8. Eden
EDEN
Viper’s bike tears up the county road, and I ride pressed against his back, hands locked under his cut.
A week of this and my body speaks the language now. Lean when he leans. Hold when he brakes. Trust him with the rest. At the stop sign, his gloved hand drops to my knee and squeezes once before we roll on.
A week at the clubhouse, and the strangest part is how fast it quit being strange. My toothbrush in his cup. My textbooks are stacked on his dresser beside a knife I always glance at. A matte-black helmet, my size exactly, appeared on the dresser my second morning and has never once been discussed.
The men at the club, Viper’s brothers, treat me as if I belong. And today, I’m meeting other Old Ladies.
Viper says they’ll love me. I can’t help but be nervous.
Saber’s place is a thirty-acre ranch east of Ash Valley, a mesquite tree leaning over the yard, and a dozen bikes lined along the fence. Nose-out, every one of them.
Even at a barbecue, they park for leaving fast.
Viper backs us in at the end of the row and kills the engine. I pull the helmet off and shake my hair loose. He doesn’t look away once, like it’s a show he paid for.
“The one on Cholla Road has a porch,” I say, handing him the helmet, talking about a property we plan to visit this week.
The realtor’s printout is folded in my pants pocket—three listings circled in blue pen.
“Then it’s winning.”
“You haven’t asked about the kitchen. Or the square footage. Or the price.”
“You want the porch, you get the porch.” He says it as if that settles the question.
I guess it does.
Mesquite smoke drifts across the yard. Saber mans the grill, and a woman comes off the porch wiping her hands on her jeans before my boots hit the gravel.
Viper kisses the top of my head and leaves me to go introduce myself to the other women.
The woman hugs me before I’ve decided whether we’re huggers.
“I’m Shelby,” she says. “Saber’s Old Lady. And you’re the girl who sewed Viper shut on a county road. I’ve been dying to meet you.”
She’s warm, and kind, and welcoming. My nerves dissipate.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I respond.
On the porch, a soft-faced woman rises, holding a little boy’s hand.
“I’m Violet. Duke’s mine.” She picks up the boy, who looks to be around three years old. “And this is Leo.”
“Do you like dinosaurs?” Leo asks.
“Of course,” I answer with a smile. “Everybody likes dinosaurs.”
Leo claps. I’m in his good graces.
The third woman lifts a margarita off the railing in greeting. Red hair, sunglasses pushed up. “I’m Bree. Scar’s Old Lady.”
I haven’t met Scar yet, but I already like Bree. She’s as friendly as the other two.
I sit, and Violet settles into the chair beside me with her son in her lap.
“Joker owes me twenty dollars, you know. He swore Viper would die alone and mean. I told him the quiet ones don’t do halfway.
They hold out forever, and then they go all at once.
” She looks at me over Leo’s head. “I knew he’d find someone.
I’m glad it’s someone who values what she has. ”
Across the yard, Viper sits in a lawn chair built for a smaller man, a water bottle balanced on his knee, and his eyes are already on me when I look for him. They’ve been on me since we parked. Every time I check, he’s there ahead of me, like my looking is a thing he can predict.
I make myself turn to the women. “Can I ask what’s actually happening? With the club. I know Viper got hurt by men from another MC, but he doesn’t want me to worry. So he hasn’t said much more.”
Shelby and Violet trade a glance. It’s Shelby who sets her glass down.
“Crimson Warriors. A club out of a town two hours north. They’ve been encroaching on Kings’ territory for a year. Started small. It keeps getting bigger.” Her eyes drop to my hands, then come up. “Last month, it was three of them and a knife.”
The road. The blood drying on my forearms. “Viper.”
“Yep, Viper.”
“It keeps getting worse,” Violet says. “But our guys keep us safe. When it gets bad enough, the club locks down. Everybody inside the walls—Old Ladies, kids, all of us—until it’s handled.”
“The club is mostly boring,” Bree offers, generously. “Until it isn’t.”
The afternoon loosens up after that. Shelby keeps my lemonade full and walks me through the club’s whole vocabulary—who’s who, what the patches mean, which words I’d never repeat at my father’s table. Bree supplies the parts Shelby is too polite to say.
Soon enough, I’ve had a crash course in a world I already live in.
My phone goes off against my thigh. I read the text.
It’s my mom checking in again. I let her know I’m good and I’m safe.
And I wish things could have been different. I wish that cutting off my father didn’t have to result in not seeing her, too.
I slip my phone back into my pocket.
A yelp goes up from near the grill.
