CRASH’S SECRET

ASH VALLEY HELLBORN KINGS MC

BOOK 4

VERA RIVERS

Crash’s Secret

Ash Valley Hellborn Kings MC

Book 4

Text Copyright © 2026 by Vera Rivers

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

First printing, 2026

Publisher

Vera Rivers

vera@verariversauthor.com

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CHAPTER 1

CASSIDY

The prospect spots me in my car through the chain-link and drops his clipboard.

“No way.” He hauls the gate open one-handed. “Cassidy Harlan.”

“Hey, Trapper.”

“Saber told us you were coming tomorrow. He’s gonna lose his mind.” He bounces on his heels, twenty-three and as loyal as a golden retriever. “Go. Go in.”

He waves me in. I park in front of my brother’s MC clubhouse.

Gravel pops under my boots the whole walk up. The clubhouse is loud enough to rattle its own windows with bass and laughter.

There are more bikes parked than I’ve ever counted here before, with plates from all over the country, instead of just Arizona.

Guys’ cuts in the parking lot have bottom rockers from charters that aren’t Ash Valley. Because the Hellborn Kings has chapters across the country, and above all of them sits National. The men who outrank even Saber.

The men who don’t ride eight hundred miles for a party.

The out-of-towners rode in two months ago, after years of trouble with a club called the Crimson Warriors.

And the Warriors have been lying low since National got involved. That doesn’t mean the danger is over.

The guys from National aren’t staying much longer, though, from what Saber told me. Two months is a long time.

I push the door open.

The noise hits first. Then the smell—beer, smoke, and leather. The main area of the clubhouse is exactly how I left it four years ago: pool table, the bar running the length of the far wall, and a kitchen near the back.

And him. Crash. The Vice President of the Ash Valley Hellborn Kings.

He’s behind the bar, telling a story to a group of guys. Tall, dirty blond, a beard, ink down both forearms, and that grin. He’s just as hot as I remember him.

A woman on a stool is flirting with him, and he’s flirting right back, leaning in close like she’s the only person in the room. He doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t have to. She wants him regardless.

I used to think that was charm. Whatever it is, he’s never once aimed it at me.

I’ve been in love with my brother’s best friend since I was a kid. When I left for college, I told myself I’d forget about him. It’s been four years since, and my body still hasn’t gotten the message.

One look at him and I’m a teenager again, infatuated with a man who’s never looked at me twice.

He’s been friends with my brother since grade school, and since they’re nine years older than me, I’ve known Crash my whole life. He’s been at every barbecue, every party, and every big event.

It wasn’t one thing that made me fall for him. It was a million small actions that formed one big feeling.

It was him remembering I took my coffee with too much sugar and pouring it that way without asking, every time, for years.

It was the summer I was fourteen, and a couple of older boys hung around the edge of a club barbecue looking at me, and Crash drifted over and stood at my shoulder until they found somewhere else to be. He never said a word about it, to me or them.

It was the way he’d actually answer my questions about the bikes instead of waving me off like a kid.

It was a hundred Friday nights of him sliding a soda down the bar to me before I asked.

None of it meant anything to him. That’s the part that took me years to understand. He was being good to his best friend’s little sister, the same as he’d have been good to anybody Saber loved. To Crash, it was nothing. To me, it was everything.

His eyes find me. His grin disappears.

The story hangs unfinished, and nobody around him seems to understand why he quit talking.

I stop breathing.

He’s still staring. The glass cracks in his hand.

Beer seeps through the glass, running off his wrist, and he doesn’t look down at it.

He sets it on the bar, doesn’t say a word, and walks out the back door.

Gone. Four years and he couldn’t even say hello.

“CASSIDY!”

The roar comes from the pool table, and then Saber is plowing through his own party, and I’m off the ground, ribs being crushed in a hug that smells of leather and the same cologne he’s worn since I was twelve.

“You said you were coming tomorrow,” he says, twirling me around.

“I lied.” I playfully smack his chest. “Put me down.”

He doesn’t. He turns another full circle with me hanging there and shouts at the room. “MY BABY SISTER IS HOME.”

Strangers raise bottles to me. My brother—President of the Hellborn Kings, the man who scares grown men out of whole counties—is grinning so wide it changes his face.

He sets me down and holds me at arm’s length. “Four years.”

“I came home for Christmas.”

“Four years,” he says again, like Christmas doesn’t count.

He doesn’t need to introduce me to the women by the kitchen. I met most of them last Christmas, over three days at Saber's ranch. And I’ve heard about all of them during phone calls with my brother.

My glance lands on the back door. Shut. Stayed shut.

Shelby reaches me first, my brother’s Old Lady. She hugs me before I get a word out.

“I’m obligated to report he cried when you told him you’re coming home for good,” she says.

“Not true,” Saber says, behind me.

“It’s true,” she whispers, before stepping back.

The rest of the women come in a wave after that. I hug everyone who hugs me first, laugh when I’m supposed to, and lose track of half of what’s said.

It takes less than a minute to feel like I never left.

Acorn salutes me with his cue from the pool table, more gray in his beard than I remember. He taught me to bank a shot when I was twelve, mostly so he could take Saber’s money betting on me.

Near the pool table, Joker’s voice carries over the music. He’s talking to a couple of the National guys.

“Most of you are rolling out soon, right? Can’t blame you. Two months and the Warriors haven’t so much as crossed the county line. It’s over.”

“Nothing with Nitro is over,” Razor says from the end of the bar.

“Here we go,” Joker responds.

“I’m just telling you what I know.”

Joker laughs it off and changes the subject, but I catch the look the two National guys trade. They don’t argue with Razor. Nobody does.

Razor is the club’s Road Captain. Crash might be the VP and my brother’s best friend, but when it comes to getting things done, Razor is Saber’s right hand.

“Don’t mind them,” Shelby says, close to my ear. “It’s been calm. That’s all anybody will tell us, anyway. Club business stays in Church.”

“And what do you think?” I ask her. The talk of all this violence makes me nervous. I care about a lot of people in this room; they’re the only family I have.

She takes a second before she answers. “I think two months of calm doesn’t erase years of bad. But your brother is careful, and National wouldn’t leave if it wasn’t safe. Come on, you need a beer.”

She flags down the prospect behind the bar, and he hands the bottles over to us. As I take mine, I look at the back door again, wondering where Crash went.

Shelby looks at the door. Then at me. She doesn’t say anything about it, and somehow that’s worse. She already has me figured out.

I just hope she doesn’t mention it to my brother.

Saber finds me an hour later and steers me into the kitchen.

“So.” He leans on the counter, boots crossed at the ankle. “I really want you to stay at the ranch.”

I shake my head. “Nope. I’m not moving in with you and your Old Lady.”

“I’ve got thirty acres.”

“You don’t need your kid sister in the guest room.” I lean on the counter across from him. “Besides, I’ve been on my own for four years. I don’t need a guardian.”

He scowls. “Fine. There’s an extra room in the clubhouse. Stay here until the trouble is over with the Warriors. Then, I’ll help you get your own place.”

“I thought it was over.”

“Probably is.” He doesn’t look at me when he says it. “Humor me anyway.”

I nod. “Deal.”

Staying at the clubhouse is not ideal, but it’s safe, and I’ll have my own bathroom.

“And I have a job for you.” He says this casually, but knowing my brother, he’s had this planned for a while. “The books are a mess for the club’s bar, and Duke is stretched thin. But he’ll train you on the Bones and Bucks ledgers. The pay is good. And you can walk there from the clubhouse.”

“A bookkeeper for the Hellborn Kings.” I turn the bottle in my hands. “Dad would be proud.”

“He would be.” The grief comes and goes in one breath, the only way either of us lets it. “It’s legit work, Cass. Nothing illegal. That’s the point of it.”

“Who runs Bones and Bucks now?”

I know the answer.

“Crash.”

The beer bottle is cold against my palm, and I’m using that feeling to anchor me. I’m going to be spending a lot of time with the man I’ve never stopped thinking about.

“Crash is the person I trust most in this world,” Saber says. “If anything escalates with the Warriors, I like that he’ll be close by. He’ll protect you if he needs to.”

“Okay, I’ll take the job.” My voice is too eager, but he doesn’t react.

“Great.” He squeezes my shoulder. “It’s good to have you back, sis.”

“It’s good to be back,” I say.

I just wish the man I came back for had stayed in the room long enough to say hello.

CHAPTER 2

CRASH

The lights are on in my bar when I pull in.

Seven-forty a.m.

We don’t open until eleven, and I’ve got the only key that matters.

Except I don’t. Not anymore. Duke handed a key to Cassidy Harlan last night, and there she is through the front window, set up at the rail with a pen behind her ear, ready to take this job seriously.

Of course she’s early. She didn’t even have to commute. She just walked over from the clubhouse.

I kill the engine and sit there with both hands on the wheel, losing an argument with myself.

Last night there was a plan. The plan had a name—Dana or Deena, fuck if I can remember. She came with a low-cut top and zero complications. She’d been on that clubhouse stool an hour, laughing at everything I said, and I’d already decided how the night would end. With her sucking my cock.

She’d made her intentions very clear, and I wasn’t going to object.

Then Cassidy walked in. And the woman whom I’d planned on fucking no longer held my interest.

I haven’t seen Saber’s kid sister in four years. I was always out of state on runs when she came for Christmas. She is not what I expected. For starters, she’s no longer a kid. She’s twenty-two years old with blonde hair, blue eyes, and curves that would feel so fucking good naked against my body.

That thought is the reason I cracked the glass. Saber would fucking kill me if he knew where my head was at. So I walked out of the party and didn’t come back.

I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve been talking my way into and out of trouble my whole life. I run this bar. On a good Saturday night, I can keep the whole bar laughing for an hour straight. And one look from Saber’s little sister and I’ve got nothing to say.

She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on, and she is the one woman on this earth I am not allowed to touch. Off-limits to every member in this club. Me most of all.

Saber’s sister. Saber, who is my club’s President. My best friend since grade school. The man who once got stabbed in the leg, because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

I’d take a bullet for that man.

And now she works in my bar and sleeps in the clubhouse. There is no square foot of my life she isn’t standing in.

Now I have to try to act normal and face her.

“Good morning.” She doesn’t look up when the door swings shut behind me.

It gives me another moment to compose myself.

“Hey.”

That’s it. Hey. I closed this room at two a.m. last Saturday with two dozen people hanging on every word I said, and this morning, my mind only produces one syllable.

She keeps working, so I get busy behind the bar. Pull bottles. Check the cooler. Anything that isn’t the line of her neck or the curve of her ass.

She flips a page. “Duke met me here at seven. He walked me through the first ledger, then a kid called with a question about dinosaurs. He went home after that.”

“His son. Leo.”

“He looked like a cute kid on the video chat.” She smiles. “My brother said these books were a mess. They’re actually a trainwreck, just so you know.”

“My fault,” I respond. “Duke is stretched thin. So I took over the books for the bar.”

“So, this disaster is yours.” She draws a line through a whole row of numbers, execution-style. “Good to know who to bill for the aspirin.”

A laugh gets out of me before I can kill it. She glances up at the sound, like she caught me at something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.

A smirk plays on her lips before she looks down again.

I stay at the register end, as far away as I can.

“You want coffee?” I jerk a thumb at the kitchen. “I’ll put some on.”

“Sure.”

I go make her coffee. In the kitchen, I put both hands on the counter and stand there a second, getting myself together.

She’s going to be here every day now. Every fucking day. Sleeping in the same clubhouse.

I pour hers and start shoveling sugar in. Four spoons. Same as when she was sixteen, perched on a clubhouse stool doing homework while the rest of us shot pool and pretended we weren’t a pack of criminals.

