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He chuckled—and cut that nonsense off short. No laughing for a couple days. Or sitting up too quickly. Or stretching. “It’s always about the Russians. But yeah, it was old stuff, about us just because we exist, I guess.” He caught her eye. “And you’re okay with it? Totally?”
“I am. Pop and Reed are in. You’re in. My mom hated Pop’s club back in the day, and she never really tried to deal with it. She was thrilled when it disbanded. I think she thought she’d get her husband back, but her husband was Pop. She already had all of him. Does that make sense?”
It didn’t really, but he tried. “Maybe? You mean ... she thought the things about him she didn’t like were the club’s fault, and when the club was gone she found out he was still the same guy?”
“Yeah—I mean, I wasn’t around for all that, but parsing what they’ve said over the years, yeah. She didn’t see that Pop was always a club guy, even without a patch on his back. She loved most of him, and she discounted the parts of him she hated like they weren’t really him. But theywerehim. Club life didn’t change him at all. That’s the Pop I’ve always known. I understand him, and I love him for who he is. And I guess ... I get you because of that. You’re a club guy, too. You told me that, when we had that dumb fight. You bleed orange.” A pert smirk sharpened her expression to a point. “You don’t, by the way. You bleed red. I know this for a fact, unfortunately.”
“Sorry. I’ll try not to get shot again for a while.”
“A long while, please. Like, I don’t know ... fifty years, at least.” She stretched out along his side and rested her head on his shoulder. Zach eased his arm around her and squeezed her close.
“Can I ask about something else?” she asked, her finger tracing his ink.
“Go for it.”
“Why do you have a cross on your chest? You don’t seem very religious.”
“I’m not. I guess I believe in God, but not in a way I think about much. The cross is for a brother who died. A club brother, I mean. His name was DC, and hewasreligious. Everybody called him Padre. It wasn’t his road name or anything, or he didn’t wear it on his kutte, anyway. I guess it was more like a term of endearment.” Lifting his head—ow—he picked up her finger and put it on the faint black-in-grey letters in the middle of the medieval-style cross.
She lifted her head to look. “Oh, I see. You were close?”
“He was like fifteen years older than me, and my patch was brand new when he died, but ... have you ever had anybody in your life who you just always knew if you had something weighing on your mind, some choice you had to make, or somebody who was being an asshole and making you feel bad—you could just talk to them and get a patient ear and good advice, without any judgment?”
“Yeah. Michelle’s dad was like that. He died in a wreck a few years ago. But we used to call him Dumbledore. DC was like that?”
“Yeah. He died in club shit, like Gargo. I was there when DC went, too. He died with his head on my lap.” Remembering, he closed his eyes and breathed through it.
“Oh, Zach. I’m sorry.”
“I’m okay. Just ... that’s why I wear a cross. For his belief, not mine.”
Raised on her elbow, Lyra looked down at him. Zach looked back, wondering what she saw, or hoped to see.
“I love you,” she said. “You’re my person.”
And she was his. How crazy was it that he’d met his one and only in Laughlin—and met her almost the instant he’d hit town with any idea of putting down roots here? It was almost like destiny was a thing.
And why wouldn’t it be? Legacy and destiny: two sides of the same coin, one turned to the past and the other to the future.
Zach pulled his person down and kissed the shit out of her.
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~oOo~
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“We gotta take him home,” Cooper insisted.
Zach already understood Ben Haddon well enough to be a little shocked when Ben slammed his fist down on the glass top of the rental’s table. The guy was not demonstrative, to say the least. That slam suggested he was seriously pissed.
“Thisis his home. He was bornhere. His people are buriedhere.Thisis Jason’s home.”
“He rode away from here,” Cooper pointed out, just as insistently. “He was a Bull for most of his adult life, inTulsa, and he has brothers buried there. There’s a way we do things, Ben.”
Zach understood where Coop was coming from, and no doubt Eight Ball would pop a vein if they called Tulsa and said no, they were not riding Gargoyle’s body back to Tulsa but burying him here. But he understood Ben, too. And something else occurred to him—something that answered the question for him, and might answer for the others, too.
“He was a Laughlin Bull when he died,” Zach said, resisting the instinct to lean forward when he had something to say. It was unpleasant enough to still be sitting up in this cheap-ass chair, wedged with seven other men around a table really meant for four. He needed his gut to hurry up and heal, and the club needed to get their clubhouse up and running. “This is where we’re sinking roots. He’s the first of us to go, and we all know he won’t be the last. It’s right we bury him with us.”
