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“I’m done.” Her voice cracked in half. “I heard you scream, Ava. I was on that floor and I heard you scream, and I couldn’t get to you.” She was crying too hard to hold the ice. “I don’t care who you sleep with. I don’t care if it’s my idiot brother. Don’t you ever scare me like that again.”

Ava-Rose pulled her in with her good arm. They stood there holding on to each other, the way they have since the second grade, and I kept my mouth shut for once in my life.

After a while Brynn turned around and looked at my hands.

“You called me,” I said. “Good job, kid sister.”

“It cost me a split lip, but who else was I going to call?” Her chin wobbled. “I’m still not speaking to you, by the way.”

“Okay.”

She grabbed me around the neck and held on so tight it hurt.

Sheriff White eventually arrived. No idea who called him. He took Ava-Rose’s statement. He looked at my hands once, and he never asked me a thing. He knew what was going on in this town. He’d been targeted by the cartel himself. Some things were best left unspoken.

Shade had Pete sitting up against a dryer with a towel pressed to his head, cussing, which Shade said was a good sign.

Preacher came and stood beside me.

“I’m sorry. Your shop’s gone, brother,” he said. “Switch and the volunteer truck kept it off the house at least.”

I looked across the laundromat at Ava-Rose. She had her wrist in a bandage and my sister tucked against her side.

“It’s just a building and a bike,” I said. “I’ll build another one.”

My house stank of smoke that night. Ava-Rose stood on my porch and I stood behind her as we looked at the still-smoldering wreck that had been my workshop.

“I told you this morning I’d never get tired of you,” I said.

She turned around. “You did.”

“I left out the rest.” I’m no good at this. I’d had the whole ride home to work it out, and it still came out sideways. “I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you for as long as I can remember.”

Her eyes were shining.

“I think I’ve loved you since I was sixteen. I’ve got you beat by years.” She crossed the porch and put her hand flat on my chest, over my name. “I love you too. Give me your cut.”

I’ve worn that cut since I was twenty-four. I’d never handed it to anybody but her, and even then it was to sew my patch back on.

I took it off and put it on her myself.

It hung to her thighs. She held my eyes and undressed under it, one piece at a time, right there on my porch, until she was standing in my colors and nothing else. The leather hung open down the front of her, over the curve of her breasts, and my mouth went dry. I’d had that woman every way I knew how. I’d never seen anything like her in my colors.

She went down the steps barefoot to my bike.

“I asked you for a ride on one of these when I was sixteen,” she said. “You said no.”

“I remember.”

“Well, I’m done asking.”

I got on the bike. I lifted her on in front of me, facing me, and laid her back along the tank with her legs over my thighs.

For a minute I just looked. Her hair spilled over my handlebars. My cut had fallen open, and she lay there naked under it. I got my jeans open with both hands wrapped in gauze. My knuckles were on fire, and I’d have done it with two broken arms.

I took hold of her hips and pulled her onto my cock.

She was hot and slick and tight, and she took me to the root with one long breath out. She reached back and gripped the handlebar. I moved in her slow. I had to, on a bike on its stand, and slow was killing us both. The springs creaked under us. Leather creaked on the tank. Every time I pulled her down onto me her breasts moved and her stomach pulled tight, and I felt her squeeze me from the inside.