"Turn around." The words came out rough, commanding. "Hands and knees."
Tyler whimpered at the loss when he lifted off me, but he moved—turning, dropping to all fours on the mattress, his ass in the air, his spine curved in a line that made my mouth dry. I knelt behind him, gripped his hips, and drove back inside in one hard stroke.
"Yes—" Tyler's cry was muffled by the pillow, his hands fisting in the sheets. I set a punishing pace, the angle deeper now, each thrust punching sounds out of him that I felt in my bones. His shoulders shook. His back bowed. I watched my cock disappear intohis body over and over, watched the red marks my fingers left on his hips, watched him fall apart beneath me.
"More." His voice was ruined, desperate. "Don't stop—don't fucking stop?—"
I draped myself over his back, pressed his chest down into the mattress, and pinned him there with my weight. The new angle forced his cock against the sheets, gave him the friction he was begging for. Tyler sobbed, his whole body trembling, trapped between my cock inside him and the pressure on his shaft below.
"Come for me." I bit the words into his ear, punctuated by thrusts that rocked his entire body. "Let me feel you."
Tyler shattered.
His orgasm hit him like a wave—his body clenching impossibly tight around my cock, his cry muffled by the pillow, his hips grinding down into the mattress as he spilled onto the sheets beneath him. The pressure, the heat, the sound of my name torn from his throat—it pulled me over the edge with him, and I buried myself to the hilt and came so hard my vision went white.
We collapsed together, a tangle of sweat-slicked limbs and racing hearts, my cock still twitching inside him as the aftershocks rolled through us both. I pressed my forehead to the back of his neck and breathed him in—sex and salt and something warm underneath that was justTyler, justhome.
"I love you." The words came out without thinking, murmured against his skin.
Tyler's hand found mine where it rested on his hip. He laced our fingers together and squeezed.
"I know." A pause. His voice was soft, raw, still catching from the orgasm. "I love you too."
The clubhouse had changed in two months.
Not the building itself—the low buildings and the garage and the bikes in their stalls looked the same as they had before Reno, before Primm, before everything. But the feeling had shifted. There was a weight in the air now, a sobriety that hadn't been there before. The club had bled for this war, and the scars were still healing.
Blade was up and walking, which Rosa had declared a minor miracle given that she'd had her hands inside his chest cavity pulling bullets out of places bullets shouldn't have been. He moved slow, leaned on a cane that would be gone within another month according to Rosa's latest assessment, and got winded climbing the porch steps—but he was alive, conscious, and well on his way to a full recovery. Not that he had any patience for the process.
"I've been resting for two months," he'd growled at Rosa just yesterday, when she'd caught him trying to lift a transmission. "I'm going to atrophy into a goddamn skeleton if you don't let me do something."
"You're going to reopen your surgical site if you don't sit down," Rosa had shot back, hands on her hips, utterly unintimidated. "Give it another fewweeks and you can lift whatever you want. Until then, sit."
Blade had sat down. Even he knew better than to argue with Rosa when she used that voice. But the frustration in his eyes was temporary—underneath it, we could all see the man who'd be back to full strength before summer ended. Rosa had put him back together too well for anything less.
Ghost was off the crutch entirely now, his leg healed enough for walking, though he still favored it when he thought no one was watching. The warehouse and everything that followed had changed him—stripped something soft from his eyes, replaced it with a hardness that made him look older than his years. He didn't laugh as easily anymore. Didn't smile as often. But he was steady, reliable, and had proven himself under fire in ways that meant the patched members had stopped treating him like a kid.
Irish was a different story.
His leg was healing—slower than Ghost's, the damage deeper, the recovery longer—but he pushed himself anyway. I'd find him in the gym at dawn, working through physical therapy exercises with a grimness that didn't suit him. Irish was supposed to be the one cracking jokes, flashing that knowing grin, filling silences with energy that made everyone around him feel lighter. That was who he'd been for as long as I'd known him—the spark, the mouth, the brother who could make you laugh in the middle of a firefight.
The injury had dimmed that. He should havebeen at the warehouse. Should have been at Primm. The club had ridden into two major operations without him, and the debt of that burned in his eyes every time someone mentioned the fighting he'd missed. The jokes came less often now. The grin appeared and faded too quickly.
But Declan was there.
Seven years they'd been together—seven years of Declan's quiet steadiness balancing Irish's chaotic energy, of shared bunks and inside jokes and the kind of love that didn't need to announce itself because everyone could see it. In the weeks since Primm, Declan had barely left Irish's side. I'd see them in the gym together, Declan spotting Irish through exercises that shouldn't have required spotting, his hands ready to catch weight that Irish could have handled alone. I'd see Declan's palm rest on Irish's lower back when they walked, see Irish lean into the touch like it was the only thing keeping him tethered.
And when Declan was close—when their shoulders brushed or their eyes met across a room—glimpses of the old Irish surfaced. The knowing grin would flash, bright and quick. A joke would land with its usual timing. The spark would flare, reminding everyone that the man underneath the frustration was still there, just waiting for his body to catch up with his spirit.
They'd weather this the way they'd weathered everything else. Together.
Maria and the girls had returned two weeks after Primm—Hawk's wife and daughters back in theclubhouse after months at the safehouse. The girls ran through the grounds like they owned it, shrieking with laughter, throwing themselves at any patched member who'd pick them up and swing them around. Hawk watched them with something soft in his eyes, something that made him look almost human.
But Maria was different.
She moved through the clubhouse with a tension in her shoulders that hadn't been there before, a tightness around her mouth that deepened whenever Hawk's attention drifted to club business instead of his family. I'd caught fragments of conversations when they didn't know I was listening—clipped words, long silences, the careful politeness of a marriage under strain. Whatever was happening between them, it had been building for years. The war had just made it impossible to ignore.
Not my business. Every couple had their own battles. I had enough of my own.
