She presses closer. Her chest meets my back. Her thighs bracket my hips. Not only does it feel like every nerve ending in my body fires at once, but the tension I've been carrying for months starts to ease up a bit.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Prophet nudge Jinx who stops mid-sentence, beer halfway to his mouth, and stares. Mayhem’s jaw hangs open, and he elbows Fuzzy. Even Fury, strapping a cooler to a truck bed, pauses to gape.
Half the fucking parking lot is staring.
I know what they're seeing. They’re seeing the guy who's been a black hole of rage and misery for months, who hasn't participated in a single club outing since “the incident,” not only showing up, but putting a woman on the back of his bike.
In our world, putting a chick on your bike is a statement. A claim, a declaration that she's yours and nobody else's.
London is the first woman ever to ride on the back of my bike. A part of me, a large part if I’m being honest, wants her to be the last.
Which is fucking stupid. I just met her.
And she’s Fiend's daughter.
There's a thought I should sit with—the wrongness of it, the complication, the guilt. I should feel guilty. I killed thisgirl's father, and now I'm staking a claim on her in front of my brothers like she belongs to me.
But the guilt doesn't come. What does appear is a savage, territorial certainty.
I fire her up, and as my Harley roars beneath us, London's face presses between my shoulder blades.
I pull out of the lot and into the street, taking my position as Road Captain. In my mirrors, dozens of bikes fall into formation behind me. The thunder of engines rolls through the morning air.
The highway opens up, and I push the throttle. Wind tears at my arms, fills my lungs. London's body leans into mine on a curve—pure instinct—and I cover her clasped hands with one of mine for a second, pressing her fingers against my stomach before returning my grip to the handlebar.
She doesn't pull away.
For forty minutes, there's nothing but road and wind and the heat of London’s body against mine. And my head goes quiet. The guilt, the nightmares, the constant replay of that night—that nightmare—all of it fades to a low hum instead of the scream it usually is.
Lake Erie spreads out like a sparkling blue-grey blanket. The shore is rocky where we pull in, but the club's claimed this stretch for years—a cleared area with fire pits, flat ground for grills, and enough space for forty bikes to park.
London peels herself off my bike on unsteady legs and pulls the helmet off, letting her dark hair tumble free. Windblown and flushed, she stares at the water with her lips parted and her eyes wide.
"Come on." I jerk my chin toward the group already setting up.
She stays close to me. Not clingy—more like a satellite maintaining orbit, keeping me in range even as she glancesat the other brothers with cautious interest. I'm hyperaware of where she is at every moment. How far. Who's near her. Whether anyone's looking at her wrong.
No one is. They know better.
After a couple of hours of food and noise and watching London get pulled into conversation by the ol' ladies, she drifts back toward me. I'm standing at the water's edge, hands in my pockets, staring out at the flat horizon where sky meets lake.
She stops beside me. Neither of us says a word. We just start walking. Side by side, we follow the shoreline away from the noise. The party fades to background—music thinning, laughter dissolving into the sound of water lapping against rocks. The wind off the lake is chilly, and I watch her pull that ratty jacket tighter around herself.
I break the silence first.
"I'm sorry about your father," I tell her. "I know you came here hoping for a different outcome.”
She's quiet for a beat. "It's strange. Hard to explain what I feel. Not the loss of a father—I never had one. More like the loss of a possibility. The death of a maybe. All those nights I lay awake imagining what it would be like to knock on his door, to see recognition in his eyes, to hear him say I didn't know about you, but I'm glad you're here… None of that will ever happen now."
The words hit hard.
"Your mother never told him about you?"
"I don't know. Her stories changed depending on the night and how much she'd had to drink." London picks up a smooth stone and turns it over in her fingers. "Some nights, she said he knew and didn't care. Other nights she said she never told him. I'll never know which version was true."
I want to know about her mother, about what she's running from, and about who messed up her face. "What about the rest of your life? You have people? A job? School?"
She tosses the stone into the water. "Nope."