Legend doesn’t interrupt. He just watches.
I step behind Brittany and slide the cut over her shoulders, and it fits, not perfectly yet, but close enough to feel like fate. I can’t pretend this is temporary when she’s wearing my name in public.
There’s cheering. Applause. The kind that matters in a club like ours.
Derby nods once. Sophie smiles. Royal finally relaxes back against the fence with Becki. The message spreads without a single raised voice.
Brittany is Property of Oaks.
She stands with me.
And I stand with her.
That’s the law.
Later, when the yard thins out and the kids have been corralled and the ol’ ladies are packing up aluminum pans like the world is normal again, Brittany leans against my bike with her fingers hooked in the edge of the cut like she’s making sure it’s real.
“You didn’t make a speech,” she says, half-teasing, half-wondering.
“I don’t need one,” I reply. “Do you?”
She tilts her head slightly, eyes searching my face. “You sure about this?”
I step closer until I can feel her breath, until the space between us is as thin as paper, and I let my voice drop where it belongs. Against her lips.
“I’ve been sure since the lake,” I say.
Her mouth curves faintly. “I’m not easy,” she warns.
“I ain’t either,” I tell her, and she laughs softly, the kind that doesn’t carry across yards, the kind that belongs to me.
As we kiss, I know she earned this, not because I wanted her, and not because she survived, but because she stood and didn’t bend. If we Kings of Anarchy members respect anything, it’s a woman who doesn’t beg for permission to exist.
That’s the only kind I’d ever put my name on.
Chapter 38
Brittany
Moving into a house that once belonged to another woman feels like stepping into a story you weren’t invited to, the kind where the furniture remembers the arguments and the walls hold old perfume in the paint no matter how many times you scrub them, because ghosts ain’t polite enough to leave just because you changed the sheets.
The first night I carry a box up the front steps, I almost turn around, not because the house is scary in the way people mean when they tell stories, but because it feels like a dare, like Hell itself is watching from the road with its arms crossed, waiting to see if I trip over my own nerves.
The place still smells faintly of Bethany’s old perfume under the cleaner Lottie insisted on using when we scrubbed it top to bottom, and even though the walls have been repainted and the bedroom furniture replaced and the closet emptied of silk and sharp heels and polished versions of a life that never fit him anyway, I can still feel her in the corners, in the quiet, in the way the air seems to pause as if it’s expecting her to come down the hall and make this ugly.
Oaks takes the box from my hands without asking, because he always does that, steps in like I’m fragile even when I’ve proved I’m not, and sometimes it makes me want to bite him and sometimes it makes me want to lean into him until my bones stop buzzing.
“You don’t have to look like you’re walking to the gallows,” he mutters as he sets the box down by the door.
“I ain’t,” I say, even though my stomach is tight. “I’m just thinking.”
“Dangerous habit,” he replies, and it’s dry enough to make me roll my eyes, but it cracks the tension anyway, which is what he meant to do. Oaks handles feelings the way he handles fights, by moving in a way that keeps you from getting cornered.
He’s been saying the house feels different now, less like a cage and more like something waiting to be rewritten. Lottie’s curtains hang in the front windows, soft and practical, and there’s a new rug in the living room that doesn’t look like it wants to trip you out of spite. The kitchen has been scrubbed so hard it practically squeaks, and yet I still catch myself looking at the counter like I might see blood there, like Bethany might be hiding under the shine.
I wander into the bedroom slowly, my steps careful like I’m crossing an invisible line. The bed is new, dark wood, heavy frame, the kind that doesn’t creak when you move on it.
Sunlight filters through curtains onto bedsheets we picked together, soft instead of sharp, and for a second I can almost pretend this is normal, like I’m just a woman moving in with a man who wants her, not the girl who stabbed a club vice president’s wife and then walked into her house, anyway.
