”
Tracker’s woman is asleep just down the hall. The promise I’d made to my brother sits heavy on my shoulders, the way it always does when the noise falls away.
Flipping the steaks, I listen to them hiss against the grates.
Tracker had always been the one on the grill when we were younger, back when we were still at home with Mom, back before the clubs, back before life got complicated, heavy, and full of things that couldn’t be undone.
He’d stand at that old backyard grill with a beer in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, completely in his element, talking too much and laughing too loud the way he always did.
‘You’re flipping it too early,’ he used to say whenever I tried to take over, that grin already spreading across his face before the words were even out.
I can still hear it, clear as anything.
“Shut up,” I mutter up at the sky and feel a smirk pull at the corner of my mouth despite everything.
The steaks cook slowly as the night deepens around me.
Heading back inside, I grab two clean plates from the kitchen.
Two, not one, and when I come back out, Memphis has appeared from wherever he’d spent his evening, padding toward me across the warm stone with that unhurried ease of his, like he’d simply decided it was time to come home, and so here he was.
Pulling the steaks off the grill, I let them rest while I stare out into the desert.
The emptiness that usually settles over me at this hour isn’t there tonight. And I know exactly why.
Rubbing the back of my neck, I look down at Memphis.
“Tracker, brother,” I mutter. “You better appreciate this.”
Memphis looks up at me with those steady amber eyes.
“I know,” I tell him. “I’m talking to a ghost. Don’t look at me like that.”
A faint sound from inside the house pulls my attention back to the glass doors. Footsteps, soft and unhurried, are moving down the hallway. Grabbing the plates, I carry both inside and set them on the kitchen island just as Sophia appears at the end of the hallway.
She blinks in the light, hair loose and slightly rumpled from sleep, rubbing her eyes with the back of one hand. She looks soft in a way she hadn’t at the airport, the careful composure of the day worn away, something younger and quieter underneath it.
Padding into the kitchen. “How long was I asleep?”
“Maybe an hour.”
A faint flush moves across her face. “I’m sorry, I should have been up helping you.”
“Don’t be. You’re my guest.” Already reaching for my cut from the back of the stool, I hang it up and pull the stool out for her. “Sit down.”
She does.
Crossing to the refrigerator, I pull out the salad I’d prepared earlier, mix the dressing through it, and set it on the island between the two place settings. Knives, forks, paper towels, laid out and done.
“Steak and salad.”
Sophia looks up at me and smiles a real one, slow and warm, and in that moment, I understand, properly and without any particular fanfare, exactly why my brother fell in love with her.
It isn’t just that she’s beautiful—though undeniably she is, standing in the light of this kitchen as if she belongs in it—it’s the whole of her.
The intelligence behind her eyes. The warmth that lives underneath the grief.
The way she makes even a kitchen island in the Nevada desert feel like somewhere worth being.
Tracker always had good taste.
“It looks incredible,” she says, already reaching for the salad spoons and distributing greens onto both plates with the easy efficiency of someone who is used to taking care of people. “And it smells even better.”
“Figured you’d be hungry after the nap.”
She glances up at me. “I thought motorcycle presidents lived on beer and takeout.”
“That’s a rude assumption.”
“That’s fair,” she concedes.
Looking out through the glass doors at the darkened desert, the last traces of purple are fading from the sky. “What do you say we eat outside? It’s a good night for it.”
Her face lights up. “I’d love that.”
We carry our plates and beers out onto the patio, and the moment Sophia steps outside, she stops and looks up.
“Wow.” She exhales the word, tilting her face toward the sky. “It’s beautiful out here.”
“It is,” I agree, following her gaze. The sky has deepened to a rich dark purple, stars beginning to press through in numbers you never see in the city. The open land stretches out silent and silver beneath them.
“It’s so quiet,” she breathes out.
“That’s why I built here.”
She looks at me for a moment, something thoughtful and searching in her expression, then sits down at the patio table. I take the seat beside her.
“I think I like it,” she says, with a smile that tells me she means it.
We eat in comfortable silence for a while, the kind that doesn’t need filling. The desert doing what it always does at night, just breathing around you, vast, unhurried, and completely indifferent to whatever you’re carrying.
The steaks disappear. The salad bowl empties. The beers go down slowly while the stars come out properly above us, bright and innumerable against the dark Nevada sky.
“You know, Tate,” she says eventually. “You really didn’t have to do all of this.”
“Cook you a steak?” Cutting into the last of mine. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She brings her beer to her lips.
I know what she means.
The room, the books, the food, the effort that sat underneath all of it, quietly, deliberately, and never once made into a performance.
“It’s just what you do for family. That’s all it is.”
Sophia sets her beer down and studies me for a moment, her blue eyes steady and serious in the way they get when she’s actually seeing you rather than just looking at you.
“Ryan was lucky…” she says, “… to have a brother like you.”
I don’t answer.
I can’t.
Something tightens in my chest at those words, something I don’t have a name for, and I turn my attention back to my plate, letting the quiet fill the space where a response should have been.