I set the cup next to her ledger. She looks at it. Then at me.

She wraps both hands around the cup and takes a drink. “You remembered the sugar.”

“Lucky guess.”

“The absurd amount of sugar I like in my coffee is not a guess, Crash.”

The front door saves my ass.

Saber comes in with his cut on, riding gloves hanging out of one pocket, and a gun tucked into a holster. That combination at eight in the morning means club business, not a social call.

“There she is.” He kisses the top of Cassidy’s head, lifts her coffee out of her hands, drinks, and grimaces. “Fuck, Cass. Still with the sugar.”

She takes it from him. “Serves you right. Get your own.”

He leans on the rail across from me, and from the look on his face, I’m about to get orders.

“Guys from National decided to leave today.” He checks his holster. “Razor, Viper, and I are riding out with them, then we are going on a run.”

Cassidy stops writing. “What kind of run?”

“Club business, Cass. You know not to ask.” He says it gently.

She holds his stare a beat, then drops her eyes to the ledger.

His attention swings to me. “We’ll be gone a week. Maybe ten days. You’ve got the gavel while I’m gone.” He looks over at his sister, then back to me. “Trapper and the other prospects will keep an eye on Shelby. You take care of Cassidy.”

Shit. The one job I shouldn’t take, but can’t refuse.

“Anything she needs.” He ticks it off like a grocery list, no idea he’s reading my death sentence. “Most of her stuff is still in her car. Get a prospect to haul it up to her room today. She needs furniture for that room, take her to get it. Car acts up, you fix it. She wants anything in town, a brother goes with her.” He points at me. “She’s sleeping under the club’s roof and working under yours, and I want my best on her. Okay?”

He wants his best on her. Jesus fucking Christ. Why did he have to say it like that?

“Yeah.” I keep my eyes on him and off her. “Of course.”

“I’m an adult.” Cassidy straightens in her stool. “I’ve been living alone for years. I agreed to the clubhouse. I didn’t agree to a babysitter.”

Saber shrugs. “You’ve got one, anyway.”

“Saber!” That’s her whole argument.

“Cass.” Just her name. The President surfaces in his face for half a second, even for her. “Warriors have been quiet two months. But I can’t promise that will hold. Don’t fight me on this one.”

She wants to fight back; anybody could see it loading up.

Then she trades it for leverage instead. “Fine. But we do it my way. He keeps me company, but he doesn’t hover. And he has to take me out for tacos as often as I want. Because if I’m stuck with a babysitter, I’m at least eating well.”

“That’s the spirit,” Saber says.

She points her pen at her brother. “Then it’s a deal.”

She smiles. Aims it straight at me, first one since I walked in, and I’d hand over a year of my life to be allowed to do a single thing about it.

Saber checks his phone and rounds the bar to hug her. Her arms come up around his ribs and hang on.

It’s obvious how much she means to him.

“Be safe,” she says into his cut.

“Always am.”

She chuckles. “No, you’re not.”

“But I always come home.”

He turns her loose, knocks his fist on the rail in front of me, and stops. Saber looks at me longer than he needs to, and for one cold second, I’m sure he’s seen straight through my skull to the thoughts I’ve had about his sister since last night.

“Take care of her,” he says.

“With my life.”

It comes truer than I meant to let it sound.

Saber nods once—satisfied.

The door swings shut behind him.

His bike fires up outside, and he’s gone.

And then it’s the two of us.

She clicks her tongue. “So… A week.”

“Ten days, maybe.”

“Then you’d better get used to me.” She takes a slow sip of the coffee. “You’re feeding me the whole time.”

“That so?”

“There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s the deal I made with the club’s Prez.” She sets the cup down and turns it a quarter turn, lining the handle up like it matters. “Starting today. Tacos. The good place, not the gas station one.”

“It’s barely eight in the morning.”

“So we have time to plan.” She tips her head back against the wall behind her stool and looks at me down the length of the bar, and there’s that smile again, the one that ought to come with a warning label. “Unless the VP of the Hellborn Kings can’t manage lunch.”

I should keep the bar between us. Instead, I lean on it across from her, because apparently, I’ve decided to make my own life harder this morning.

“I can manage lunch.”

“Good. Noon. You’re buying. And if you order for me, I’m telling Saber you let me starve.”

“I would never order for you.”

“You absolutely would. You’re the type.” She puts her pen behind her ear. “But I’m warning you not to try, Crash. You don’t know the first thing about what I want.”

I could think of a few things. I keep that thought to myself.

“Tacos,” I say. “Noon. You order for yourself.”

She holds my eyes a second longer than she needs to. “See? You’re trainable.”

I push off the rail and go find something to do with my hands before they do something on their own.

It’s going to be the longest week of my life.

CHAPTER 3

CASSIDY

The bartender shows up at eleven, a server right behind him, and Crash spends forty minutes pretending he has work to do that requires standing at the opposite end of the bar from me.

At noon, I close the ledger and put my pen down loud enough for him to hear it.

“Time to pay up, VP.”

He looks at the bartender. The bartender suddenly has glasses to polish. The whole club knows about the deal—nothing stays quiet in that building longer than an hour.

He grabs his wallet. “Alright, tacos it is.”

He walks around the bar, and I follow him to the door, where he holds it open for me.

Outside, he straddles the bike and waits.

“Problem?”

“No problem.” Six minutes to Rosa’s. I can behave for six minutes.

Six minutes pressed against him, my thighs bracketing his. Easy.

He doesn’t offer instructions. He knows I grew up on the back of my dad’s bike, then Saber’s bike.

I know where to put my feet. Now the only thing left to figure out is my hands.

I settle behind him and rest them on his hips. Light. Polite.

He reaches down, takes my wrists, and pulls my arms around his waist until I’m flush against his back.

“Hold on tight,” he says, and starts the engine before I can respond.

That’s a good thing, because right now, anything I say would be embarrassing.

During the ride to Rosa’s, my mind is not on tacos. All I can think about is the feelings of his hard muscles against me, how he smells like leather and soap, and how every gear shift moves his body into mine. And then I think about how he’d react if I moved my hands down—just two inches.

I don’t do it. But for six whole minutes, I think about it.

Rosa’s is half full, all locals. Heads turn when we walk in, and then turn away fast, the way they do for anyone wearing a Hellborn Kings patch. We take two stools at the counter.

“Order whatever you want,” he says. “You’ve already warned me about the consequences.”

“I’m going to get three steak tacos and a lemonade.” I fold my menu and lock my gaze on his. “It feels good to give me what I want, doesn’t it?”

He drags his lower lip through his teeth, but we’re interrupted.

The waitress who comes over is pretty—dark hair, red lips, and a shirt unbuttoned one more than it needs to be. She doesn’t look at me once.

“Crash.” She smiles and leans on the counter, giving him the full view. “Been a minute. What are you having?”

He doesn’t return her smile. “Ask her first.”

“Three steak tacos and a lemonade.”

The waitress writes it down without looking at me. Then she turns back to Crash like I’ve stopped existing.

“And you?”

“A chicken enchilada.”

“That’s it?” She tilts toward him, dropping her voice. “You usually want a lot more than that.”

There it is. She might as well have hung a banner.

I study the salsa caddy. Of course they’ve slept together. He’s slept with half the county.

He doesn’t grin. “That’s it.”

He slides both menus across the counter and gives her a look that ends the conversation. A look that I’ve never once seen him aim at a woman.

She blinks. Her eyes flick to me for the first time—down, up, and dismissing.

“Sure thing.” She’s sweet again, and her hand grazes his forearm on the way to collecting the menus. “Holler if you change your mind. You know I take care of you.”

“Just the food.”

She clenches her teeth, then straightens and walks away.

I turn the salsa caddy a quarter turn. “She seems nice.”

“Don’t.”

I cough, holding back a laugh. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re saying it with your whole face.”

I prop my chin on my hand. “My face is minding its own business.”

He picks up his water and drinks instead of responding.

The tacos arrive. A different server brings them.

“Interesting,” I say.

“Eat your food.”

I eat my food. It’s good, and I tell him so.

He relaxes, and for twenty minutes we’re just us. He tells me about the night Jinx got patched and how Viper was stabbed, but that led him to meeting his Old Lady. He asks about California and listens to the answers, asks follow-ups, and asks how my roommate’s wedding went. I didn’t tell him about the wedding. Saber must have. Which means he was listening when my brother talked about me.

He remembers everything.

He stands. “Bathroom. Don’t try to pay while I’m gone. Wouldn’t want you telling Saber I didn’t buy you tacos.”

“No promises.”

I’m still smiling at my plate when a stool scrapes on my other side a minute later.

“Now what is a pretty little thing like you doing all alone?”

He’s big, sunburned, and day-drunk at noon on a weekday. His arm is already on the counter, crowding into my space.

“I’m not alone.”

His hand lands on my thigh. “Don’t see anybody.”

It stays there less than two seconds.

I don’t see Crash come back. One moment, there’s a sweaty hand on my leg, and the next, Crash has him by the collar and slams him into the counter, plates jumping.

Crash hits him once, short and brutal. The guy folds onto the floor.

The restaurant goes quiet. Nobody stands up. Nobody reaches for a phone. The cook leans into the pass-through window, takes in the patch on Crash’s back, and goes back to his grill.

Crash crouches over him. “Nobody fucking touches her.”

This is a side of Crash I’ve never seen, and he’s not using the voice that tells stories at the bar.

The drunk holds both hands up, blood running from his nose. “Okay. Okay, man. My apologies. I didn’t know she belonged to you.”

“She doesn’t belong⁠—”

It comes out fast. His fist is still cocked, but he doesn’t finish the sentence.

Crash stands up instead. Pulls cash from his wallet, drops it on the counter without counting it, and gives the drunk one more look—long enough that the man scoots himself backward into the legs of an empty table.

Then he looks at me, and there’s no charm in it anywhere. None of the grin.

“We’re going back to Bones and Bucks,” he says. “Where guys know they don’t fucking touch you.”

I should argue. I’m twenty-two and independent. I don’t need to be marched out of a taco place like a child.

I follow him out, anyway.

On the bike, I don’t hesitate. I wrap my arms around his waist before he can say a word, flatten my palms against his stomach, and his breath moves under my hands.

He doesn’t say anything the whole ride back.

Neither do I. I just hold on tighter than the ride requires, and he lets me.

CHAPTER 4

CRASH

The clubhouse seems so quiet, now that all the guys from National have left.

I’m lying on my bed with my boots still on, staring at the ceiling fan turning slow enough to count the blades.

Down the hall, behind the third door, Cassidy Harlan is sleeping under the same roof as me.

I keep replaying the restaurant.

Not the waitress. Marissa has been wanting to fuck me for two years, and I’ve taken her up on it twice. It was good. We have fun.

Then today she leaned over that counter, making it very obvious she wanted my cock, and I felt nothing. Less than nothing. An itch of irritation, because she ignored Cassidy.

Then Cassidy figured out the whole history in about four seconds. And I felt guilty.

Guilty. And I did nothing wrong.

That’s what I keep thinking about. The fact that I wanted to apologize for things I did before she ever came home. Like I owe her an explanation.

Then there was that guy. That fucking drunk.

Big sunburned bastard, hand on her thigh, and I don’t remember crossing the room. I remember the bathroom door, and I remember crouching over him with my knuckles split. The middle is gone.

I’ve hit men before. I’ve killed men before. Club life. A one-percenter.

Every time before tonight, I decided to do it first.

Nobody fucking touches her.

That feeling was primal. I wasn’t only trying to protect my best friend’s sister.

