Chapter Twenty-Three
TATE
It’s been a month.
That’s what it had been since Quill and his men rode back to New York, a month of planning, waiting, and the frustration of a man who knew exactly what he wanted to do and couldn’t do it yet.
The intelligence was close.
Cable had the hacienda mapped to within an inch, with security rotations and patrol patterns, the blind spot on the north wall confirmed and measured, and entry and exit points identified and cross-referenced.
Two weeks had become three, three had become four, and the reason for the delay had shifted from incomplete intelligence to something considerably more complicated.
Three weeks ago, Cable pulled me aside after church. Just the two of us in the hallway outside the room, everyone else filed out, Cable with that focused stillness of a man who has been sitting on something and has decided it is time to put it on the table.
“We’ve got a problem.”
“Tell me.”
“We’re being watched.” His voice drops low even in an empty corridor, old habit, good habit.
“Digital surveillance on our communications, not everything, they’re not that deep in, but enough.
Phone patterns, movement tracking… they know we’ve been gathering intelligence on something, and they’re trying to work out what. ”
He looks at me steadily.
“FBI?”
“Almost certainly. Given the El Pasos’ investigation and the Blood Brothers’ visit, they put it together. They know something’s being planned.”
I stand in that hallway for a long moment, thinking about Sam Reeves on the news broadcast, the composed, measured authority of a man who ran things from the top and left nothing to chance.
“Can they hear what we’re planning?”
“Not yet. But if we keep operating the way we have been, they will.”
So, we change everything—burner phones rotate every week, meetings are in person only, nothing digital, nothing that can be intercepted or traced. Routes are planned on paper and destroyed afterward. No footprint is anywhere a surveillance team can follow.
We’re going to disappear off every grid they have eyes on.
And when we reappear, we will be in Mexico.
Cable is working on the how, not just the hacienda intelligence, but the movement itself. How to get two motorcycle clubs across a border without triggering a single flag. How to be gone before anyone realizes we’ve moved.
Not yet, I tell myself every morning.
But soon.
***
The call from Quill comes on a Thursday.
Out on the back deck with my coffee, Memphis is stretched at my feet in the morning sun, the desert doing what it always does at this hour. The mountains are sharp and still against a sky that hasn’t decided what color it’s going to be yet.
The burner buzzes.
“Brother.” Quill’s voice is measured and controlled in the way it gets when he is managing something underneath it. “We need to talk.”
“Talk.”
A pause. “Rhyder is losing it.” Simple. Without drama, the way you state a fact that doesn’t need elaborating. “I’ve been holding him for a month. Telling him we’re close, telling him to trust the plan, telling him one more week.” Another pause. “I’m running out of one more weeks, Tate.”
The desert stretches out ahead.
“Cable’s still working the movement. We can’t go while we’re being watched. If we move, and the FBI tracks us, we blow everything before we’ve even crossed the border.”
“I understand that,” Quill says. “And Rhyder understands that intellectually.” A beat.
“But Lawrence is alive, Tate. Every day that man wakes up somewhere in that hacienda is another day he’s breathing when Lexi is…
” he stops and starts again. “Rhyder made his peace with waiting when he thought it was a matter of two weeks. It’s been a month. ”
The weight of that settles over me.
Thinking about Rhyder in that church room, his chair going back, his hands flat on the table, that motherfucker, and the promise made in the heat afterward.
You’ll be there. I promise you that.
“I know what I promised him.”
“I know you do,” Quill says. And then quieter, “I promised him too. In that room. I told him Lawrence doesn’t walk out.” A pause that carries the full weight of a president who has made a promise he is struggling to keep. “Give me something to tell him, Tate. A date, a plan… anything concrete.”
The coffee has gone cold in my hand. “One more week. Cable will have the movement plan ready. One more week, and I’ll have something concrete for both of you.”
Silence on the other end.
Then, “One week, Tate.” His voice drops to a quiet, absolute tone. “Then I can’t hold him.”
“One week. I promise.”
The line goes quiet.
