Same spot.
Inside of the left forearm.
Cowboy doesn’t ask questions—he’s done enough of these to know the protocol.
The needle hums. The ink goes in. I watch the letters form, one at a time, in Cowboy’s clean, practiced hand.
Property of Banshee.
Not Lee. Banshee. His road name.
The name the club gave him, the name that means something in this world—the wail that warns of danger, the man who rides at the front, the brother who went into exile for loyalty and came out the other side still standing.
I’m not just claiming the man.
I’m claiming everything he is—the grief and the healing and the MC and the horses and the cabin under the oak trees and whatever comes next.
Lee takes my arm when Cowboy’s finished, holds it next to his.
Our forearms side by side—his ink, my ink, the matching declarations that will be there when we’re eighty.
“Property of Bex,” he reads, then mine: “Property of Banshee.”
He looks at me. The smile on his face is the one I’ve been earning since I walked into that feed store—the real one, the unguarded one, the one that transforms his whole face and makes him look like the man Rose fell in love with, except he’s not that man anymore.
He’s the one I fell in love with.
The one who was built by the loss and rebuilt by the choice. “We match.”
“We match.”
Cowboy takes a picture for the shop wall.
Two forearms. Two names. The shorthand of forever in a world where forever is earned, not promised.
Club dinner is running late tonight.
The table is full—brothers, ol’ ladies, clubwhores, kids running between chairs.
Grace sits at the far end looking like she might deliver the baby right there on the table and not caring because the food is good and Shadow’s hand’s on her back.
I sit beside Lee.
His bare hand finds mine under the table.
The new tattoo on his forearm is still healing—slightly raised, slightly tender, the skin pink around the black letters.
I trace the edge of it with my thumb and feel him shiver.
Across the table, Phantom sits alone.
The empty chair beside him—Jolene’s chair, though no one calls it that—is pushed in, squared with the table, as precisely maintained as the absence it represented.
He laughs at the right moments.
Speaks when spoken to.
Leads the toast when Shadow announces the baby’s name—Braxton—but I saw the space he kept around himself—a perimeter, invisible, the boundary line of a man who has made peace with being the one who sits alone.
