Page 49 of Iron and Ivory

The name lands like a gut punch. The hard kind that makes you immediately feel sick. "Oh, fuck. Did you talk to her?"

"I literally had a dream about her and just woke up sick."

"Yeah," Mama Jo's voice in the background. "And he started yellin' at me for it!"

"Woman," Diesel snaps. "I already fuckin' apologized for that, but it is your fuckin' job to take care of the old ladies!"

"I know," Mama Jo hits back. "I was out there on day three with all the other bitches. It's not my fault you and fuck-face didn't have the decency to go pay your respects! I'm not a damn babysitter!"

While they go back and forth—Diesel barking, Mama Jo giving just as good as she gets—I stop hearing any of it. Their voices blur into something distant, like radio static coming through thick walls, and everything else collapses in on itself. The weight of it hits me fast and ugly, the way bad things always do when you've been holding too much else in your hands to see them coming.

June Dun. Havoc's wife. Six kids, a farmstead ten miles out, bake sales, and school drives, and a woman who wore vintage dresses like she was born in a better era than the rest of us.

A woman who baked bread for the club on patch days. Whose loyalty to her man, her family, and this club in that order was absolute.

Every single time she kissed Havoc goodbye and he rode out, she knew—the way all the old ladies know—that this might be the last look of him she ever gets.

He took three bullets for the club. Literally went down shootin'.

And I never went to see her.

Hell, it was my job to tell her what happened. Not Mama Jo's.

"OK," I say into the phone. And whatever insults these two were throwing at each other, they stop and fade to silence. "OK. We go today, Diesel. Me, you, every fuckin' officer. We ride out today and make this right. I'll be back in two hours."

"Got it," he sighs. And the call ends.

I go back inside and Savannah is sittin' up, rubbin' her eyes. "What's goin' on?"

"Nothin'," I lie. It's not her burden to carry. She hasn't asked about the dead bodies, so she has no idea Havoc is dead and I'm not gonna tell her until I have to.

This is not that day.

"I just gotta get back," I say. "Club stuff."

Savannah gets up and grabs her jeans, pulling them up her legs still lookin' sleepy and sexy as fuck. "Yeah, me too. No need to make Cash crazy. But I want you to know," she says, zippin' up her jeans as she walks over to me. She takes my face in her hands and smiles. "This was the best date I ever had."

Then she kisses me real slow and I let myself enjoy it.

Savannah hugs me tight as we ride back to the ranch. The wind is cold. A constant reminder that winter is comin' and this bike will go in the garage until spring.

The long Ashby driveway is somethin' else in the dark. Every fencepost lined up like soldiers, each one wearin' a little solar light that glows amber against the black. Hundreds of 'em, maybe thousands, runnin' the whole length of the road in two perfect lines, and off in the distance in every direction.

The kind of pretty only rich people could afford to dream of, let alone install.

Savannah's arms tighten around my ribs as I slow down, her breath warm on my neck. The mansion materializes out of the dark and I pull up to the front walk and kill the engine.

The silence after a motorcycle is always loud. She swings off the bike slow, like she's stalkin' the moment, and stands there in the new cut, and my t-shirt, and her jeans with her hair wrecked and her lips still swollen and she looks like every prayer I never finished.

Savannah leans down. Both hands on my jaw. Kisses me long and deliberate, the kind that ain't goodbye but ain't stay either.

"See ya soon, Demon."

She says it like a fact. Like weather. Like somethin' that just is.

I watch her walk the stepping stones that lead to her log mansion. Watch the door open, the warm light spillin' out around her like it's been waitin'. Watch her step inside without lookin' back, because she doesn't need to.

She already knows I'm watchin'.