And then the other thing. The sentence I cut off, because I couldn’t say the words.

She doesn’t belong⁠—

I couldn’t say that she doesn’t belong to me.

Every cell in my body disagrees.

I drag my hands down my face.

The girl I knew left four years ago and never came back. The woman who took her place is somebody I’m meeting for the first time.

Nothing wrong with that part. I met a woman, and I want her. Simple as it gets.

The problem is whose sister she is.

Decades of friendship, and not once have I given him a reason not to trust me.

He left this morning and made me promise to protect her. But maybe she needs protection from me.

There’s no version of this where I get what I want and keep being the man Saber thinks I am.

The ice machine rattles down the hall. Somebody kills the music downstairs.

It’s even quieter now. And the quiet gives me space to think about her arms around my waist when she was on the back of my bike.

On the way back from Rosa’s, she reached around me and flattened her palms against my stomach, and her thighs opened around mine, and for six minutes she was pressed against my back with the engine running through both of us.

Every gear change rocked her into me. Her chin at my shoulder. Her thighs spread around mine, and her pussy pressed against the small of my back. Two layers of denim did nothing. I felt the heat of her the whole six minutes.

She held on tighter than the road required. And I was hard the whole fucking ride.

She knew. She had to know.

I sit up. My boots hit the floor.

I need a shower. A cold one.

That’s what I need. Freeze it out, go to sleep, wake up tomorrow, and be her brother’s best friend again.

I go into my bathroom and strip down, turn the left tap all the way, and step in before I can talk myself out of it.

The cold shocks my system, and I stand in it with my hands flat on the tile, head down, water hammering the back of my neck. Breathing through it. My knuckles ache where they split on the drunk’s face, and the cold makes them ache worse.

Good. I need to focus on the pain to forget about her.

It doesn’t work. Fuck.

I’m as hard as I’ve ever been in my life.

Then I give in.

I turn the hot tap up. The water warms, and steam starts to lift off my skin. My hand is already moving down my stomach before the temperature evens out. I let my head fall back against the tile.

I grab my dick in a grip that’s too tight, and it punches the air out of me. A groan gets out before I can stop it, and I bite down on the next one.

It’s her instantly. No warm-up, no anonymous body. My mind only pictures her in specific detail.

Cassidy on that bike, except in my head she does the thing she didn’t do, slides her palms down off my stomach, lower, then rubs my cock through the denim while I’m doing eighty on an open road.

I can’t do a single thing about it, but white-knuckle the handlebars and let her.

In my head, I can build it exact: the wind, the engine vibrating, her grip testing me through the fabric while her thighs clamp down, her laugh against my spine when she figures out what she’s done to me.

My fist works at a slow and brutal pace. The water is hot down my chest, and my hand moves faster.

I imagine her on the stool at my bar, grabbing my cut and pulling, because she’s exactly the kind of brat who’d pull a man down to her level instead of coming up to his. She’s kissing me with that smart mouth still curved against mine, biting my lip when I try to take control, hard enough to taste.

Then I’m lifting her onto the rail I’ve polished a thousand times—the weight of her real in my hands, denim under my palms, her boots locking behind my ass. Her knees opening for me the same way they opened around the bike.

I’d drag her to the edge of that rail, and she’d let me, and the fantasy is so detailed it’s not a fantasy, it’s a plan. My mouth is on her throat, her fingers are in my hair, pulling like she means to steer. She’d talk through it because that girl has never once shut up at the right moment.

It feels good to give me what I want, doesn’t it?

Fuck yes, it does.

Then she’s under me, bare, my name in her mouth, begging, and I give her everything she asks for.

My breathing goes ragged. Steam thickens until the room is all white noise and heat, water drumming the back of my neck, running off my jaw, into my mouth. I spit it out, and my hand speeds up. The slap of it is obscene in the small, tiled room, louder than the spray, and I couldn’t stop now with a gun to my head.

My thighs start to shake. The pressure builds low and mean, climbing the base of my spine, and I let the sensation spread.

In my mind, her pussy is tightening around my cock, making me come apart.

I come so hard my knees nearly buckle, hips driving into my own grip, spilling over my fist while the water takes it, forearm braced against the tile. My forehead drops against it, the whole thing tearing through me in waves that keep coming past the point I expect them to quit.

Her name jams behind my teeth and stays there. It has to stay.

I don’t move for a while. Water beats down on my shoulders. My pulse is in my ears, my throat, the ache of my knuckles. The steam drifts and thins.

The water runs. I stay against the wall until my legs are mine again.

I shut off the tap and stand dripping in the dark, and there’s no story I can tell myself anymore.

I just jerked off to my best friend’s little sister.

And I can’t take it back, can’t unfeel it.

Tomorrow, I have to look her in the eye and pretend I feel nothing.

I towel off and then lie down on my bed on top of the blanket.

She’s just down the hall. Saber’s miles away. He trusts me.

This is day one of him being gone, and I already failed.

CHAPTER 5

CASSIDY

Four days into Saber's run, the bartender calls in sick twenty minutes before open, and Crash takes the news with his phone pressed to his ear and his eyes shut.

“It’s fine, Manny. Drink fluids.” He hangs up and stares at the ceiling like it’ll send down a replacement.

It’s not fine. There’s a baseball tournament in town. We’re about to get crushed. And Violet no longer bartends.

I put my pen down on the ledger. “I bartended for three years in California.”

“No.”

“Dive bar near campus,” I continue. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Cass, you’re here to fix the books, not pour⁠—”

The front door opens, and the first six guys in matching jerseys walk in, and the decision makes itself.

“Apron is under the register,” he says.

By one o’clock, the rail is two deep, and the room is wall-to-wall red and yellow jerseys.

I remember exactly why I quit doing this and exactly why I loved it.

The problem isn’t the volume. The problem is the area behind the bar, which is a very tight space.

Crash calls a drink, and I’m already reaching for the bottle. I call for limes, and they appear at my elbow. Every turn puts us inches apart, his hand on my waist to move past me, my palm flat on his shoulder blade so he knows I’m behind him with a full tray.

An hour in, we stop saying excuse me. Two hours in, we stop needing words at all, and that’s worse, because now there’s nothing to listen to except his hand finding the same spot on my waist every time.

“Two margaritas, one IPA,” he says.

I’m shaking the salt tin when he reaches over my head for the tequila, his arm a warm line above me, and a guy in a red jersey leans across the rail.

“Sweetheart, can I get your number with that beer?”

“No,” Crash says, without turning around, in a register the whole rail goes quiet for.

The guy tips well and doesn’t speak to me again.

I bump Crash with my hip on my way to the register. “I can handle drunk baseball players.”

“Never said you couldn’t.”

“Then what was that?”

He racks clean glasses and doesn’t answer, and I take the next three orders with a stupid smile I can’t talk my face out of.

The evening bartender walks in at four, ties on an apron, and surveys the wreckage of the lunch rush.

I untie mine, and it’s the first chance I’ve had to take a deep breath. I go to the back office to get away from the crowd.

Crash comes in a second later. “Didn’t know you were in here. Forgot my phone.”

The space is even smaller than the bar area. “I just needed a moment to myself.”

“You were good out there,” he says. “Better than Manny.”

“Tell Manny.”

“I’m not telling Manny that.” He’s looking at me, and my shirt is sticking to my back, and his eyes drop to my mouth and stay a second too long to be an accident.

“Crash.”

His hand comes up, and his thumb takes a smudge of something off my cheek, and the touch lasts longer than the smudge does. He leans down, and we’re eye to eye.

I’d swear under oath the room runs out of air. If I lean forward three inches, this whole thing is over.

He steps back.

“I need to go for a ride.” He’s already moving, scooping his keys off the desk without breaking stride.

I duck out after him. “I’ll come with you.”

“Cass.” He stops with his hand on the doorframe. “You’re the reason I’m leaving.”

“Well, maybe I’ll leave first,” I tell him. “And you promised Saber that you’d babysit me if I left the clubhouse.”

He sighs. “Don’t do this.”

“Then take me with you.”

He turns around. “Fuck it,” he says. “Let’s go.”

We ride for miles until we reach a dirt road I haven’t been on since I was a kid. The bike climbs through mesquite and loose rock for twenty minutes, and I hold on to Crash with my palms flat against his stomach, half an inch lower than last time I was on his bike.

He doesn’t correct me.

The trail tops out on a ridge with the whole valley spread underneath it. Ash Valley looks small from up here. The highway is a gray thread, and the clubhouse is a speck you’d miss if you didn’t know what to look for.

I get off the bike and stand at the edge with my hands in my pockets while the sun starts its long slide toward the western range.

“I’ve been here before,” I say. “My dad used to ride up here.”

“I know.” He kicks the stand down and stays by the bike. “He’s the one who showed me. I was sixteen, first bike, riding it like an idiot. He made me follow him up this trail till I learned throttle control or died.” He looks out at the valley instead of me. “I didn’t die.”

“Thank god.”

He huffs out a laugh and comes to stand beside me. Not close. There’s a careful three feet between us.

The sun drops. The valley goes gold, then copper. Somewhere below us, a hawk circles, and neither of us has said a word in five minutes.

It’s the quietest I’ve ever known him to be.

“You want to know why I picked a school in California?” I ask.

“Good weather. Ocean.”

“To get away from the desert,” I whisper.

He looks over at me. “You mean to get away from the club?”

“To get away from you.”

He turns his gaze back toward the valley and doesn’t respond.

“I loved you, Crash. Since before I understood what to call it. And you only saw me as a kid.” I stop myself. Breathe. “I felt invisible.”

“You weren’t invisible. But you’re right; I never saw you as more than a kid.” He says it low. “Because that’s what you were—a kid.”

He’s right. I was a kid. He’s nine years older than me.

“I know that now, but I didn’t feel like a kid back then.” I rub at some dried lime juice on my forearm. “It’s why I left. I figured I only wanted you because I couldn’t have you. Like forbidden fruit. So I went to college in a place where nobody knew who I was. And nobody was off-limits. I went, so I could stop thinking about you.”

“Did you?”

“I had four years and a whole life out there.” I watch lights start to turn on below us. “And the whole drive back, the person I couldn’t wait to see wasn’t my brother.”

“If you’re about to say Trapper⁠—”

The grin doesn’t reach his eyes.

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t joke about this. Please.”

The grin dies the rest of the way, and for a second, I’m looking at a man I don’t know. No charm.

He turns toward the valley.

“I’ve watched you charm every woman who’s ever walked into that bar. And they all want you. The number of women you’ve slept with is no secret,” I say. “Yet, you’ve never had an actual relationship. Have you ever felt anything for anybody?”

“No.” He says it without any hint of regret.

“I see.”

He walks back to the bike and leans against it and picks a flat piece of shale off the ground. “My mom raised me alone. Mostly.” He turns the rock over. “Mostly is the operative word. There were men. A whole revolving door of them, and every one of them promised her the world. House with a yard. Take the boy fishing. Marry her in the spring.” He shifts his position against his bike. “One of them, Ray, lasted two years.”

“Crash—”

“She had this routine.” He keeps going like I haven’t spoken, like the story will only come out if he doesn’t stop. “When one of them didn’t show, or showed and said the wrong thing, she’d stand at the kitchen sink and run the water so I couldn’t hear her cry. Then she’d shut the tap, fix her face in the side of the toaster, and come out asking what I wanted for dinner.” He throws the rock over the ridge. “I was eight the first time I worked out what the water was for. I told myself that night, if I can’t keep a promise to a woman, I don’t make one.”

“And you couldn’t keep one?”

