The fierce, burning, full-body pride of a woman who watched a man earn something the hard way and knows exactly what it cost.
She pours me a beer and slides it across the counter. Her fingers brush mine on the glass.
"Nice patch." Her mouth curves. "Looks good on you."
I lean across the bar. "Everything looks good on me."
She laughs. The real one. The one I've been chasing since the statistics classroom and my ridiculous pens.
Maddox commandeers the jukebox and puts on something loud and terrible and dances with Tildie until Ruger pulls her away.
Tildie laughs and lets herself be pulled, and the room fills with the noise of men who love each other pretending they don't.
Coin is in a booth with Leah. Their heads are close together, talking low, and Leah's hand is on his forearm.
Coin's scar catches the bar light when he smiles.
Porter isn't here.
His empty space fills the room the same way his empty chair filled Church. Nobody says his name. Nobody toasts to the absent. The celebration has a shadow, and the shadow is shaped like a man whose wife chose someone else.
I drink my beer. Accept congratulations. Let Daemon put me in a headlock that's eighty percent affection and twenty percent brain damage.
Kinsey appears at my elbow somewhere around the second beer.
I sense her before I see her. Not instinct, not attraction. Memory. The awareness your body develops around someone who once had the power to ruin you.
She's standing a few feet away, a soda in her grip, her blonde hair pulled back.
She looks different than she did when we were younger.
Steadier. Less brittle. The guilt she carried like a second skin has softened into something she's learning to live with instead of drowning under.
"Congratulations." She says it to my shoulder, not my face.
I turn. "Thanks, Kinsey."
Her name in my mouth doesn't taste like it used to. No bitterness. No heat.
A word. A name. A person I used to know in a way I don't anymore.
"You earned it." She meets my gaze. Her expression is clean. No agenda, no angle, no play. "I mean that. What you did for Saylor, for the club—you earned every thread of that rocker."
I nod. "I appreciate it."
A pause. The jukebox switches tracks. Someone laughs too loud near the pool table.
"I'm sorry." She says it with the steady certainty of a woman who's said it before and will keep saying it until it stops needing to be said. "For what I did to you. For using you. For all of it."
I look at her. Really look, the way I haven't in years. The girl who played me for information. The woman who killed her own father to save this club.
The person standing in front of me now, holding a soda at a party, trying to close a door she opened when she was too young to understand what doors do.
"I know you are." I hold her stare. "And I forgive you. I forgave you a long time ago, Kinsey. I was holding onto it because letting go felt like losing."
Her chin trembles. Once. She presses her lips together and nods.
"I hope she makes you happy." She lifts her soda in a small toast. "You deserve it."