When we stepped outside, despite it being December, it had an unusually warm glow, probably because of the clear skies. Rachel pulled on my arm, and I looked back down at her.
“I could get used to the idea of this being forever,” she said.
She didn’t even give me a chance to respond. It was for the best. Something like this didn’t need words.
Love, in this case, was best left shown and not said.
Epilogue, Part 2
Downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico
At the top of his penthouse suite, Cole Carter leaned over the railing, a drink in his hand, the sun just beginning to descend beneath the horizon.
To his right, his brother, Lane Carter, sat in a porch chair, drinking a glass of whiskey.
“I’ll give you credit on this one, Cole,” Lane said. “When you said that you were starting a new chapter out here, I about wanted to murder you.”
“Oh, so what happened in Springsville can be forgiven, but not this, got it.”
Cole chuckled. Lane didn’t say anything. Even after all these years, even after the realizations that he had come to, the reminder of what had happened the night of his father’s death still haunted him. It seemed like every time he found the person “responsible” for the death of his former beloved, Shannon, he found someone else even more responsible.
First, it was Cole. Then it was Lucius. And now it was King, the man behind, apparently, both what had happened in Springsville and what had happened in Santa Maria.
“In any case,” Lane said, bringing the conversation back to the topic at hand. “You showed that there’s room for growth in the Black Reapers. I had wanted to keep the club small, but just as you did with the Gray Reapers, you forced my hand. Well played.”
Cole, perhaps picking up that Lane wasn’t entirely in the joking mood, took a sip of his drink and sat down in his own chair, his expression far more serious than moments before.
“I didn’t do any of this to antagonize you,” he said. “You understand that, right? That what I did here with the former Bernard Boys, that was merely trying to help a small town. It just so happened to blossom into something bigger.”
“So you mean to tell me that you expanding the club wasn’t some long-run scheme, wasn’t some way to undermine me, but simply done from the goodness of your heart?”
This time, it was Lane who chuckled.
“I can see that,” he said. “If it was anyone else, I would have called bullshit. But in your case, I know you, and I can see that happening.”
He sighed.
“And it’s probably for the best, anyway. King’s bound to find out that we came and helped these guys.”
“Which means he’s probably seeing us as his biggest threat, so he’s going to try and kill all of us.”
“Which means that our supposed peace lasted all of about, what, two, three years before we got sucked back into it?”
Lane sighed. He was going back to what he was good at, that was for sure, but there was a reason that he had turned his back on it. The peace of the previous few years had provided him with an enormous respite. It had allowed him—he thought—to move past his past, to establish a strong marriage with Angela, and to build the Black Reapers into less of a supposed “violent gang” and more of a “tough but welcome community” in Springsville.
But even he knew, in the deepest parts of his mind, that this peace could not have lasted. Even if King did not exist, someone else, perhaps a former Fallen Saint, perhaps a relative of a Fallen Saint, perhaps just some fucking stranger who only knew the Fallen Saints through news reports would rise up to cause him hell. Evil was not something that was eradicated but rather was something best held at bay.
“Well, it was fun while it lasted,” Lane said. “And now that you have pushed me outside of my boundaries, I think it’s time that I ask you to help me do it again.”
“How so?”
Lane took a sip of his drink.
“I know little of King and his MC in Vegas,” the older brother said. “But if I had to guess, given that he bankrolled two different clubs and gangs already, it’s probably lined to the teeth with weaponry and training that we’re not ready for, at least right now. Ironically, we beat the Fallen Saints and Bandits with tactics and skill. But here, now, we’ve got to beat them with numbers.”
“Numbers that we don’t have.”
“Yet.”