We clear the table together without discussing it. Sophia stands and starts to stack plates like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and I’m not going to argue with her about it.
Inside, I run the hot water and hand her a dish towel without thinking.
“I don’t actually know where anything goes,” she says, holding the towel and looking around the kitchen with a slight frown, like she’s trying to work out the filing system of someone she’s only just met.
“I’ll wash, you dry. I’ll put away.”
“That seems like you’re doing most of the work.”
“I live here.”
She considers that. “Fair point.”
Passing her the first plate, she dries it and moves toward the cupboards.
“Just leave it on the counter,” I say. “I’ll sort them.”
She ignores me completely and opens the first cupboard.
Wrong one.
“Other one.”
She tries the next.
Wrong again.
“Tate, how many cupboards do you have?”
“Enough.”
She tries a third time and finds the right one, sliding the plate in with a small noise of triumph that she clearly hadn’t meant to make out loud. She glances at me sideways to check if I’d noticed.
I carefully keep my eyes on the sink.
But I am smiling.
Memphis, sensing an opportunity, has positioned himself directly between us on the kitchen floor, squarely in the most inconvenient possible location, watching the dishes with the focused optimism of a dog who believes deeply that something worth eating is eventually going to fall within reach.
“Memphis.”
He doesn’t move.
“He’s fine,” Sophia says, reaching down to scratch behind his ear with her free hand while still managing to dry a glass with the other. “He’s just hoping.”
“He’s always hoping.”
“Smart dog.”
“Don’t encourage him.”
She laughs, small and unguarded, like she didn’t mean to, and the sound of it moves through the kitchen, settling somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
Passing her another glass without looking at her, she dries it without saying anything else.
Memphis eventually accepts that nothing is coming his way and relocates himself to the doorway with a dignity that is frankly impressive for an animal who’s just been ignored.
Finishing the dishes, we head back outside, beers in hand, the night air cooler now and full of that clean desert stillness.
Lighting the fire pit, we settle into the low chairs beside it. Sophia tucks her feet up beneath her the way she had at dinner, wrapping both hands around her bottle, looking out at the darkness beyond the pool.
The fire catches, climbs, and casts everything in warm shifting amber.
Memphis drops at our feet with a long exhale of pure contentment, and we sit in silence for a while.
“Were you always like this?” Sophia asks, her eyes still on the fire.
“Like what?”
“Quiet. Contained.” She glances at me. “Like everything you’re thinking stays behind your eyes.”
Considering that for a moment, I say, “Probably.”
“Ryan was the opposite,” she states. A small smile crosses her face. “He filled every room he walked into. You always knew exactly where he was and what he was thinking because he’d already told you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “He was.”
The fire crackles between us.
After a moment, she turns her bottle slowly in her hands, eyes dropping to the label, and says carefully, like she isn’t sure she wants the answer, “Did he ever talk about me? When he was with the club?”
The question lands in the night air and stays there.
I look at the fire for a moment before I answer, “Yeah,” I say. “He did.”
She looks up at me.
“All the time. More than men in his position usually talk about their women, which, in that world, means something.”
She is very still. “What did he say?” she asks, her voice barely above a whisper.
Turning the beer bottle in my hand, I think back, not having to search very hard, because the memory comes without any effort at all.
Tracker and I were sitting on the back step of the Blood Brothers’ clubhouse, maybe six months before everything went sideways, sharing a beer in the dark the way we sometimes did when the noise inside got to be too much.
‘She doesn’t know this world,’ he’d said. ‘And I’m glad she doesn’t. But she knows me, the real me, not the patch, and I don’t know how to explain to you what that means when you’ve spent years making sure nobody gets that close.’
My eyes move to Sophia.
“He said you knew him. The real him. Not the patch, not the reputation. Just Ryan.” A pause. “He said he didn’t know how to explain what that meant to him. But I could see it on his face when he said it, so I understood anyway.”
Sophia’s eyes fill with tears, and she doesn’t try to stop them, just lets them fall, her hands wrapped around her beer, her gaze somewhere in the middle distance beyond the fire.
I don’t try to fix it or reach for words to make it smaller, easier, or more manageable. I simply sit with her in it, because sometimes that’s all you can do for someone, and sometimes it’s enough.
After a while, she brings one hand up and wipes her face. “Thank you for telling me that,” she whispers.
“He meant it. Every word.”
She nods and looks back at the fire.
We sit in silence again, the good kind, the kind that holds rather than presses, while the embers shift and the stars burn bright above the desert, and Memphis snores at our feet.
Eventually, leaning forward, I set my bottle on the low table between our chairs.
Sophia reaches for hers at the same moment.
Her fingers brush mine in the dark, brief, light, and completely accidental, just a moment of warmth over cool glass before we both register what has happened and pull back without a word.
Neither of us says anything.
Neither of us looks at the other.
We sit back and look out at the open land like nothing has happened, the fire burning lower between us, the night pressing in from every side.