It’s been a week since I spoke to Sophia, and I still don’t have a plan.
I’ve been turning it over every day since that phone call, every angle, every option, and I keep coming back to the same wall. She wants New York, but I can’t let her have New York. And somewhere between those two facts, there has to be a solution that doesn’t end with her hating me or me breaking a promise to my dead brother.
My phone has a missed call from the hospital in Boston, the third one this week. Little Ryan’s surgery has gone well according to the doctors, but there are follow-up appointments, bills, and a hundred small logistics that fall to me now because there is nobody else. Tash has her mom, but money is another thing entirely.
Tracker would never know he had a son.
That thought sits with me differently every time it surfaces. Sometimes, it’s like grief, rage, or just something that has no clean answer and never will. I’ve named myself the boy’s financial support without anyone asking me to. It’s just what you do. He is Tracker’s blood, which makes him mine, too, and I’m not going to be the man our father was.
I never will be.
Memphis finds me at the kitchen island, his nails clicking on the polished concrete floor before I even hear him coming. He’s a big dog, a German Shepherd built like he knows it. He moves with that slow, unhurried confidence of an animal that has absolutely nowhere to be and no intention of rushing to get there. He finds his bowl, drinks deeply and without urgency,then lifts his head and looks at me with those steady amber eyes like he’s waiting for me to figure out my life.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell him.
He blinks once and looks away.
Pushing off from the island, I take my coffee out through the sliding doors onto the deck. The Nevada heat hits immediately. It’s dry and clean, and I stand there for a moment just breathing it in. The pool glitters below the deck, still and blue, catching the morning light. Beyond it, the desert stretches out in every direction, the mountains rising jagged and permanent against a clear sky.
I built this house three years ago when I became President of the Sinners. I wanted something that was mine, not the clubhouse or a rental, and not somewhere temporary. Something with clean lines, real walls, and a view that reminded me every morning there was a world out here beyond the noise, blood, and the business of running an MC.
Memphis follows me out and drops heavily onto the warm stone beside my feet with a grunt of pure contentment, one paw landing on my boot like he’s claiming me.
Standing there with my coffee, I think of Sophia.
Hearing my phone buzz on the kitchen counter, I make my way back inside to look at the screen.
Quill.
I’ve been avoiding this call for days, and I’ve run out of road. Pulling in a breath, I answer, “Hey, brother.”
“Don’t hey brother me.” His voice hits like a fist through the phone, no warmup or preamble, just raw fury sitting right at the surface. “What the actual fuck, Tate?”
I don’t say anything.
“You went into my city, on my streets, and pulled a trigger without a single word to me. Not before, not during… I found out from the fucking news, Tate. The news. Like everyone else.”
It’s the control in his voice that makes it worse, the kind that comes from a man choosing very carefully how much fury to let through.
“Quill—”
“No.” The control snaps, just slightly, just enough. “You don’t get to Quill me right now. Do you have any idea what that looked like? Do you have any idea what it said to my club, to my men, that the president of the Sinners came onto our turf and made a move without so much as a phone call? That’snotbrotherhood. That’snotrespect. That’syoudecidingyourgrief mattered more than everything we’ve built.”
The words land exactly where he means them to.
I stay quiet because he’s right, we both know it, and there’s nothing I can say right now that isn’t going to make it worse.
“Tracker was your brother by blood,” Quill continues, his voice dropping back down, but the heat still burning underneath it. “I know that. I know what you lost. But he was our brother by patch, and that war… the El Pasos, Clemente, Lawrence, all of it, that belongs to us too. You didn’t get to shut us out of it and go in alone like some kind of one-man army. That’s not who we are.”
Moving through the kitchen and out the front door, I pull it shut behind me and lean against the front porch railing, looking out over the yard where Memphis has already relocated himself to a patch of shade near the gate.
“You went in without telling me,” he continues. “And then you ran back to Vegas and went quiet. I’ve been calling you for days, Tate.Days. Do you know what it’s been like holding my club together while the FBI sniffs around our clubhouse because of a move you made without asking me?”
That lands differently.
“FBI?”
“Yeah. FBI.” His voice is tight. “They’ve been around twice, asking questions about Tracker, retaliation, and who hadmotive. They’re not wrong, but they’ve got nothing because there’s nothing to find. But that’s not the point. The point is my club is under a microscope right now because of something I didn’t know was coming and couldn’t prepare for.”