“Never wanted to.” He brushes shale dust off his hands. “I’m a flirt. I like flirting. Being nice costs nothing. Everybody laughs, everybody leaves happy, and nobody cries when I leave. I never promise I’ll stay. I’m always very clear about that.”

“Do you think your mom would be proud of that?”

“She died when I was still a prospect. Never got the house with the yard.” He shrugs. “But yeah. I think she’d have been proud that I don’t promise women dreams I have no intention of fulfilling.”

The sun is gone. The sky over the range is burning down through orange into a deep bruised purple, and the first cold edge of desert night moves across the ridge.

“Do you ever want to fall in love?”

“Not with the type of women I’ve been with. They don’t want to get to know me. They love the idea of dating a patched member, being an Old Lady. They like the money and the lifestyle.”

He doesn’t want to fall in love. I asked the question, but I don’t like the answer. I really thought I felt something between us, but I was wrong, and I’ll accept that.

“But you’re not that type of woman.” He finally turns and looks at me again. “You grew up in this world. The patch doesn’t impress you. The money doesn’t impress you. You’ve watched what this life actually costs people; your whole family paid it.” He shakes his head. “Which means if you wanted me, it’d be me. And that’s never happened.” He exhales. “You know the real me, Cass. And I know the real you. I want⁠—”

He stops. Right there, on the edge of the words I want to hear.

He doesn’t finish the sentence. “We better get back.”

He swings a leg over and settles into the seat, and he won’t look at me.

I walk over and stand beside the bike.

“Scoot back.”

His brow creases. “What?”

“Scoot. Back.”

And he does it. He slides back on the seat without knowing why he’s obeying, and I put one hand on his shoulder, swing my leg over, and sit down facing him, my thighs over his, boots hooked behind him.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Exactly what you’re too scared to do.”

I kiss him. For one second, he doesn’t react. Two.

Then his hand closes around the nape of my neck, and he kisses me back.

CHAPTER 6

CASSIDY

His mouth is still on mine, and his hand closes in my hair.

I’m in his lap, facing him, the bike rocks on its stand every time either of us moves. The desert went cold the second the sun dropped. I don’t care. Everywhere he’s touching me is warm.

He breaks the kiss first. Holds me an inch off his mouth with both hands framing my face, breathing hard, and in the dark, his eyes are all pupil.

“Cass.” His thumb drags across my bottom lip. “Tell me to take you home.”

“No. You think I climbed onto this seat by accident?” I peel his hand off my face and put it on my thigh. Spread his fingers flat against the denim myself, press them down. “I’ve wanted this for a very long time.”

He looks at his own hand on my leg. “Saber⁠—”

“Is not on this bike.” I lean in until my lips brush the shell of his ear, and I lower my voice. “I am. So, stop being a gentleman about it.”

He goes rigid under me. Every muscle.

“Careful,” he says.

“Or what?” I sit back so he can watch my mouth. “You’re going to give me exactly what I want?”

He squeezes my leg. “You don’t know what you’re asking for.”

“I think I do. Have you thought about fucking me, Crash?”

He laughs once. Rough, low, no humor anywhere in it. Then his hands move to my hips, and he drags me flush against him. The laugh is gone, and what’s underneath it is raw.

“I’ll tell you what I’ve thought about.” His mouth moves along my jaw while he says it. “I’ve thought about peeling you out of these jeans and finding out if you’re as wet for me as I think you are.” His teeth find my earlobe, drag, release. “After we got back from Rosa’s, I stood in my shower with my fist around my cock thinking about fucking you, and I came so hard I had to brace a hand on the tile to stay standing. That’s what I’ve been thinking about, Cassidy.”

I roll my hips against him, and he’s already hard. And, oh, my God, his dick is huge.

“That what you wanted to hear?” he asks.

“Yes.” It comes out wrecked. I clear my throat and try again, and it comes out worse. “Yes.”

“Good.” His hands slide up under the hem of my shirt, thumbs tracing the underside of my bra, and he stops there. Holds. “Because here’s how this works, Cassidy. You started this. So, you don’t get to blush now, and you don’t get to go shy. If I ask you a question, I want an answer out loud. Understood?”

“What if I don’t answer?”

“Then I stop whatever I’m doing until you do.” His thumbs brush against my nipples. “And baby, I promise you’re going to hate that.”

“Anyone ever tell you you’re insufferable?”

“Constantly.” His teeth graze my jaw. “Take your shirt off before I tear it off.”

The cold shocks me the second the shirt clears my head. I drop it across the handlebars, and his hands are already there, palms hot, sliding up my ribs. He looks at me, the valley lights faint on the side of his face.

“Fuck,” he says. “Look at you.”

“You could do more than look.”

“I’m getting there, Cass. Let me have a minute.”

He pops the clasp of my bra one-handed, and then his mouth is on my breasts. He’s not gentle, and he’s not rough. He’s thorough, with teeth and tongue and that beard dragging across my skin until I’m squirming in his lap, grinding down against him.

His thick ridge under the denim is exactly where I need it, and the seam of my jeans is doing devastating work. If he keeps his mouth where it is, I’m going to come before I’m even naked.

“Crash.”

“Mm.” He doesn’t stop.

“Take your clothes off.”

He lifts his head. His grin shows up out of the dark. “Bossy.”

“You like it.”

“I really fucking do.” He sits back. “But I also like it when my women take commands. Strip. I want to watch.”

I climb down. The cold raises every hair on my body, and I stand in the open desert night and take my boots off, hopping once, graceless.

He watches me with his forearm slung over the tank.

Next, my jeans. I push them down my hips slowly, underwear with them, and step out, and now I’m bare to the night air in front of a man I’ve loved for a lifetime.

He doesn’t say anything for a second. The wind moves between us.

“Turn around,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

I should tell him where to put the instruction. Instead, I turn, slow, arms loose at my sides. When I come around to face him again, he’s sitting forward over the tank with his forearms braced.

“Come here.” His voice is rough.

“You’re still dressed.”

“You’re stalling.”

“How am I going to fuck you if you still have your clothes on, Crash?”

That makes him stand. He shrugs out of his cut and lays it over the handlebars, then drags his shirt over his head. He has tattoos everywhere. Then he sits back down, unhooks his belt, gets a condom out of his wallet, and sets it on the tank. He opens his jeans and takes his cock out.

My mouth goes dry.

“Now come here,” he says.

I climb back into his lap, and I can’t get close enough, fast enough. His hand slides between my thighs before I’m even settled, two fingers dragging through me.

“Fuck.” He licks his bottom lip. “Fuck, Cassidy. So wet for me.”

“I need you to fuck me.”

“Don’t say shit like that, I’m trying to take my time.”

I shake my head. “Don’t take your time.”

“I’m in control, baby.” His fingers move, and my body answers. “You’re going to come on my hand first, with my fingers in your pussy. I want to give my dick something to look forward to.”

His fingers curl exactly right, and his thumb rolls slow circles over my clit.

His mouth keeps up a low, filthy commentary. How tight I am, how wet, and what he’s going to do once I’ve come for him.

Then his fingers crook and his thumb presses down, and my entire focus shoots to the sensations between my legs.

“There it is,” he says. “There it is, baby, give it to me.”

It catches me on an upstroke of his fingers, sooner than I’m ready, and I’m moving faster against his fingers, chasing the sensation. My thighs clamp around his hips. My heel knocks the exhaust pipe. Everything south of my navel pulls taut, until the feeling bursts, spreading everywhere all at once.

He doesn’t ease off. He rides it out with me, and then a second orgasm builds, just as intense. The bike groans on its stand like it objects to all of this. The desert is so quiet, the only sounds are the wet movement of his fingers and the groans coming from my lips.

Then his fingers go from perfect to unbearable in a single stroke, and I clamp my hand around his wrist. “Too much.”

He brings his fingers to his mouth and drags his tongue across them. “That was one.”

He picks the condom up off the tank, tears it open with his teeth, and rolls it on without taking his eyes off me. “Up.”

I set my bare feet on the passenger pegs and lift my hips. The bike sways on its stand, and he puts a foot down to steady us, his hands at my waist taking half my weight like it’s nothing.

“Easy,” he says. “Come down slow.”

I take him in my hand, line us up, and sink.

He’s big. I knew that already, but knowing it and taking it are entirely different things.

I go down an inch at a time, thighs burning, and he holds himself still beneath me, letting me set the pace.

“Cassidy,” he groans. “You’re so fucking tight.”

When I’m fully seated, stretched around him, it threatens to steal my breath.

“Is this what you imagined, baby?” he asks. “Fucking me on my bike?”

I roll my hips. “This is better than what I imagined.”

The sound he makes is feral, then he moves.

His hands clamp down on my hips, and he drives up into me. The pegs give me leverage, and I use it, rising and dropping to meet him. The bike rocks and creaks under us.

“You came home for this? You came home for my dick?” His hand fists in my hair and pulls my head back, his mouth dragging up my bared throat.

“Yes!”

“Say it.”

“Your dick feels fucking amazing, Crash. But I’m here for you.” It tears out of me on a thrust. “You. I came home for you.”

His kiss breaks our rhythm. He doesn’t apologize for it. He just builds a new one, faster, harder, his hands hauling me down to meet every thrust. There’s sweat at his temples, my palms slide on his shoulders.

Then he wraps an arm around the small of my back and tips me. His other hand snags his cut off the handlebars and shoves it between my shoulders and the tank before my skin touches metal, and I’m lying back with the whole sky of stars straight up, and the handlebars somewhere above my head. He rises over me, one boot still planted, and hooks my knee over his arm.

He’s going to ruin me.

He drives in slow and deep, watching my face, learning what works.

He talks the whole time. Low and ragged, half of it filth, half of it worship.

“Touch yourself,” he says. “Rub your clit while I thrust in and out of you.”

I slide my hand down between us, and his eyes follow it.

And within seconds, another orgasm builds. It starts at the base of my spine this time, deeper than the first one, slower. My free hand finds the edge of the tank and holds on. His rhythm picks up a hitch.

He’s close too, fighting it, waiting me out.

“Let go, baby. Come with me.”

It begins low and rolls upward, slow and deep. My back bows off the tank, my heel digging into the back of his thigh, and his name comes out of me over and over.

He goes quiet, following me over seconds later with his rhythm coming apart, hips driving into me rough and uneven.

He comes with his face buried against my collarbone. I hold him there, fingers in his hair, his whole weight shaking against me, and for once in his life, he doesn’t have a single thing to say.

His heart slams against my chest.

I shiver, and he slides his cut out from under my shoulders and hangs it over them instead.

The leather smells like him. I grew up knowing exactly what it means when a woman wears a member’s cut, even for five minutes. If he understands what he just did, he gives no sign of it.

“You good?” he asks.

“Don’t fish for compliments.”

His laugh moves through both of us. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

“That’s a yes.” I pull back enough to look at him.

He tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, and his hand stays at the side of my neck, thumb moving along my jaw, and he looks at me so long the look starts to mean things. “You came back,” he says, mostly to himself.

He kisses my forehead.

We get dressed in stages—my jeans, his shirt, my bra fished off the ground, my shirt off the handlebars, my boots hunted out of the dirt, his belt. I hand his cut back last, and he swings it on and becomes the Vice President of the Hellborn Kings again in one motion. I watch it happen and tell myself the man from five minutes ago is still in there.

I’m buttoning my jeans when I ask, “So what do we do tomorrow?”

He’s quiet behind me. A few seconds. Long enough.

“That’s not a problem for right now,” he says. “Right now, I only want tonight.”

My whole body clenches.

Right now, I only want tonight.

He told me an hour ago, ten feet from this spot. He doesn’t make promises to women.

