Something happens to his face when I say her name, an opening, immediate and warm, like a door unlocking all the way.
“She’s good.” A break, something opening further. “Really good. She’s nursing now. Changed her plans after everything. Harvard felt like a different version of her life. But she found her way into medicine through a different door, and she loves it. She’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.”
“That sounds perfect for her.”
“She says hi. She wanted to come, but—”
“Club business. I understand.”
He nods slowly. Then, “She thinks about you, both of you going through what you did. She understands it in a way most people don’t.”
Swallowing against the tightness in my throat, I find my voice, “Tell her I think about her too. And tell her I’m glad she’s okay.”
He holds my gaze for a moment longer, something moving in his expression that is quieter and older than everything else he carries.
“He’d be glad you’re here.” His voice drops low. “Tracker. He’d be glad you’re somewhere safe.”
Not trusting my voice, I nod, and Rhyder nods back, that acknowledgment between two people who understand each other’s grief without needing to say another word about it. Then he moves back toward the group, and I stand there with the bowl still in my hands and breathe in the cool desert evening and let it settle.
Across the yard, Raven has found her way to Torch.
Standing close to him near the far end of the table, not quite touching but not quite not, her dark hair catches the evening light, saying something that makes him turn toward her with that slow, focused attention of a man who has decided something is worth his full consideration. He is smiling. Just slightly. On a face like Torch’s, that is practically a declaration, and watching for just a moment before looking away, I carry the salad to the table and let the evening keep being what it is.
The evening settles into something genuinely good, the kind of good that arrives without you planning for it, that comes from the right combination of people, food, cooling air, and the relief of having gotten through a difficult day and come out the other side still standing.
The food is extraordinary. Flame has clearly taken the grill as a personal challenge, and the desert air has cooled into something gentle and perfect. The conversation around the tables moves between serious and easy in the way it does when people have been through something together and earned the right to laugh at the other end of it.
It is Trigger who says it, near the grill with Remy, something coming up in the conversation, he says, “Tracker would’vealready eaten half of whatever’s on that grill and blamed it on someone else.” The laugh that comes out of that is sudden, genuine, and slightly surprised, the way laughter always sounds when it arrives somewhere you weren’t expecting it.
It moves through the group quickly, table to table, face to face, and I feel it move through me too. I look up at the enormous Nevada sky above us and sit with that bittersweet thing, where grief and love are so tangled together you genuinely can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
I know, I think.I know that’s exactly what he would have done.
Later in the evening, the heat fully gone now, the desert night cool and enormous above us, the yard lit warmly against it, Quill appears at my elbow. “Can I steal you for a minute?”
Following him to a quieter corner of the yard, away from the tables, grill smoke, and easy chaos of the evening, I watch him reach into the inside of his cut and pull out something folded.
Dark gray, worn soft in the way that things only get when they’ve been someone’s favorite for a long time, washed too many times, reached for too often, the fabric giving way to something that has a warmth to it that is more than just cotton.
He holds it out, and looking at it for a moment before reaching out and taking it from him with both hands, something shifts before I’ve even understood what it is. The moment it is in my hands, I know, before bringing it to my face, breathing in, or any of the logical parts of my brain catch up with what my hands already understand.
Ryan.
Pressing it against my face and breathing in its scent, it’s there, faint and completely real, absolutely impossible, and entirely true.
It still smells like him.
“Jasmine found it in his room,” Quill says, his voice low and even, giving me the words carefully. “She was clearing it out a few weeks ago. She couldn’t do it for a long time, none of us could, and she found it folded on the shelf above his bed. Like he’d just left it there.” A pause. “She kept it until she knew I was coming here. Said she thought you’d want it more than anyone.”
I’m not able to speak.
Standing in the corner of the Sinners MC yard in Las Vegas with Ryan’s T-shirt pressed against my chest, I cry, quietly and completely, the way I’d learned to cry since all of this began. Not fighting it, not performing it, just letting it move through me the way grief does when you stop trying to manage it and simply let it be what it is.
Quill doesn’t try to fix it.
He stands there solid, steady, and completely present, because Quill has always understood, probably better than most people in my life, that some moments don’t need fixing. They just need someone willing to stand in them with you.
When I finally surface, I wipe my face with the back of my hand and look up at him. “Thank you.” I pause, finding the rest of it. “And tell Jasmine—” I stop. Start again. “Tell her I love her.”
