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“What?”
“I fucking love you.”
He climbed up and sat beside her, flipping the cover of the sketchbook back. Lyra opened her pencil kits so they could share.
Before she started, she rocked her shoulder into his arm. “I fucking love you, too.”
EPILOGUE
a few weeks later
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“Little help over here!” Cooper yelled.
In the middle of painting the party room ceiling, Zach looked over his shoulder and saw Cooper in the front doorway, his back to the room. He held one end of the top of their new table: a beautiful, custom job one of Geno’s cousins had made for them, some kind of pine, with their patch carved into the center and a border with all sorts of symbols and images that represented their multiethnic charter and the diversity of the southern Nevada area.
But it appeared to be too wide to go through the front door.
Zach saw the issue right away and put the roller aside to help. “I think we need to take the frame off. But how’s it gonna get into the chapel?”
“One problem at a time, Z,” Cooper grunted. “This fucker’s heavy, so help us out.”
“You need to take it back out. You take one more step this way, and you’ll gouge the table.”
“FUCK! Back up, Reed.” Cooper and Reed walked the tabletop back outside.
Since they’d buried Gargo and said goodbye to the mother charter, they’d been working virtually nonstop on turning the new property into a compound. It was taking longer than they’d initially thought; now they were thinking they wouldn’t be fully finished and ready before the spring.
They’d started with the garage; all it had needed was a good clean-out and scrub and some industrial shelving. Now they were working on the clubhouse. Ben and Lonnie were hanging new cabinets in the kitchen, Kai and Geno were laying laminate upstairs in what would be Cooper’s office and the weapons locker. They had three prefab ‘tiny houses’ coming in a few weeks; they’d decided to do ‘bunkhouses’ instead of ‘crash pads.’
Those tiny houses were cute as fuck, actually. For like twenty grand a pop. They had given Zach an idea.
Once they got the clubhouse finished and the charter had a real home, they’d start working on the business. That was turning out to be the biggest pain in the ass, and not only because that building was being turned from a barn to a race shop. They had a name—RockSteady Racing, which was both pretty catchy and also intended to honor Gargoyle, whose last name was Rock—and a detailed business plan. They were paying cash for everything and didn’t need a bank loan, but there was still a fuck ton of red tape involved in starting a new business and a long line of palms to grease to get it done the way they wanted.
Lyra and Zach shared that hassle, and they bitched to each other every day about the aggravations of starting a business. In some ways, Lyra had it harder: she and Michelle were trying to open an artists’ gallery-slash-studio in a little retail space near the Riverwalk, but, as they were strictly legit, they were doing everything the long and hard way. Fewer palms to grease, much more red tape to get throttled by. Also, they were renting the space, not buying it, so they had a land-overlord who was being a real pain in the ass, especially for a guy who hadn’t been able to rent out his space in more than a year.
Zach was so proud of her—she’d found something she wanted and she was going for it. Her concept for this studio wasn’t just a place to sell her art; she was really thinking about building a community, a place where local artists could showcase their work, where those just starting out could find more experienced artists for help and critique. She’d had the idea of a membership kind of thing, so unknown artists who were members would always have some space where they could display and offer their pieces for sale, regardless of any one person’s opinion of their art.
Michelle’s job so far was tanking the bureaucrats. She didn’t have a talent for or particular interest in art, but she loved the idea of working with her best friend, and she knew how to talk to all kinds of people to get them to do what she wanted—or at least to get them to give her straight answers. In that way, Lyra said she was invaluable.
It was cool, how he and Lyra had both embarked on these different big changes at the same time, and how those big changes balanced between the promise of whole new lives and the comfort of their old ones.
Zach was still a Bull, a life he knew in his bones. But this charter was new, in a new place, and he’d be—he already was—instrumental in shaping what it would be. He felt energized by the future. Lyra was staying in Laughlin, still working in the family business, but she’d found this fresh new thing to excite and fulfill her. Something she could share with her best friend.