Everybody laughs, everybody leaves happy, and nobody cries when he leaves. I knew all of it before I climbed onto his bike, and I climbed on anyway.

I don’t cry. I am, if nothing else, my father’s daughter.

“Okay,” I say.

He looks at me a beat too long, half a question loading in his face.

I smile to placate him, let him know I’m okay. But I am not okay.

He kicks the stand up and fires the engine, and the noise saves us from anything else.

The ride down the mountain takes twenty minutes. I do it with my hands resting on his hips. Light. Polite. He doesn’t reach back this time to pull my arms around his waist.

I hold on exactly as much as the ride requires, and not one bit more.

CHAPTER 7

CRASH

As soon as we pull up to the clubhouse, Cassidy is off the bike.

“Goodnight, Crash,” she says over her shoulder, walking away from me.

That’s all I get. Then the clubhouse door swings shut behind her.

I sit in the lot, wondering what the fuck just happened.

Two hours ago, that woman told me she’s always cared about me. She even used the word love. And now she will barely look at me, after what just happened? Maybe she’s embarrassed, or she regrets fucking me.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I go up to my room and lie on the bed with my boots on. The ceiling fan turns its slow circles.

Earlier this week, I was wracked with guilt for jerking off in the shower, imagining fucking her. Tonight I did the actual thing. And it didn’t feel like betrayal. It felt right.

So I think about the night again, hunting for what went wrong.

The ridge. Her telling me she picked California to get away from me. Me telling her about my mother—a story I have never told anyone, not even Saber. Her climbing onto the seat facing me. The kiss. The sex. All of it.

I even put my cut on her without thinking twice about it. She knows what that means, more so than most women do.

I can’t find it. Whatever I did to make her angry, I don’t know what it is.

Everything I told her on that ridge was true. Every word. The women who come through my bar see a patch and a grin and a good time. Sure, some of them want more, but I never let them believe I’ll make them my Old Lady.

Cassidy is the woman who sees more than the VP title, the money, and the allure of club life.

But it’s more than that, and I might as well admit it to myself.

She’s exactly who I want. Not close. Exact. Gorgeous at a level that I don’t deserve. Kind in the bones, not for show. Loyal. Smart. She’s got dreams and the spine to chase them. And she doesn’t need my life explained, or softened, or apologized for, because she was raised in it.

My brothers are my family. They’re hers, too.

I could go down the list of every woman I’ve ever known and not build half of her.

And she’s so close, behind a door she shut on me, and I don’t know what I did. But I know I’m not lying on this bed until morning, letting her shut me out.

I’m out the door and into the hallway before I have time to talk myself out of it.

Her knob turns. The door is unlocked.

I shove the door open. “You don’t lock your door? In a clubhouse full of⁠—”

I stop.

She’s sitting on the edge of the bed in a T-shirt and shorts, and she’s crying. Her hands come up to her face, wiping the tears, like she can hide what’s happening.

“The only man in this club stupid enough to barge into the Prez’s sister’s room is you.” She’s up off the bed, arm out, pointing at the hallway. “Get out.”

I shut the door. From the inside.

“That’s the opposite of out.”

“You’re crying.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m aware.” She drags the heel of her hand across one cheek, chin up, daring me to mention it again. “What do you want, Crash?”

“What happened?” I stay by the door because if I reach for her, she’ll only push me away. “I’m asking straight, no jokes. The ridge was the best night of my life, and I’m including the night I got patched. Everything was good. Better than good. And now you’re obviously mad at me… and crying. So what happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Cassidy.”

“Nothing happened that you didn’t warn me about.” She wraps her arms around herself.

“Do you regret it?”

She takes her time with the answer. “Yes.”

I’ve been hit with fists, bottles, and I was even shot once. None of them compares.

“Why?”

“Because I told you, Crash.” Her eyes are wet and furious at the same time. “Up on that ridge, I told you I’ve loved you for as long as I can remember. You told me you don’t make promises to women. You were honest. You’re always honest—it’s your whole trick. Nobody gets to be mad at the man who warned them.” She laughs, and it’s the saddest sound I’ve ever heard come out of her. “I had sex with you. I’m a grown woman. That part’s on me. But then you said it.”

“Said what?” I’m so confused.

“Right now, I only want tonight.” She throws my words back at me. “And I sat there on your bike with your cut on my shoulders, realizing what that meant. I got the exact speech you give all the women you fuck. I’m no different.” Her chin trembles once, and she locks it down. “Congratulations. You were honest with me, too. So I have no right to be upset.”

“Cassidy, those words… That is not what I meant.”

“It’s what you said.”

“I know what it sounded like.” I stop. “Cass. Look at me. You want to know what I meant?”

“I know what you meant.”

“You don’t. Please listen.”

That stops her.

“You asked about tomorrow. But tomorrow, I have to figure out how to tell Saber,” I say. “Tomorrow I have to work out how I look my best friend in the eye. Tomorrow there’s club business, and a war that’s coming whether anybody says so or not. Being with you comes with more complications than anything I have ever wanted. I’ve spent thirty-one years only wanting things that come easy. That’s the whole design of my life. Nothing I can’t walk away from.” I cross the room now. “And up on that ridge, I had one perfect thing in my hands. One. And I didn’t want to spend a minute of that time problem-solving. I wasn’t telling you tonight is all you get. I was telling you tonight was too good to share with tomorrow.”

She searches my face for the lie. She won’t find one.

“That’s not how it sounded,” she says, and there’s less hostility in it.

I sit down next to her on the bed. “Yeah. I’m getting that.”

She turns toward me, and I shift so I face her. Her hands come up and close in the front of my shirt, to push me off or hold me there, I don’t think she’s decided. “I need you to be honest. No flirting. No telling me what I want to hear. What do you want, Crash?”

“You.”

“Why?”

I lean in, so my mouth is only inches from hers. “I’ve fucked the same woman more than once. You know that. The whole county knows that. But I never went back because I wanted her. The offer was just there, so... why not? You’re the first woman I’ve ever wanted. Wanted the morning after. The small stuff. The in-between. I want you at my bar every day fixing my books, so I’ve got an excuse to look at you for hours. I want to keep making your ridiculous coffee. I want you bossing me around.” My lips brush against hers, just briefly, and she doesn’t pull back. “I haven’t worked out how I tell Saber. I might not survive working it out. He might kill me.”

Her laugh cracks through the tears, and it loosens a knot I’ve been carrying since she said goodnight in the parking lot.

“Until I figure out how to tell him, nobody can know. Not Shelby, not the girls. Gossip spreads fast here, which you’ve seen.” I take her jaw in my hand, thumb under her chin, and tip her face up. “But I want you to know, you’re mine.”

Her breathing goes uneven. “And you?”

“Yours.”

“No more sweetbutts? No more waitresses?”

“No more anybody. No more flirting, either.” She didn’t ask for that one. I give it to her, anyway. “That last part is going to take some work. I’m asking for forgiveness ahead of time if I fuck up.”

“You. Not flirting?” She sniffs, wipes her face on her own shoulder without letting go of my shirt. “The bar’s revenue is going to collapse. I’ll have to see it in the ledgers.”

“Put it under losses. Act of God.”

She pulls me down by the shirt, or I’m already moving.

The kiss is slow, and certain, and she tastes of salt, and I make myself a promise on the spot that I will never be the reason she cries again. She lies back on the bed, pulling me down by the shirt, and I go, because that’s exactly where I want to be.

My phone goes off in my pocket.

“Don’t,” she says against my mouth.

“Two seconds. I can’t ignore it. Saber is gone, and I’m in charge. It’s just a text.” I sit up and pull it out one-handed.

Duke: Tonight’s shipment never made the drop. Driver isn’t answering. Buyer is losing his mind. Your call, VP. What do we do?

I read it twice.

Fuck, this is not good.

Crimson Warriors have to be involved.

The guys from National left earlier this week.

That’s not bad luck. That’s a club that was waiting for the babysitters to leave.

“Crash?” Cassidy looks at my face, and whatever’s on it kills the softness in hers. She grew up in this life. It’s bad. “What happened?”

“Club business.” It comes out automatically. Women don’t get involved in this shit. She knows, but still, I feel the need to explain it to her. “The less you know, the safer you are. That’s the only reason I will ever say those two words to you. Okay?”

She nods, and she lets me go when I stand up.

“Lock the door behind me,” I tell her.

“Crash.” She stands, rushes over to me, and catches my hand at the door. Her thumb runs across my split knuckles, once. “Go be the VP. But be careful.”

I kiss her once. Fast and hard.

I go down the stairs with my phone in my fist and the taste of salt still on my tongue.

Saber is miles away. The Warriors picked tonight. The war is here.

CHAPTER 8

CRASH

My brothers are already at Church when I arrive.

Duke is at the long table with his laptop open and his phone face-up beside it. Joker leans over his shoulder, a whiskey in his hand that he hasn’t touched.

“Talk,” I say.

“Shipment rolled out at nine, on schedule.” Duke turns the laptop toward me. “Driver checked in at the county line. After that, nothing.”

“Was Bear driving?” I ask.

Duke nods. “Buyer sat at the drop for an hour, then started blowing up my phone. I’ve called the driver eleven times.”

“The van?”

“Found it.” Joker sets the whiskey down without drinking it. “Jinx ran the route with a prospect. Van is in the ditch off Oak Road, doors open, cargo gone. Bear was face down in the dirt twenty feet off. Breathing. Barely. They’re bringing him in to Doc now.”

Thank fuck he’s alive.

“Cameras,” I say.

Joker is already pulling his own laptop across the table. He scrubs through gray-green footage at triple speed from the cameras we have set up around checkpoints.

Then he stops.

At eleven forty-one, high beams swing across a wall of corrugated metal. Then bikes. Five of them, single file, riding dark until the last hundred yards.

Duke leans in. “That’s the old copper mine. We put a cam on that turnoff just three months ago.”

The mine has been dead longer than I’ve been alive. A big metal processing shed, some rusted-out equipment, and one dead-end road in and out. A mile inside our eastern border.

“That’s our shipment.” I watch two men haul a crate off a flatbed trailer, and the crown stenciled on the side catches the beams for half a second. Ours. Stacked in a building on Kings’ territory.

All three of the guys in the room are looking at me.

We warned the Prez of the Crimson Warriors that if any of his guys crosses into our territory, we’ll declare war. Nitro’s men did a lot worse than that.

“Get Jinx. The four of us will check out the mine,” I say. Then I list off the other brothers who will join us. “I want guns sitting on that access road in case anybody else shows up. Trapper follows us out with the box truck. If our shipment is in that building, it’s coming home. The women and kids come to the clubhouse. Anybody not coming with us is on guard duty.”

We kill the engines a mile out and walk in.

The desert at two in the morning is cold and dead quiet. The four of us spread out, boots silent on the hard dirt, the old shed a black shape ahead of us. Armed reinforcements are sitting dark on the road behind us.

There are five bikes parked behind the shed, the flatbed trailer next to them, and through a gap in the metal wall, a battery-operated lantern lights our crates.

Voices are laughing from inside.

I pull the guys in close and keep it to a whisper. “Duke, Joker—the back. Jinx, you’re with me. Fast and quiet.”

We move.

The side door isn’t even shut. That’s how comfortable they are on our territory. It’s the last comfortable thing that happens to them.

I put my boot through the door, and the whole building turns into noise.

It happens fast. These things always do. Two of them are dead before they’re off the crates they’re sitting on. Bullets tear through the wall a foot from my head, and shards of metal sting my cheek.

Jinx handles the shooter. Dead. The fourth runs for the door and doesn’t make it.

