“I want to give her the option.” He scraped a hand through his hair, and it came away black with soot from the fire. “As long as I’m a wanted man, I can’t give them a normal life. And I’ll always be looking over my shoulder, waiting for the day Viper or someone like him goes to the cops. But it’s not just that. I’ve lived my whole life in hiding. I’ve lived in the shadows. Evie brought me to the light. I don’t want to hide anymore. I want the truth to come out. The truth about what happened the night I left Stanton. The truth about how I feel.”
He shrugged off his cut, folded it carefully, and handed it to Jagger. “I talked to Richard. He says if I go up to Stanton and turn myself in they’ll process me and stick me in the slammer for a coupla days, maybe a week. He’ll be there for the interview and to arrange bail.”
“Fuck.” Jagger scrubbed his hands over his face. “Don’t do this. You know we’ll protect you.”
“I gotta do it, Jag. It’s the only way.”
“The club will bail you out then,” Jagger said. “Whatever the cost.”
Zane nodded his appreciation. “Richard said the bail conditions usually include not associating with known felons or criminal organizations. I’m guessing he means the club. I’ll be there for T-Rex’s funeral unless something goes wrong, but I’ll stay away from the brothers. He says our big chance is the preliminary hearing where we try to show the judge there’s not enough evidence to go to trial. Best-case scenario, I walk. Worst-case scenario, I spend the next twenty years in jail for something I didn’t do.”
“That won’t happen. If it gets to that we’ll break you out.”
Zane laughed. “I thought you were gonna say you’d hire a better lawyer. But, yeah, break me out. I’d go fucking crazy if I had to spend twenty years staring at the same four walls. Grand gestures are only good if there’s someone to appreciate them.”
“She might not take you back if you leave her again,” Jagger warned.
Emotion welled up in Zane’s throat. “This time I’m not leaving her alone or unprotected. And this time I’m not running away. I’m trying to come home. Make sure she understands that.”
He brushed his lips over Evie’s cheek and then he and Jagger clasped shoulders. “Look after her and Ty until I get back.”
“Like they were my very own.”
Zane stood in the doorway and drank in the sight of Evie, her hair fanned over the pillow, her face restful in sleep.
After all he’d been through, he had come full circle. He loved her. And yet he had to leave her again.
TWENTY-THREE
If your repair doesn’t work, don’t give up, Go back to the beginning and start again.
—SINNER’S TRIBE MOTORCYCLE REPAIR MANUAL
Evie squeezed Connie’s hand as the biker procession entered the cemetery. Although there was no body to bury, the Sinners had erected a tombstone in their dedicated plot at the Conundrum Cemetery and invited support clubs and local friendlies to honor T-Rex’s memory. T-Rex’s parents had declined the invitation to attend the ceremony, saying that T-Rex had been dead to them for many years and they had already mourned his passing. Jagger had smashed the phone after that conversation and added T-Rex’s family to his blacklist, to be punished at a later date.
Almost two hundred bikers converged on the cemetery, a testament to T-Rex’s popularity, not just in the club, but in the biker community. Of course, politics factored into who showed and who didn’t, which clubs sent presidents or VPs and which sent junior patch. All duly noted, of course, by Tank who had been assigned secretarial duty for the day and stood with Evie and Connie translating biker funeral customs into civilian terms so they could understand what was going on.
“Support clubs gotta send at least two board members and two junior patch,” he said, as he snapped pictures with his phone. “I’ll be making a list to give to Jagger and if anyone didn’t show, he’ll send Gunner out with a team to put them in their place.”
“I like that idea.” Connie pulled a collapsible umbrella from her purse and shook it out under the tree where they’d been standing for the last ten minutes. They had chosen a position on a small rise near the edge of the cemetery—close enough to hear, but far enough away that their civilian presence would not offend the biker gathering. “If I die, I want you and Evie to go beat up any of my friends who don’t show for the funeral. Especially Gene. So he regrets never making a move before he had the chance.”
Tank lowered his camera. “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re mine. Gene doesn’t touch you. And after I had words with Sparky, he won’t be touching you either. No one touches you. Except me.” He cupped his hand behind her head and pulled her in for a hard, possessive kiss.
“This is why I like bikers,” Connie said in a breathy voice after he released her. “The whole possessive caveman thing is very hot. You should see what he does if I show any interest in the guys at the bar.”
Evie tried, but failed to smile. T-Rex’s funeral had reopened the black hole in her chest that she hadn’t managed to heal since he’d sacrificed himself to save her. She felt guilty moving on with her life, guilty for every laugh, because T-Rex would never laugh again. And she had no one to share her grief. She’d awoken the morning after the big raid with a splitting headache, and no Zane.
That had been two weeks ago.
Despite her best efforts and the worst of her threats, she had been unable to convince Jagger to tell her where Zane had gone or how long he would be away. However, he had helped her find a small warehouse south of town big enough for a new shop and garage, and a small rental house only a ten-minute drive from Ty’s school. Evie hadn’t seen any Jacks lurking around, and she hadn’t heard anything from Viper. She figured he had better things to do with his time now that he had a clubhouse to rebuild and, no doubt, revenge to plan.
A biker minister said a few words after the crowd had assembled. Evie wondered how the minister reconciled his duties with the ethos of an outlaw biker gang, or what his superiors thought about him wearing a cut. She didn’t recognize his patch, but he was darkly handsome, almost exotic in appearance, with deeply tanned skin and long blond hair, tied back in a ponytail.
Jagger’s speech about T-Rex moved her to tears. Powerful, moving, quietly eloquent, he mentioned the little things that had made T-Rex the most well-regarded member of the club: small kindnesses, thoughtfulness, and a selflessness that put them all to shame. And in the end, he had died true to his nature, sacrificing himself to keep another safe.
Gunner followed with a story about T-Rex as a prospect, bursting into a board meeting to tell them Jagger had been kidnapped and then almost falling over when he saw Jagger alive. After Sparky and Dax gave their speeches, and the service had come to a close, Evie stayed behind so she could spend a few minutes alone at the grave.
She had only a few minutes of reflection before she sensed another presence near the grave. Her head jerked up and she saw Zane on the other side of the headstone, thumbs looped in the belt hooks of his worn, black jeans. The dark shadow of a beard covered his jaw and his hair looked like it hadn’t been combed in weeks. He had lost weight—his T-shirt hung loose under his cut, and although he still cut an imposing figure he looked … diminished, not just physically, but emotionally, too.
Her first instinct was to run, and maybe weeks ago that’s what she would have done. But she’d changed since Zane walked back into her life, and in the last few weeks she’d moved on. She had always known he would leave her again. This time she wasn’t prepared to take him back.
“You missed it,” she said.