I wait.
He stops.
Then briefly looks up, as if the sky might offer him some assistance.
“Never mind. Let’s go.”
Pressing my lips together to keep the smile from going anywhere interesting, I follow him to the truck.
The drive to the clubhouse takes about fifteen minutes, out of the quiet desert roads and back toward the city, the Vegasskyline growing ahead of us as we drive. Tate is still in that way of his, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the door, country music playing low on the radio in a way that suggests it is always playing rather than something he’d chosen.
Watching the city come back into focus through the passenger window, I think about what I’m walking into.
I’ve been in a clubhouse before. I know the energy, the noise, the leather, and the kind of controlled chaos that comes from a group of men who live by their own rules and have stopped apologizing for it somewhere along the way. The Blood Brothers’ clubhouse in New York had eventually felt like home, after enough weeks of Jasmine pressing coffee into my hands and Tess pulling me into conversations I hadn’t expected to care about, and all of them slowly, quietly making space for me in a world I hadn’t grown up in.
But that was Ryan’s world.
This is Tate’s.
And Tate had made it very clear this morning that those are not the same thing.
‘You’re not stepping into Ryan’s life. You’re stepping into mine.’
“You nervous?” Tate asks without looking at me.
“No.”
He glances at me sideways.
“A little.”
The corner of his mouth moves. “Good. Means you’re paying attention.”
The Sinners’ clubhouse sits on a wide industrial street on the east side of Vegas, a long, low building with blacked-out windows and a row of bikes lined up outside that gleam even in the flat midday light. A large Sinners’ patch is mounted above the entrance, dark and striking, nothing subtle about it.
Tate pulls the truck into the lot, kills the engine, and for a second, neither of us moves.
“Rules,” he says, turning to face me slightly.
At his words, I turn toward him.
His eyes are on me, dark and completely serious, the kind of serious that doesn’t leave room for negotiation. Standing this close, I’m reminded again of how much space he takes up without trying, how completely he fills whatever room he’s in.
“You stay with me or Luke. You don’t wander. You don’t ask questions about club business. You don’t touch anything that looks like it belongs to someone without asking first.” He pauses. “And if anyone gives you trouble,anyone, you come straight to me. You don’t handle it yourself.”
“Okay.”
He studies my face for a second like he’s checking whether I mean it.
“Okay.”
He climbs out, and I follow. The moment we push through the front doors, the noise hits me all at once, music thumping from somewhere, voices overlapping, the crack of pool balls from a table near the back, the smell of leather, cigarette smoke, and something cooking that I can’t identify but that smells surprisingly good.
The place is busy.
Men in Sinners’ cuts are everywhere, at the bar, the pool table, and clustered around a bike that is partially stripped in the corner. Near the far wall, a woman in cut-off shorts is pressed against one of the club members, his hands low on her hips, pulling her in, neither of them concerned about their audience. Another sits sideways across a man’s lap at the bar, his hand running slowly up her thigh while he talks to the man beside him like nothing is happening.
It isn’t as polished as the Blood Brothers’ clubhouse, rougher around the edges, louder, the kind of place that has never cared what anyone thought of it, but it has the same energy underneath. That same hum of brotherhood, loyalty, and men who would bleed for each other without being asked.
