Closing my eyes for a second, I let that land. “Quill. I’m sorry. That is on me, and I’m not going to stand here and tell you otherwise.”
“You’re damn right it’s on you.”
“I should have called. I should have brought you in. And I didn’t because I wasn’t thinking about the brotherhood. I was thinking about Tracker and those bastards sitting on Fulton Street laughing like they hadn’t played a hand in his death.” A pause, jaw tight. “That’s not an excuse. That’s just the truth.”
A silence on the other end…
Long and deliberate.
When Quill speaks again, some of the fire has banked down, leaving something harder and more honest underneath.
“I know why you did it,” he says. “And if it had been my brother sitting in that car with a bullet in him, if it had been someone I loved, I’d have probably done the same thing. I get it. But Tate, you’re lucky it was clean. You’re lucky nobody got caught. Because if it had gone sideways, it wouldn’t just have been you paying for it.”
“I know that. I know.”
“Do you? Because it didn’t look like it from where I was standing.”
I let that sit. He’s earned the right to say it.
“This happens again,” Quill growls, his voice settling into something final and certain. “You come to me first before you make a single move. I mean it. We will have serious words if you don’t. We arenotdoing this again.”
Pressing my lips together to hold back the instinct to push back, I decide it’s not the time. Tracker loved these men. Theywere his family, and they’re mine now, too, whether I asked for it or not.
“Yeah. I got you.”
“Good.” A beat, and then his tone shifts. Not warm exactly, but the edge is gone from it, the way it goes with men who’ve said their piece and mean to move forward. “Now. We’ve got another problem.”
Memphis has wandered back from the gate and is now sitting at the bottom of the porch steps, looking up at me with his ears forward.
“What is it?”
“Sophia.”
Everything in me goes still.
“What about her?”
“She’s packing her bags, brother. She’s heading to New York.”
My hand tightens around the phone.
“What do you mean she’s heading there? I told her I’d deal with it.”
“Deal with it how?” Quill asks. “What does that mean?”
Exhaling slowly, I drop down onto the top porch step, elbows on my knees. Memphis leans his big head against my thigh.
“She called me a week ago. Said she couldn’t stay in Vixen Falls, that she wanted to come back to the clubhouse. I told her to give me some time to figure something out, and I’d call her back.”
There’s a pause, and then Quill laughs.
Not a small laugh either. A proper, genuine, full laugh that tells me he finds this considerably funnier than I do.
“What the fuck, Quill? What’s funny?”
“Nothing, man.” He’s still smiling. I can hear it. “You’ve just got a lot to learn about women. She wasn’t asking for your permission. She was telling you what her plans were.”
Memphis looks back at me with those amber eyes. Neither of us has anything useful to say.