And the fifth comes out of a back room nobody had gotten to yet, and his pistol is level with my eyes from four feet away. No reason on earth for him to miss.

People say your life flashes before your eyes. Mine doesn’t. I get one picture.

I told Cassidy I wanted morning afters with her. The small stuff. The in-between. And that’s it.

I never got the morning after.

The shot is so close to my ear, the world rings white.

The Warrior, pointing the gun at me, drops, and Jinx is standing there with his arm out straight and smoke crawling off the muzzle.

“Clear,” Duke calls.

“Clear,” Joker says.

Five down. None of them ours. My legs hold me up out of habit more than anything.

Jinx lowers his arm. “You good, VP?”

“You’re never buying your own beer again,” I tell him. “I’ve got it covered.”

Back at the clubhouse, I stop at the infirmary door. Bear is lying on the cot, face swollen into something unrecognizable.

Doc looks up from his chair beside him. “He’ll wake up ugly,” Doc says. “But he’ll wake up.”

Good enough.

The guys are already around the table in Church when I walk in. Duke has a ledger open in front of him.

“Every crate accounted for,” he says. “Shipment’s locked in the back room until we reschedule with the buyer.”

“And the Warriors?”

“Down the shaft.” Joker drops into his chair. “That hole goes deeper than anybody ever measured. Bikes are stripped for parts by the weekend. There’s nothing at that mine but a dead mine.”

“Nitro will know, anyway,” Duke says.

“Five of his riders don’t come home? He’ll know exactly what it means.” I take the seat at the head of the table. “And we’re not going to wait for him to come for us. We’re done with this shit.”

Jinx leans against the wall, arms folded. “Trapper was a real asset tonight. He’s as loyal as they come.”

I’m thinking the same thing. “Noted.”

Church runs for forty minutes. Then I call Saber.

Duke has been keeping him updated, but he needs to know we’re escalating our retaliation.

He listens to all of it without interrupting once. When I finish, the line stays quiet long enough that I check the screen.

“You made the right call. All of it,” he says. “We’re already on the road. We’ll push through the night. Be home sometime tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. They’re hundreds of miles out. Even riding hard, that’s late afternoon at best.

“Cass is fine,” I say. He didn’t ask, but I figure he’d want to know.

“I know,” he responds. “I trust you to protect her.”

He hangs up, and I sit there alone in Church for a minute with that one—the trust he put in me.

Then I climb the stairs.

Her door’s locked.

Good girl.

I knock twice, and her feet cross the floor, and the lock turns.

She cracks open the door. She’s still in the same T-shirt and shorts, hair flat on one side.

Her eyes roam over me, top to bottom—the dust on my jeans, the split knuckles, the scratch dried on my cheek. She grew up in this life. She does the math without a sound.

She steps aside and locks the door behind me.

“Is everything good?” she asks.

“Not really.” I’m not going to lie to her. “It’s bad, and your brother’s on his way home.”

She nods but doesn’t push for more information.

“But,” I say, sitting down on the edge of her bed and pulling at my bootlaces, “I’m still getting my morning after.”

She watches me work the second boot off, and the corner of her mouth gives her away.

“It’s four a.m. We didn’t spend the night together.”

“It’s after midnight. Still counts.”

“What if we get caught?” She grabs my hand, turning it over and examining it. “And you’re covered in dirt.”

“You’re stalling.” I squeeze her hand. “Saber probably won’t be home until late afternoon. And I’ll personally wash your sheets.”

She bites down on her lower lip, smiles, and then lies down to pull the blanket open. I lie down in my jeans with my gun on her nightstand, and she fits herself along my side, head on my shoulder, her hand flat over the middle of me like she’s checking I’m all in one piece.

I am. Thanks to Jinx.

I had a gun in my face tonight, and the only thing in my head was this. This exact thing.

The war is here.

And after that’s handled, there’s going to be a second war when I tell Saber I want to make Cassidy my Old Lady.

Tomorrow’s problems.

I pull her in tighter and stay.

CHAPTER 9

CASSIDY

The door hits the wall, and I’m awake.

Daylight. My room. Crash’s arm heavy across my waist, his gun on my nightstand, and my brother standing in the doorway with his key still in his hand.

Nobody moves. I look at the clock. It’s past lunchtime.

Saber’s eyes go from me, to Crash, to the boots by my bed, to the gun on the nightstand, and back to me.

He crosses the room in three steps, fists Crash’s shirt with both hands, and rips him off my bed.

“Whoa!” That’s all Crash gets out.

The punch lands flush. Crash goes into my dresser, catches the edge of it, and stays down on one knee. He doesn’t get up. He doesn’t put his hands up either. He spits blood onto my floor and stays exactly where my brother put him.

“Stop!” I’m out of the bed, blanket gone, in my T-shirt and shorts with my hands out between them. “Saber, stop!”

“You’re supposed to protect her.” Saber is yelling. “I gave you one job. One. We talked, and you told me she was fine, and the whole time you were—” He cuts himself off. His jaw works. “Get up so I can knock you down again.”

“Stop it.” I plant myself in front of my brother. “Look at me. Saber. Look at me. I’m a grown woman. He didn’t do anything wrong. I love him.”

Saber looks at me like I slapped him. Then he laughs, one short ugly sound with nothing in it.

“You love him.” He points past me without taking his eyes off mine. “Cass, I’ve known that man for most of my life. I’ve watched him charm half the county out of their pants and forget their names by breakfast. He’s my best friend, and I’d die for him. But listen, I’m telling you, as the person who loves you most on this earth, he could never love you. He doesn’t have it in him. He’s never had it in him.”

“You’re wrong,” Crash says from the floor.

He gets up slowly, one hand on my dresser, blood running from the corner of his mouth, and he doesn’t wipe it. He stands there in front of the man who hit him and doesn’t square up, doesn’t grin, doesn’t crack jokes to defuse the situation.

“I didn’t want you to find out about us like this.” He looks at me when he says the rest. “You’re wrong, Saber. I do love her.”

For just a moment, I forget my brother is in the room.

Crash has never said it. Not on the ridge, not in this bed, not in the dark when it would’ve been easy. He said mine and yours. But he didn’t say love—until now.

He loves me. He said it. He said it out loud.

Saber stares at him. “Out of all the fucking women throwing themselves at you,” Saber says, “you pick my little sister.”

“I didn’t pick her. You think I’d choose this? You think I wanted to want the one woman guaranteed to cost me my best friend?” Crash shakes his head once. “It’s her. It was always going to be her. I just didn’t know it until she came home.”

Saber’s hands open and close at his sides.

And then his phone buzzes, and I watch Saber read the screen. His shoulders set. When he looks up, the fury is still there, but something else just happened. That’s what this life does—it doesn’t even let him finish being angry.

“We’re at war, and I don’t have time for this shit.” He points a finger at Crash. “And if it weren’t for that, I’d fucking kill you. And you’d let me, because you know you’ve got it coming. But right now, I need my VP more than I need to beat the shit out of my best friend. Get dressed. Church. Five minutes.”

He walks out. He doesn’t look at me again, and that hurts more than anything he said.

Crash picks his boots up off my floor. There’s already swelling along his cheekbone, and his lip is split.

When he stops in front of me, I reach up and wipe the blood off his chin with my thumb.

“You heard that,” he says. “What I said.”

“I heard it.”

“I wanted to tell you differently. Not like this.” His hand comes up to the side of my neck, thumb along my jaw. “I’ll fix it. After.”

“Go.” I push him toward the door. “Your Prez needs you.”

He kisses me once, fast, copper on his mouth, and he’s gone down the hall with his boots still in his hand.

The sun is dropping behind the western range when there’s a knock, and it’s Trapper, and his expression is all wrong.

“Pack a bag, Cass. You’re leaving in ten minutes with the others.”

“What’s happening?”

“All the women and kids are moving. Safehouse.” He’s already looking down the hall toward the next door. “Clubhouse isn’t safe enough. Everybody knows where it is, and Saber wants you all someplace different. Ten minutes, okay?”

He’s gone before I can ask anything else. Not that he’d answer. Club business.

I pack the way I was raised to pack in situations like these—fast, essentials first.

Downstairs is controlled chaos. Shelby is directing traffic with a duffel bag over her shoulder. Violet has Leo on her hip and a suitcase in her free hand. Eden and Bree are helping organize. The other Old Ladies are managing kids or helping out where needed.

Jinx works his way down the line with a box of small black fobs, zip-tying one inside Leo’s backpack, handing one to each woman.

“Trackers,” he says when he gets to me, pressing one into my palm. “Everybody carries one. Pocket, not the bag. Extra precaution.”

“Precaution against what?”

“Pocket, Cass.”

I put it in my pocket.

We take cars, not bikes—too many people, too much luggage, and too many car seats. My sedan ends up third in the caravan, Bree riding shotgun in the car ahead of me, brothers on bikes bracketing the whole column like a moving fence.

Jinx and Trapper left to meet up with Saber.

Acorn is on the lead bike. Crash is nowhere in the line, and I don’t get to know where he is instead.

The clubhouse shrinks in my mirror.

The desert slides by.

We’re forty minutes out, on a two-lane stretch with nothing on either side, when the lead bikes brake hard.

Brake lights. Bree’s car is swerving. A truck where no truck should be comes off the shoulder fast.

It hits my passenger side like the world is ending.

There’s glass. The seatbelt cutting into me. The horizon rolling over itself, sky then dirt then sky.

Then nothing at all.

CHAPTER 10

CRASH

The county line marker leans the same way it’s leaned my whole life, green paint, half eaten by rust.

More than two dozen bikes idle here in the dark.

Trapper is one of them. Saber posted him on the clubhouse gate tonight, but he left another prospect holding it and rode straight here instead. Nobody sent for the prospect. Nobody sends him back, either.

Saber stands at the front with Joker’s tablet propped on Razor’s tank, drone footage frozen on the screen. Nitro’s compound is forty minutes north of this marker, deep in Warriors’ territory. Joker flew over it twice this week, but he’s been scoping it out for years.

Chain-link fence, two gates, a main building, a row of trailers along the east fence. We know where they sleep. We know where they keep the guns.

Tonight, we stop knowing things and start ending them.

Saber hasn’t said a word to me that isn’t an order since this morning. Fine. I’ll take orders. I’ll take the silence. I’ll take another punch if he’s got one left over, as long as he lets me ride at his shoulder when we go through that gate.

“Duke’s team takes the south gate,” Saber says. “Scar and his guys hold the north fence. Razor swings the trucks behind the trailers. Viper⁠—”

His phone lights up in his cut.

He’d never answer it here, this close to go-time, except the screen says Acorn, and he is leading the caravan to the safehouse.

Saber puts the phone to his ear. “Talk.”

I’m close enough to catch the sound coming through, not the words. Doesn’t matter. Saber’s face does the translating. Something is wrong.

“Say that again,” he says.

Acorn says it again.

“Which car?” His eyes land on me, and my body goes numb.

“Cassidy,” I say.

He doesn’t answer. He’s listening, jaw locked, phone crushed against his ear.

“Truck came off the shoulder,” he repeats for the rest of us. “T-boned Cassidy’s car. Second truck blocked her. Two men pulled her out before the brothers could get turned around, and they lost them on the dirt roads.” He listens another second, then says. “Acorn says they weren’t targeting her. They hit the middle of the column and took whoever was in reach.” He’s pacing. “Whoever was in reach was Cassidy. Everyone else made it to the safehouse. All the women and children.”

I put a hand on my tank, for balance, and the metal is the only thing grounding me.

They took her. The Crimson Warriors took her.

“Jinx.” Saber snaps his fingers. “The trackers. Everyone got one before they rolled out, right?”