I sit on the back deck for a while, coffee forgotten, Memphis shifting his head from my foot to the warm stone and sighing in the way he has when he senses the mood without understanding it.
One week.
Cable needs to be ready.
The other thing that has happened in a month, the thing I think about considerably less carefully than I think about Mexico, is Sophia.
Or, more specifically, what a month of Sophia in my house has done to it.
And to me.
The first signs were small things. Her mug on the shelf beside mine.
The smell of whatever she uses on her hair drifts through the house on mornings when she showers before I’m fully awake.
Then, there’s the sound of her moving around in the kitchen, unhurried and comfortable, like someone who has stopped treating a space like a guest and started treating it like home.
She makes breakfast now.
Not every day, some mornings I’m up and gone before she wakes, but on the days we’re both home, she appears in the kitchen and wordlessly takes over.
Coming back from feeding Memphis, I find eggs the way I like them, coffee already poured, and Sophia at the island with her mug and laptop open, and her hair loose around her shoulders.
It stopped feeling strange approximately two weeks ago.
That probably should have concerned me more than it did.
She tells me her plans in the morning now. What she is working on for The Ember project, whether Remy is taking her somewhere, or she has a call with Trevor. Not because I asked, but because that’s what people do when they share a space and have stopped pretending they aren’t.
And in return, I find myself telling her things, nothing about the club or Mexico, and nothing that crosses the line between her world and mine, but small things—what is happening at the shop, whether Memphis had gotten out again, and what Flame did at church that week that caused Luke to nearly spit his beer across the table.
She laughed at that one for longer than the story deserved.
Not telling her, I’d replayed the sound of it twice in the car on the way to the clubhouse.
***
One afternoon, I come home to find the house different.
Not dramatically or in a way that announces itself.
Just different.
Flowers are on the kitchen island, something yellow and wild, in a glass jar I don’t recognize, sitting between the coffee machine and Sophia’s open laptop as if they’d always been there.
A small canvas is on the living room wall where there hadn’t been anything before, something abstract in warm tones.
It looks like the kind of thing that was painted by a human hand rather than produced for the purpose of filling a wall.
I stand in the doorway looking at everything.
Memphis walks past toward his bowl.
“I found it at a market,” Sophia calls from the kitchen, her back to me, doing something at the counter.
“There was an artist selling her work, and I thought…” she pauses.
“I thought the room could use some color.” She turns around, holding a dish towel, and looks at me with an expression that is carefully neutral.
“If it bothers you, I can take it down.”
The painting. The flowers. The way the room feels warmer, somehow, the warmth of a space that has someone living fully in it rather than just occupying it.
“Are you planning on staying longer?” The words come out before I fully think them through.
Her expression shifts immediately, something uncertain moving across it, a slight pulling back, the look of someone who has just wondered if they’ve overstepped.
“I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “I should have asked. I just thought… I’ll take it down.”
“Sophia.” Moving into the kitchen, I set my keys on the counter. “Stop.”
She looks at me.
“Don’t take it down.” Finding the right words, the ones that are true without being more than they should be. “I want you here. That’s what I mean… I was asking because it looks like a home, and I wasn’t sure it looked like that before.”
She holds my gaze.
Something warm and complicated moves in her expression, there and then quickly folded away. “It did,” she says. “It just needed a little color.”
The room goes thick for just a moment, that charged quality of two people standing close in a quiet kitchen with something unspoken sitting directly between them.
Memphis walks back through and plants himself between us with the magnificent obliviousness of a dog who has never once read a room in his life. We both look down at him, and the moment dissolves naturally into something easier.
“Pizza tonight?” I move back to the counter.
“Yeah.”
And we don’t talk about it again.
***
The movie is my idea.
Not entirely sure what makes me suggest it. It’s a Saturday night, both of us home, the desert outside, the quiet of a house that has stopped feeling empty and started feeling like something I’m not ready to name.
“Pick something.” I hand her the remote and drop onto the other end of the couch. “Something you’ll actually watch. Not something you think I want to watch.”
She smiles the smile she gets when she is deciding something and starts scrolling.