“Mason isn’t staying here.”
“I meant the cat.”
“Sure you did.”
Lena grinned. “Book my couch, babe. I’m coming to Santa Fe.”
When we hung up twenty minutes later, my apartment felt quieter but not empty. The light had gone soft across the floor, Judith sat smugly in the window, and Bandit’s bell jingled from behind the spare room door like a tiny warning.
Saturday was suddenly not a vague threat anymore.
Lena was coming.
Regan was expecting me.
Mason would be there.
I stared at my phone, then at my reflection in the darkened window over the sink. Hair damp from the shower. Oversized T-shirt. Bare feet. A woman with a new job, a hostile cat, an adopted social circle, and no safe explanation for the way one biker had managed to turn my entire nervous system into a bad idea.
I took another sip of coffee.
“Fine,” I muttered to the empty apartment. “One wedding.”
Bandit hissed from the other room.
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s how I feel too.”
CHAPTER 10
MASON
The clubhouse smelledlike roses and cheap regret.
Regan had gone full fairy-tale on the place. Tulle hung from every rafter like someone had mugged a wedding planner. Strings of fairy lights blinked overhead, soft and twinkling and completely out of place in a room that usually smelled like motor oil and spilled whiskey. Roses everywhere—red, white, pink—stuffed into vases on the bar, scattered across tables, even taped to the goddamn pool cues. All of it for Tank’s bride. Surprise rehearsal dinner number four. Or maybe five. I’d lost count. The wedding was still a few days away yet.
I stood at the far end of the bar, nursing a beer I didn’t want, watching the brothers laugh and clap Tank on the back while stories got louder and champagne corks popped like gunfire. Tank looked happy. Really happy. The kind of settled that made a man believe forever wasn’t just a word on a tattoo. I was glad for him. Tank had earned that.
But weddings always did this. Dug up shit I thought I’d buried under six feet of desert dirt.
Like the shoebox in the back of my closet. The one with the ring I’d saved for six long months—every extra shift, every overtime run, every dollar I didn’t spend on beer or bail. Rylee’sring. The one she never wore because she’d sold club secrets to the highest bidder and left me with two dead brothers and scars that still pulled tight when the weather turned cold.
I set the bottle down harder than I meant to.
Tarak caught my eye from across the room. River stood next to him, arms crossed, watching the whole circus like he was already calculating how many more nights of this we had left. I jerked my chin toward the door. No words. They didn’t need any.
I shoved off the stool and headed out.
Edge fell in step beside me before I reached the parking lot. “I hate this shit too,” he muttered. “Let me watch your six.”
I almost said yes. Almost.
Then Regan appeared out of nowhere, stepping between us with that look she got when she was about to lay down the law. Hands on her hips, eyes narrowed. “If you cut and run with him, Edge, no nooky. For a month.”
Edge stopped dead. His shoulders dropped. “Shit,” he drawled, long and defeated.
I kept walking.
The night air hit me the second I stepped outside—still warm from the day’s sun, carrying the faint smell of creosote and distant rain that would probably never come. I swung a leg over the bike, fired it up, and let the engine rumble through my chest like a second heartbeat.