Jinx already has his phone out, thumb flying, pulling up Cassidy’s tracker. We crowd in. The screen is a map, mostly empty desert, and one green dot.

The dot is moving north. Back roads, but every turn it takes bends it toward the same destination, and all of us standing around that screen know the address.

“They’re taking her to the Warriors’ compound,” Joker says.

“They’re taking her to the place we’re about to burn down,” Razor says around his cigarette.

“We cut them off,” I say.

“On which road?” Razor doesn’t even look up. “They’re threading dirt tracks we don’t have eyes on. We pick wrong, we’re an hour out of position, and they’re behind a fence. We pick right, and it’s a gunfight with her in the middle of it.”

He’s right. I hate him for being right.

“Glad she listened,” Jinx says quietly. “I told everyone to put the trackers in their pockets, not their bags.”

Good girl.

Saber stares at the dot. The compound is forty minutes up the road. The staging point Razor scouted for tonight sits five minutes south of its fence.

Once that dot stops moving, his sister will be five minutes from where we’ll be standing.

Five minutes. And we have to let them take her through that gate first, because the only thing worse than her inside that compound is a gunfight on an open road with her in the truck.

“They don’t know we’re coming tonight,” Duke says. “She’s leverage. They’ll want her breathing.”

Saber gives his orders. “Nothing changes. We’re attacking the Warriors’ compound exactly as planned.” He tells everyone what their specific job is.

“What about Cassidy?” Duke asks.

“Crash and I will get Cassidy.” Saber pulls his Glock, checks it, holsters it. “We go in four minutes before the rest of you. We get her. Then you all follow your orders.”

He turns to me last. This morning, he ripped me off her bed and told me I don’t have love in me. Now, he looks at me a long second.

“You really love her?” he asks.

“I do.”

He nods once. It’s not forgiveness, but acceptance. “Let’s go get her.”

Saber swings a leg over his bike.

We ride north with headlights dark. At the staging point, Saber and I kill our engines and walk the bikes the last quarter mile to a ditch before continuing on foot.

The compound is bright against the dark, floodlights on the main building, music from somewhere, men’s laughter.

Saber and I belly up a low ridge of rock-hard dirt east of the fence. Below us, the row of trailers—five of them propped on cinder blocks.

A man sits on the steps of the middle one, rifle across his knees, halfway through a beer.

I check the tracker app on my phone. The green dot is inside that trailer.

She is twenty yards from me, behind one drunk guard and a sheet-metal door.

“One on the steps,” Saber breathes. “One on the corner of the fence, north. See him?”

“Got him.”

My phone buzzes once against my chest.

Duke: In position.

It’s time to go get my girl.

We come down the slope in the dark. Saber takes the fence corner, gets behind the guard, and puts a knife in him. The body goes down without a sound.

The man on the steps tips his beer back, oblivious.

I cross the last thirty feet while his head is tilted back, and I kill him with my knife before he ever sees me. He folds sideways off the steps into the dirt. I take his rifle and set it down out of reach.

Saber materializes at the other side of the door. He holds up a fist. Wait.

Through the thin metal skin of the trailer, we hear a man’s voice. “Keep crying, sweetheart. Nobody out here but coyotes.”

Then she says, “When my brother gets here, I’m going to tell him to kill you first.”

My knees nearly give out with the relief of hearing her, and Saber smiles.

I know the same thought is in both our heads: That’s our girl.

Saber drops his fist and kicks the trailer door off its hinges.

Two men are inside. The first one turns toward the door, and Saber shoots him dead.

The second grabs Cassidy. She’s zip-tied to a kitchenette chair, blood dried down her temple. He grabs a fistful of her hair, and his pistol is half-raised toward her head.

I shoot him through the shoulder of his gun arm. He drops the pistol, and my second shot kills him.

“Crash,” Cassidy calls out to me.

I leave the man where he is.

Saber is already cutting the zip ties. She comes up out of the chair, and there’s one second where she doesn’t know which of us to go to, her brother or me.

Saber steps back. She comes to me.

She hits my chest, and my arms close around her, and her fists twist into the back of my cut.

“You came,” she says into my chest.

“I’m making you my Old Lady,” I whisper. “Figured I should keep you alive long enough to let you know.”

A sound comes out—half laugh, half sob.

Then the south gate explodes, right on schedule. The whole compound erupts—engines, gunfire, and men yelling names. The war we came to finish has officially started.

“Move,” Saber says from the door. “Celebrate the reunion later.”

We leave the trailer and run the fence line with her between us.

The Crimson Warriors are losing. That’s visible from here. Warriors are pinned between Duke’s team and Razor’s trucks. The main building’s floodlights are shot out. A bike lies on its side, burning.

A bullet flies past us and sparks off the chain-link fence. I put Cassidy against my left side, fence side, my body between her and the lot. Saber kills the shooter at forty feet without breaking stride.

We’re twenty yards from the gap in the east fence when the main building’s side door bangs open and a wiry figure comes out, silver goatee catching the firelight, a pistol in each hand.

Nitro. The Prez of the Crimson Warriors. Running for the trucks. Running from his own war.

Saber aims at him, but there are too many brothers in his line of fire. I won’t let go of Cassidy’s hand to draw my gun. Nitro is going to reach the trucks.

Then a single shot comes from the shadows by the trailers, and Nitro falls in the open lot. Dead before he hits the dirt.

Trapper steps out of the shadows, rifle still raised, checking left and right for more threats.

“TRAPPER,” Joker’s voice bellows from somewhere in the smoke, disbelieving, delighted, already telling the story. “PROSPECT JUST KILLED NITRO.”

Saber stops. Looks at the body in the lot. Then at the kid who has swept our floors for three years and just ended the war.

“That kid is getting patched,” Saber says, to nobody, to everybody.

The gunfire slows, then stops before we reach the bikes. Duke’s voice comes over the radio with the count. Every brother is alive. Two are wounded, but they’ll make it. Most of the Warriors are dead, including Nitro. The ones who aren’t dead surrendered, and they’re face down in the dirt with zip ties on their wrists.

At the ditch, I get on my bike.

Cassidy climbs on behind me without asking her brother’s permission, arms around my waist, palms flat against my stomach, chin hooked over my shoulder.

I turn my head and kiss her. In front of God, the burning compound, and her brother.

When I open my eyes, Saber is astride his bike ten feet away, watching us, and I brace for whatever shit he’s about to say.

He just looks tired. Tired and relieved down to the bone. He shakes his head at the pair of us, one slow time, like we’re a problem he’s decided he can live with.

“Let’s get home,” he says, and fires his engine.

Twenty-six bikes come up off the desert floor behind him, and the woman I love tightens her arms around me. We ride back toward Ash Valley with the fire shrinking in the mirrors until the dark takes it.

It’s over.

CHAPTER 11

CRASH

The sun comes up on twenty-six bikes rolling through the clubhouse gate, and not one brother left behind.

Cassidy’s arms stay around me until I’ve parked next to the clubhouse. Even then, she doesn’t let go right away.

So I sit there in the gravel lot and let her take her time.

“Doc first,” I say.

“I’m fine.”

“A truck slammed into your car, and you were zip-tied to a chair. Doc first.”

She slides off the bike with my help. She winces as soon as she touches the ground.

“Doc first,” she agrees.

Doc shines a penlight in her eyes, makes her track his finger, presses along her ribs until she hisses, checks the cut at her temple, and decides it doesn’t need stitches.

“Seatbelt bruising, banged-up ribs, a knot on her head the size of a walnut,” he says to me because I’m standing in the doorway and haven’t moved in twenty minutes. “Nothing broken. No concussion. Nothing permanent. She’ll be sore for a couple of weeks.”

“I’m right here,” Cassidy says.

“You are.” The doctor finally looks at her but doesn’t apologize. “Take the ibuprofen, kid. Don’t be a hero.”

She takes the ibuprofen. Over Doc’s shoulder, her eyes find mine, and the corner of her mouth comes up, and I’d burn that compound down a second time for that half a smile.

Behind me, the clubhouse fills back up. The Old Ladies and kids are home from the safehouse. Shelby and Saber are talking in whispers and kissing in between words. Violet holds Duke’s face in both hands, looking him over for damage, while their son, Leo, sits next to them with a toy motorcycle. Eden is checking Viper for any injuries, and the big man stands still and lets her.

I don't know how long I stand there watching all of it. Long enough for the noise to thin out, for brothers to drift toward showers and beds, for Saber to untangle himself from Shelby and disappear down the hall with Razor.

“Crash.” Joker leans into the infirmary, tablet under his arm. “Church. Saber wants the rundown before anybody sleeps.”

I look at Cassidy.

“Go,” she says. “I’ll be upstairs.”

Church is full and loud until Saber takes his seat, and then it’s neither.

Joker walks us through what we took from the Warriors’ compound. Two laptops, a box of documents, and three phones.

National is sending riders to handle the cleanup, the surrendered Warriors, and any heat from the law. And that’s fine by me.

“Here’s the one you all want.” Joker spins the tablet to face the table. A photo of a logbook page. “They knew about us sending away our Old Ladies and kids. They had a spotter. Some civilian they paid cash. He watched the caravan roll out and called it in. That’s also how they knew the day National left.”

Nobody around the table hides their anger.

“The spotter is gone,” Joker says. “National has his name and his plate number. He’s their problem now.”

Church runs another hour. Wounded accounted for, Bear awake and bruised, the buyer rescheduled, the books square. All the loose ends are tied up.

Then Saber says, “We’re done. Get some sleep.” And as chairs scrape back. “Crash stays.”

Nobody looks at me on the way out. Everybody wants to.

The door shuts. The padlock hangs open against the frame. Saber sits at the head of the table, turning his lighter over in his fingers, and I take the chair I’ve sat in for years and wait for whatever is coming.

“I saw how you two look at each other,” he says. “Yesterday. Tonight. All of it.”

I wait. He’s not done.

“She told me she loves you, and I didn’t believe you felt the same.” He leans forward, forearms on the table. “Then I watched you walk into that compound for her without blinking. I was wrong. I don’t say that often, so enjoy it.”

I keep my mouth shut.

“Here’s how it is.” He pauses. “You treat her right. If she cries because of you, we have a different conversation. I won’t give a fuck about our history.” He shifts in his seat. “No more sweetbutts. No waitresses, no barflies, no women whose names you can’t remember. That life is over the day you claim her, or you don’t claim her.”

“It’s already over. Been over since she walked through that door.”

He studies me, and whatever he’s looking for, he finds it.

“You’re the closest thing I have to a blood brother,” he says. “Always have been. I spent yesterday wanting to kill you. But the whole time, some part of me kept thinking, if it had to be somebody, there’s only one man I’d trust with her.” He stands, comes around the table, and puts his hand out. “I’m glad it’s you, Crash.”

I stand and take it. Then I pull him into a hug.

“Go on,” he says. “She’s waiting on you, and we both know it.”

I’m at the door when he adds, “Crash.”

I turn.

“Welcome to the family. Officially.” A beat. “It’s a nightmare. You’ll fit right in.”

Her door is locked again.

Good girl.

I knock twice. “It’s me,” I call out.

She opens it within seconds.

She’s showered. Wet hair, an old T-shirt, the seatbelt bruise coming up along her collarbone, the cut at her temple cleaned up. She looks like she went through a war, because she did.

And even with all the injuries, she’s still fucking beautiful.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

She steps back to let me in, and I shut the door and lock it, and then I just stand there looking at her. I rehearsed what I wanted to say, but I can’t remember a thing.

“You’re staring,” she says.

I shrug. “I’m allowed.”

