Walking across the lot, I hold out my hand, and he takes it, both of us gripping harder than necessary, holding it a beat longer than a standard greeting. It’s the kind of handshake that doesn’t need a single word to explain what it means.
“Rhyder.”
A beat.
“Tate.”
That is enough.
Inside, two clubs fill the room the way two clubs do, voices overlapping, bottles cracking open, the smell of cold beer, road dust, and leather, the loosening that happens when men who’ve been riding hard arrive somewhere solid and safe.
Luke and Torch fall into conversation at the bar almost immediately, something about a run through similar country years back, the easy shorthand of men from different clubs who somehow speak the same underlying language. Trigger finds Remy near the pool table, and within twenty minutes, there is a game going on and genuine laughter coming from that end of the room.
Hawke settles near the bar with a beer, taking everything in while giving nothing away.
Quill moves through the room the way a leader does, with natural authority that never needs to announce itself, briefly checking in with each of his men, and making sure everyone has what they need. He eventually makes his way over to where I am standing near the back wall.
“How is she? Sophia?”
“Honestly, better than I expected.”
Raven arrives through the side door not long after. She stops when she sees the room, both clubs, men she doesn’t know, the energy of a space that has already established its own order, and for just a second, something moves across her face that I can’t quite read. Then she finds me and makes her way over, dark hair loose, dressed simply for once, her hands slightly open at her sides in a way that is less performance than usual.
“Heard there was something happening.” A pause, her voice dropping. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I just want to help.”
My eyes move over her for a moment. Not a girl trying to play tricks, just someone who has decided to be straight about it for once.
“Kitchen. Nothing else.”
She nods, no smile, no play, and turns toward the kitchen, and that’s when I notice Torch on the other side of the room. He has stopped whatever he was doing to watch her walk, the way a man watches something that has caught his full and undivided interest. Not subtle about it either.
Noting that, I go back to my beer.
Rhyder finds me later that night.
The room has settled into something easier by then, road tiredness catching up with some of the men, conversations dropping to a lower register, bottles getting worked through at a steady pace. He sits beside me without ceremony, beer in hand, and for a moment, neither of us speaks, just two men letting the noise sit around them.
Rhyder turns his beer in his hands. “How are you doing with everything?”
The jaw on him, the stillness, the controlled fury that lives just underneath all of it, and underneath that, something softer. Something that asks because it genuinely wants the answer.
The beer bottle turns in my hands. “Every morning I wake up, and he’s the first thing in my head. That hasn’t changed.” I pause while I find the rest of it. “But I’ve got my club and a promise to keep. And Tracker…” I stop. Let it settle. “Tracker will never be forgotten. Not by me. Not by anyone in this room.”
Rhyder is quiet for a long time. “He saved Lexi.” Something needing air. “Him and me, side by side in that place, and he never hesitated. Not once.”
“That was Tracker.” Simple and certain.
Rhyder nods, then lifts his beer. I lift mine, and our necks touch in a toast that nobody else in the room notices, and neither of us needs to explain.
It gets late into the night when I show the Blood Brothers to their rooms. They are basic rooms that are clean, functional, and have no pretense about what they are. I walk each manthrough until I get to Torch’s door, where he stops me with one hand on the doorframe and turns back, something purposeful in his expression. “That woman.” He leans against the frame. “The dark-haired one.”
“Raven.”
“Anything between you two?”
Holding his gaze, I give the question the weight it deserves before answering, “She’s not mine, Torch.”
Something brief and sharp moves in his expression and is filed away immediately. “Good.” The door closes.
