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Today, we go our separate ways and I get to find out if she’ll come back to me at all. Because no matter what name is stitched across her back in leather, yesterday changed her entire world. Her axis tilted and I’m not sure where gravity rests for her any longer.

“I’m ready.” She appears like a wraith at my side, dressed in black. We all are today. A black band is wrapped around her upper arm. It doesn’t need straightening, but I do it anyway, needing to touch her.

She might be ready, but I’m still unwilling to let her go. Not after the shit-fight of yesterday. The percussion overwhelm is real in my head. No matter how many times I close my eyes to nap, the echo of every gunshot lives there, in the space between my ears and reality.

“I’ll be okay,” she adds. “They won’t touch me.”

“Bullshit,” I grate, heedless of how harsh my tone and words are. “You go there, they will kill you, cosita. I don’t want to wrap you in a black flag and place dirt over your heart.” I capture her jaw in my hand, holding her firm. “Whatever sense of loyalty you have to a dead man, he never returned it. You were a tool to him. Nothing more.” I’m being cruel, and I know it. But that’s her reality, and now mine, too.

If she heads out to the Forsaken Saints’ funeral service for her father, whatever chapter remains there, she won’t find what she seeks and I’ll bury the woman I call mine this afternoon.

“I’ll be fine. I need to return there.” She taps the guns wrapped in a dark cloth. The covered metal sits between us. Her father’s name is engraved on the handles. That’s how I knew she was planning to leave. She had to return what she had taken.

And why I love her all the same.

“Your heart is large,” I murmur, stroking her cheek, then press my thumb to her bottom lip, mesmerized by the way the soft flesh depresses under my touch. “But don’t let this sense of displaced honor be your end.”

She lets me touch her and doesn’t pull away. “I was his daughter, once. A child.” She doesn’t offer any other explanation, and it’s enough.

I drop my hand and let her go, watching with no little sense of disquiet as she swings onto her bike in her leather slim pants and matching jacket and lace top beneath. It’s practically formal attire for her. Part of me wants to see her in some soft, flowy material, but I’ve never seen her like that and doubt I ever will.

“Come back to me, little toy,” I whisper to myself as she pulls away and leaves the yard without looking back.

The prospect I motion to, one of the few remaining, follows her at a distance at my nod. I have no authority here to order Savage’s boys around, but that doesn’t matter. Not today and not with her.

“She’ll come back to you.” Nero, the Denver Sons’ president, stands next to me. “She bears your name on her back.”

I don’t acknowledge him at all. The last time I saw Nero, we were cutting through a local deal gone wrong and discovered a cache of trafficked women. Well, children, because the girls were young enough to be considered so. I’d never been so sick in my life at the sight of their damaged bodies. Most were so scared they couldn’t speak. Some didn’t make it through the first week, from pure fear of the outside world. They’d been incarcerated that long.

And while Nero removed the local dealer who supplied the girls and stole them from their homes, word was he hadn’t yet secured the name of the man who oversaw the operation.

I hope he loses sleep at night looking for him. If that was my city, I wouldn’t rest until it was clean of an infestation like that. But I’m simply a chapterless rider, a man lucky to find the woman he loves who wants to stay. At least, I think she does.

My jaw works. “We’ll see.”

Nero doesn’t say anything else and after a moment he walks over to his bike. A whistle and his crew leaves with him, headed to the cemetery where today’s services will be held.

I swallow back the sense of disquiet, the emptiness that slams me now that she’s gone. I should have stopped her. Hell, I should have gone with her. Maybe that would have made everything worse. Maybe I should have followed her rather than sending a prospect.

I strode to my sled and grabbed my helmet. Maybe...

She won’t leave you.” Saint strides out the door of the clubhouse and right in my path, blocking my exit.

My temper flares. “Just because you’ve watched me fuck her doesn’t mean you’re a part of what we are,” I snarl, revving my sled.

Silence falls in the yard, the few remaining club members watching our interaction with a sense of exhausted wariness.

Saint folds his arms across his chest and tips his head back to stare at the sky. “There’s an old saying about high horses,” he mutters, apparently to no fucker at all.

“Are you going to stand there all day or am I going to run you over?” I rev the engine again, startling Mama M who sends me a reproving look as she walks out of the clubhouse, her hands filled with plates of covered food.

Guilt hits me hard. While we’re out here show-ponying, Saint and me, the rest of the club is grieving. I shut the engine down and hang my helmet, liberating a stack of plates. Saint gets the other, muttering his apologies.

I don’t waste breath, heading straight for the support van that will be used for catering for today’s wake. Usually, the clubhouse would feature for such an event, but today Savage has opened his home. My feet trail dust to and from the clubhouse, and half an hour later, we’re ready to ride.

For the first time in an age, I’m part of a convoy of patched brothers. Wind batters at me, but the air is stilled and sour. Poppy should be here. Riding with me or beside me. Either way, she should be here. Her absence is keenly felt. More than one man looks around. Our contingent is small enough. Savage will be on a recruitment drive, and I guess that will be my job in the coming months, seeing as it’s partially my fault that his club is fucked up.

Or he’ll pull the next nomad in line to drive a select population his way and manipulate them to do his bidding. Savage always was good with a sales pitch. A gritty one.