“Oh, yeah? With whose permission?”

“Your brother, as of a few minutes ago.”

Her lips part, but for once she’s got nothing. This woman is never at a loss for words.

“Sit down,” I say. “Before you fall down.”

She sits on the edge of the bed. I crouch in front of her, take her hands, and turn them over in mine. Zip-tie marks around both wrists, raw and red. I run my thumb beside them, not on them, and the rage comes up my spine again. I breathe it back down. The men who did it are dead. There’s nobody left to hurt for her.

There’s only this.

“He gave us his blessing,” I say.

She pulls one hand free and puts it against my face, careful of the bruise her brother left there. Her thumb moves along the swollen edge of it.

“You let him hit you,” she says. “You didn’t fight back.”

“I had it coming.”

“You didn’t.”

“I betrayed his trust. I had it coming.” I catch her hand and press my mouth to her palm, soft as I know how. “I said it wrong yesterday. So I’m saying it again, the way I wanted to.”

Her breathing changes.

“I love you, Cassidy. I’ve never said that to a woman in my life. You’re the first. You’re the only.”

“Crash,” she whispers.

“I’m not finished. I have a whole speech, and I’m getting through it.” I stay down on her level, her hands in mine. “I want you as my Old Lady. But only if you want it. And I want us out of this clubhouse. A house. Yours and mine. Someplace your brother has to knock to get into.” I huff a laugh. “I’ve got money put away. A lot of money. And nothing I ever wanted to spend it on. Turns out I was saving it for you and didn’t know.”

The first tear gets away from her, and I reach up and take it off her cheek with my thumb.

“You done?” she asks.

“Yeah.” I nod. “That’s the speech.”

“It was a good speech.”

“I know. I’m good at speeches.”

She slides off the edge of the bed into my arms, carefully. We’re both injured.

“Yes,” she says, kissing my cheek. “To all of it. I want to be yours. I want the house. I want you. Yes.”

I hold her on the floor, both arms around her like she is the most important thing in the world, because as far as I’m concerned, she is.

She kisses me. Slow, careful of my split lip.

I get her into bed and get in behind her, boots off, gun on the nightstand, her back tucked against my chest. Her breathing goes long and even before mine does.

I’ve spent my whole life leaving before this part. Turns out this is the best part.

EPILOGUE

CASSIDY

One month later

Someone drops what sounds like a full keg in the hallway, and Crash stops moving inside me.

“If that’s a prospect, I’m killing him,” he says.

“Don’t stop.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” He pulls my knee up toward my chest and drives back in, deeper at this angle, and my head goes back into the pillow. “Where was I?”

“Right there.”

“Right there,” he agrees, and stays right there, snapping his hips against mine.

The headboard hits the wall. He doesn’t ease up. A month of mornings in this room and he’s quit treating me like I’ll break.

He knows my body now, knows I want his weight and his teeth and roughness, and he gives me all of it.

“Eyes on me,” he says.

I open my eyes. He’s braced over me on one arm, watching my face, hips rolling slow and deep and merciless.

I grab the back of his neck and pull him down and bite his lower lip, and he groans into my mouth and his control slips—the rhythm goes harder, rougher.

He pulls out, flips me onto my stomach, and drags my hips up before I’ve finished gasping.

“Like this. Yeah?”

“Yes,” I moan.

He pushes back in and sets a pace with nothing careful in it. One hand spreads wide between my shoulder blades and pins me to the mattress, his thumb hooking the collar of the shirt I’m still half wearing, and dragging it aside to put his mouth on the back of my neck.

“Faster,” I command him.

I push back to meet him, hard, stealing the rhythm out from under him, and his laugh breaks off into a curse. He likes it when I fight him for the pace. He told me so the second week, and I’ve been abusing the information ever since.

“Brat,” he says.

“Slacker.”

That earns me what I want.

He hauls me up off the mattress, my back against his chest, both of us upright on our knees, and he never stops fucking me through the move—short, deep strokes now, grinding up into me from below.

His free hand slides down my stomach and finds my clit. His fingers move in the opposite direction of his cock, and the two rhythms cross, creating a storm of sensation between my thighs.

“Crash, come with me.”

“Yes, baby, yes.”

Slow heat rolls up the backs of my thighs, gathering, my whole body winding tighter on every stroke. I’m shaking against his chest and pushing back into him.

His arm bands across my chest, and locks me to him, and his fingers keep that opposite rhythm, patient and ruthless. The heat crests and goes everywhere at once.

The waves keep rolling, and somewhere in the middle of it, he turns my face back toward him and kisses me.

“Fuck,” he says, right at my ear, and his pace finally slips. “I love you!”

He finishes deep, his words dissolving into a groan against the back of my neck, his hips stuttering through it.

We collapse flat, his weight crushing me into the mattress.

“You bit me,” he says into my shoulder.

I chuckle. “You liked it.”

“I really did.” He nips at my neck lightly with his teeth. “We need our own house.”

“You say that every morning.”

“Every morning, I mean it.” He rolls off me and lies there with one arm behind his head, in no hurry to be anywhere. “I’ve lived in this clubhouse my whole adult life. It was enough. Now we share our mornings with twenty brothers, and sometimes the women they’re fucking if they’re still here. Trapper eats breakfast with us every single day.”

“You love Trapper.”

“I love Trapper. I don’t want him at my breakfast table.” He turns his head and looks at me. “I want a kitchen where I can fuck you on the countertops, whenever I want.”

“Romantic.”

“I’m serious, Cass.” He pushes me playfully. “I want a shower built for two. A whole house where everything in it is yours and mine and nobody else’s.”

“Then let’s finally get serious about buying a house.” I sit up and find my shirt on the floor. The cut he gave me is hanging over the back of the chair next to my clothes, where it lives now. PROPERTY OF CRASH across the back.

The first week I wore it, it felt like a costume. Now it feels strange when it’s not on, like leaving the house without my own skin.

“We’ll find the perfect house. But not today.” He gets up and pulls his jeans on. “Today we’ve got the barbecue.”

He comes around the bed and kisses me, unhurried, his hand at the back of my head.

“I love you, baby,” he says against my mouth.

“I love you, Crash.”

He grins. “I know.”

Saber’s yard is full. Bikes in a row along the fence, trucks behind them, kids running between the legs of large men who step around them without looking down.

Saber is at the grill with a beer and a pair of tongs, arguing with Razor about how long ribs take. Razor’s dog lies in the shade under the porch, on its side, sleeping through all the chaos.

Shelby spots us first and crosses the yard with her arms already open.

“Hey, girl!” She hugs me, then holds me out at arm’s length and looks at the cut. She does this every time. “Still not over it.”

“It’s been a month, Shelby.”

“You don’t get to dictate how long I’m excited about it.” She loops her arm through mine and walks me toward the porch. “Tell me about the new location for the bar. Saber told me almost nothing.”

“The books are finally cleaned up. The bar is making a ton of money.” We climb the porch steps. “So, I pitched Crash and Saber a second Bones and Bucks location, making it a chain. In town this time, on a busy street. Foot traffic, lunch crowd, tourists passing through.”

“On Main Street.” Shelby is already somewhere else, working. I can see it happen behind her eyes. “I love the idea.”

“Since you do the marketing for the bar, it’s really important that you’re on board, too!”

“I’m on board!” She hands me a beer out of the cooler without asking. “Where on Main?”

“The empty building next to the diner.”

“Next to the diner.” She laughs. “That’s where I met Saber!”

“I know! I love the story of how you two met.” I give her a side hug. “My brother is a lucky guy.”

“That he is,” Shelby agrees with a laugh.

Violet and Eden are at the other end of the porch, and we drift down to them. Violet is sitting next to Leo, who is falling asleep on her lap. Duke comes up the steps, takes the boy off her without a word, and she leans into his side like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Eden stands with Viper, her hand in his.

I sip my beer and look at all of it. The yard, the smoke, the kids, the row of bikes.

Crash catches my eye from across the yard and winks. I blow him a kiss.

A month ago, there was a war. Now there’s this.

Family.

Hours go by, and Saber kills the music himself, right when the sun starts going down.

“Alright,” he says. “Everybody shut up for a minute.”

The yard goes quiet. Men come in from the fence line. Shelby steps up next to me and grips my hand, and that’s when I know what’s coming, because she already knew.

“Trapper. Get up here.”

Trapper comes through the crowd. He’s been a prospect for years, but he’s done more for this club than a lot of patched brothers.

Saber holds up a cut. New leather, full patches. Top rocker, bottom rocker, the crown and skull in the middle.

“Years,” Saber says. “Years of guard duty on that gate, mopping floors. Years of making the worst coffee in Arizona.” Laughter rolls through the yard. “And you never once complained where I could hear it. You bled for this club. You stood your ground for this family when it counted, more than once.” He stops. The yard is silent. “Vote was unanimous. Get over here, brother.”

Trapper takes the cut in both hands. He stares at it a second too long, his bottom lip quivering, and all the bikers pretend not to see it.

He puts it on.

The yard erupts. The men close around him in a wall of leather and noise, slapping the new patches, shaking him by the shoulders.

Joker’s voice comes up over all of it, telling a funny story about Trapper everyone has heard fifty times.

Leo wakes up on Duke’s shoulder, takes one look at the commotion, and holds his small hand out flat, and Trapper breaks out of the crowd to high-five the kid. The yard laughs all over again.

Crash appears at my side and puts his arm around me, his hand curling at my shoulder.

Later, I sit on the porch steps with a plate I’m not eating from, and Saber lowers himself down next to me with a groan he’d deny making.

“Old man,” I say.

“Watch it. I can still throw you in the horse trough.”

“You can’t. I’m somebody’s Old Lady now. There are rules.”

“There are no rules that protect you from your brother.” But he bumps my shoulder with his, and we sit there watching his yard full of people.

Crash is at the fire pit telling a story with both hands, and a dozen brothers are laughing at whatever it is, and Trapper is standing in the middle of them in his new cut, grinning so wide it has to hurt.

“Dad used to do this,” Saber says. “The barbecues. You remember?”

“Yeah.”

“He’d stand right where I was standing tonight.” He turns his beer in his hand. “I used to think I was keeping everything going for him. The club, the family, all of it.” He nods toward the yard. “It’s not for him. It’s for this. Took me a war to figure that out.”

I lean my head on my brother’s shoulder. He lets me.

“You happy, Cass?”

“Yeah.” It’s an easy answer. The easiest one I’ve ever given. “You?”

“Very.” He finishes his beer and stands, and squeezes the back of my neck once. “Your man’s looking for you.”

Crash is crossing the yard toward the porch, firelight behind him, and he holds his hand out when he reaches the bottom step.

“Come here,” he says. “There’s a thing I want to show you.”

“What thing?”

“A thing. Come on.”

He pulls me up and leads me away from the fire, around the side of the house, where the noise drops off and the dark takes over and the stars come all the way down to the horizon, the way they only do out here.

He stops, turns me by the shoulders, and points.

“There,” he says. “See the ridge line? Left of the windmill.”

“I see desert, Crash.”

“Forty acres, backs right up against Saber’s east fence. Old house on it, needs work. It went up for sale this morning.” He’s behind me, his arms coming around me, his chin on top of my head. “I called the guy already. We can see it on Monday.”

I turn around in his arms. “You want to live next to my brother?”

“I want to live next to family.” He pushes my hair back from my face. “But far enough away where we have our own space, so I can have you all to myself when I want you.”

“I like the sound of that,” I say. “Monday?”

“Monday.” He kisses me, slow, no audience, no hurry.

I came home after four years, thinking I was over Crash. I was wrong, and being wrong was the best thing I ever did.

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