Chapter Thirty-One
SOPHIA
The desert appears below the plane as we begin to descend.
I’d been watching for it, my face turned to the window for the last twenty minutes, waiting for the moment the landscape shifts from green and ordinary to that vast ancient gold that has gotten into me somewhere over the last few months without me deciding to let it.
There it is.
Enormous, indifferent, and completely beautiful.
Home, something in me says quietly.
I don’t push it away.
The heat hits me the moment I step outside the terminal.
It’s that full, dry Nevada heat, the kind that settles into your bones and makes you feel present in your body in a way that nothing else quite manages.
Standing on the sidewalk outside arrivals with my bag in my hand and my face turned up to the Nevada sky, I breathe it in.
Vixen Falls was where I’d grown up.
This is where I live.
I get in the cab.
“The Sinners MC clubhouse. East side.”
The driver doesn’t blink.
This is Vegas.
Watching the city move past the window, I think about what I am going to say.
I’d been composing it on the plane, the words I was going to use, the order of them, the particular honesty that Tate deserves after everything.
Not a performance or a speech. Just the truth, said directly, the way he always said things and the way he’d taught me to say them by example over the months we’d lived in the same house and built something neither of us had planned for.
I’m sorry.
I was wrong.
I shouldn’t have left.
Simple. True. His.
And then whatever came after that was his to decide.
Pressing my hand flat against my chest and feeling my heartbeat and thinking about his voicemail—’I miss you’—said quietly, without performance, and meaning every word.
I miss you, too, I think. I’m coming.
Not too long later, the clubhouse looks exactly as it always has. Bikes are lined up outside, with the particular energy of the place even from the street. It’s contained, purposeful, the atmosphere of somewhere that knows what it is and doesn’t apologize for it.
I pay the driver, get out with my bag in hand, and the Vegas heat hits me immediately.
I stand on the sidewalk for just a moment.
‘You can do this.’ Remy’s voice in my head from months ago, standing at this same door. ‘No need to be nervous. They already love you.’
I walk in.
The clubhouse is busy. There’s the voices, music, the smell of coffee and leather, and that particular warmth of people who belong to each other filling a space together. Several heads turn when I come through the door, and then settle again as they recognize me.
My eyes move through the room and find him immediately, the way they always do.
He is at the far end of the bar, standing with Luke, head slightly tilted the way it is when he is listening to something carefully, a beer loose in his hand. The dark curls. The tattoos. The particular way he occupies a space is solid, certain, and completely himself.
He hasn’t seen me yet.
Luke sees me first as I cross the room, something moving in his expression—surprise, relief, something warmer underneath both. He says something quietly to Tate and steps back.
Tate turns.
His eyes find mine.
And everything in his face, the careful controlled surface of it, the particular composure he carries like a second skin, goes completely still for just a moment. Then something moves underneath it. Something warm, certain, and real.
I stop in front of him.
“I’m sorry.” My voice is steady and completely certain.
“I was wrong. I shouldn’t have left. What Raven said got inside my head, and I let it…
and I shouldn’t have, because I know what this is.
I know what I feel.” Holding his gaze. “I know what you are to me, Tate.” A beat. “I’m not running again.”
The room is very quiet around us.
He crosses the remaining distance and cups my face in both hands the way he always does, and I lean into it, relief flooding through me, waiting for the kiss, waiting for I’m glad you’re back.
But he doesn’t kiss me.
He looks at me.
And I look back.
Up close, he looks tired, really tired, the particular exhaustion of someone who hasn’t been sleeping, not just a bad night but days of it, the kind that settles into the lines of a face and doesn’t lift easily.
His eyes are warm, completely warm and certain, but underneath the warmth, there’s something else.
The particular weight of a man carrying something he’s been carrying for too long and is finally, carefully, putting down.
“I need to tell you something.” His voice drops low. “Something important.”
Those words land somewhere unexpected. Not what I’d been bracing for or the warmth I’d rehearsed on my way toward the plane.
“Tate—”
“Sophia.” His voice is low and steady. “What I’m about to tell you, I need you to hear it, and I need you to know that whatever happens, whatever you feel, I’m not going anywhere. Okay?”
Something moves through me, the warmth shifting into something less certain, the particular feeling of standing at the edge of something enormous, unable to see the bottom.
“Okay.”
He takes a breath.
And then, from somewhere behind me.
Footsteps.
The particular sound of someone coming through a door I hadn’t noticed, from a room I hadn’t looked at, moving into the space behind me with the unhurried certainty of someone who belonged there.
A presence.
Familiar in a way that makes no sense.
Familiar in a way that makes every sense.
Turning.
The world stops.
He is standing in the doorway, older, leaner, a beard that hadn’t been there before, but underneath all of it, the face I know. The face I had memorized, grieved, and carried with me every single day for months.
Those eyes.
I can’t breathe.
The room tilts, my bag slips from my hand, and every system in my body stops processing anything except the impossible thing standing in front of me.
Then, Tate’s arm is around me from behind, solid and certain, holding me up the way he always has, and I grip it with both hands because it is the only real thing in the room.
This can’t be real.
I buried him.
I watched them lower that coffin, I went home, I slept in his T-shirt, I talked to his photograph, and I—
He is still there.
Still standing in the doorway.
Still looking at me with those eyes.
Not a ghost.
Not grief playing tricks.
Him.
My hand goes to my mouth. And the tears come, not the quiet, careful ones I’d learned to cry over the last months, but something older, rawer, and entirely beyond managing. It’s the particular devastation of someone whose world has just been turned completely inside out for the second time.
He takes a step toward me, and the corner of his mouth moves.
That particular almost-smile, the one I had loved from the very first moment I saw it in a café in Vixen Falls a lifetime ago.
“Soph,” he says.
Just that.
Just my name.
The way he always said it.
TO BE CONTINUED