Crash is doubled over the cooler with his hand clamped under his arm, swearing with real range. A skewer lies in the dirt where it looks like he dropped it.
I walk over to see if I can help.
“In my defense,” Crash says to the guys, “Joker bet me ten bucks I wouldn’t grab it barehanded.”
“Worth every dollar,” Joker says.
“Get him away from my grill,” Saber says.
“Kitchen,” I say, and the whole yard discovers I have a bossy register.
Viper has the first-aid kit out of his saddlebag before I ask for it. He keeps it there now. A first-aid kit saved his life once; he doesn’t forget things like that.
I run Crash’s palm under cool water at the sink, coat the burn, wrap it in clean gauze while he narrates his own bravery.
I pat his wrist, signifying he’s all set.
Crash smiles at me. “Marry me.”
“No,” Viper says from six feet away.
“Eden, blink twice if—”
I laugh, then tell him, “Keep the wound dry. Don’t take any more dares.”
When we go back outside, Saber looks the bandage over and tips his bottle at me.
“Nice work. Not only do you make Viper less of an asshole, but you take care of our guys. Welcome to the family, sweetheart.” He turns back to the grill, and that’s the whole ceremony, and somehow it lands bigger than a speech.
I carry the first-aid kit out to the bike while two prospects argue over horseshoes. Viper follows, as I figured he would. He leans against the seat and waits.
“I’m going to ask you something,” I say. “And I want you to be honest.”
He nods. “Okay.”
That gives me the confidence to continue. “The men who stabbed you. The Warriors.” I set the kit on the seat beside him. “They could be a problem in the future, couldn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“How dangerous is it?”
He doesn’t dress it up. “It can get ugly. It has before. It’s leaning that way again.
” His hand comes up and closes over my shoulder.
“But you’re safe. That part I can promise you.
The Hellborn Kings have chapters all over the country.
National is watching what’s happening here.
If the Warriors push, we don’t stand alone. ”
“Then why does it keep getting worse? Why not end it?”
“Can’t. Not now.”
“Why?”
“Club business.”
I step out from under his hand.
“I don’t know what counts as club business. But I know what that sounds like. It means stop asking and obey. I grew up on that answer.”
“That’s not what this is.” He shakes his head. “You don’t obey me. You don’t obey anybody, ever again. Live your life. I’ll step in if something gets in your way.”
Then he pushes off the bike and stands close, looking down at me.
“If the law ever puts you in a room and asks what you’ve heard, I want the truth out of your mouth to be nothing. No lying. No choosing. Nothing to give.” His thumb skims my jaw. “Protecting you means protecting you from club business. All of it. That’s not a leash, Eden. It’s a firewall.”
The law. I turn that over. “That’s the reason you can’t go after them, isn’t it? Whatever it would take would bring the police down on the club.”
He doesn’t answer, and the not-answering is an answer.
“I don’t love it,” I say.
“Didn’t ask you to love it.”
“But club business can never affect my career, right? I’m not quitting school. Or my clinical hours. I didn’t trade my father’s rules for yours.”
“I would never ask that of you.” He pauses, and then he gives me the rest, plain. “Club business will never hold you back. You need to be protected, and I’ll be there. That’s all there is to it.”
I do love the sound of that.
“Okay,” I say.
He lifts the kit off the seat and stows it in the saddlebag, and when his hand comes out, there’s leather folded over it. Black. Small. He shakes it open and holds it up by the shoulders, and stitched white across the back, it says: PROPERTY OF VIPER
An Old Lady’s cut. Made for me. In this world, there’s no bigger promise a man can make.
“Turn around,” he says.
I turn. He settles it onto my shoulders, and I slip my arms through. It fits. Not close. Exact.
A whistle splits the yard. Joker, two fingers in his mouth, and then bottles are going up all over the lawn, and Crash is cheering with his bandaged hand, and Violet’s son is cheering, too, without any idea why.
“About time,” Saber calls out.
Viper turns me by the shoulders to face him.
“You don’t have to wear it every day,” he says, low, only for me. “But when you do, every man who matters in this state reads it the same. You’re mine, and you’re the club’s, and putting a hand on you is the last mistake a man gets to make.”
“And you?” I hook a finger in his cut, right over his heart. “Where’s the one that says ‘Property of Eden’?”
The corner of his mouth climbs. “Don’t need leather. Everybody already knows.”
I look down at myself. Twenty-two years of being told what to wear. Collar buttons and hemlines and modest, modest, modest—and now this. Leather that marks me as a dangerous man’s woman.
“I’m keeping it on,” I say.
“Good,” he says.