HIS LAST RIDE

Indie --- "If you're going to die, don't do it on my welcome mat. I just mopped." He didn't hear me. Nobody hears anything with a bullet still inside them. The glass door cracked where his shoulder hit it, and then he was on my floor — six-plus feet of blood, leather, and bad decisions sliding through the puddle I'd left with the mop bucket not four minutes ago. His bike was still screaming in the lot. The engine hadn't cut; it had *fallen*, and the headlight pointed at the sky like a flare nobody was going to answer. I had the sawed-off from under the register before I even thought about it. Three years of overnight shifts at a diner on the wrong highway will do that to your reflexes. Rain came in through the open door. I stepped over the blood trail and looked at the lot. Empty. Just his bike on its side, fuel ticking against the asphalt. I looked down at him. President's patch. Silver coin stitched into the leather. Iron Vow MC. My hand went tight on the stock and my mouth went dry the way it does when I'm about to do something spectacularly stupid. "Hey." I toed his shoulder. "Hey. You alive or am I calling this in?" A groan. One hand pressed against his ribs. Blood between every finger. I should've called it in. I should've flipped the lock, hit the lights, and dialed 911 from the walk-in where the signal barely catches. That's what a waitress does. That's what a girl with a fake name and a clean record and no past does. I dragged him to the counter instead. He was heavy the way men who are mostly muscle and anger are heavy — dead weight with a pulse. I got him up onto the Formica on the third try and knocked the pie case sideways doing it. Cherry filling hit the floor like a crime scene. "Don't you die on my counter, either. I eat here." I cut his shirt with kitchen shears. The wound was under his left ribs, leaking slow — not arterial, but deep. Bullet still in. I could see the shape of it pressing the skin from inside like a secret trying to get out. I'd done this before. Not here. Not as Indie. I got the first-aid kit, the good needle, the fishing line I kept in the junk drawer because suture thread is hard to explain on a waitress salary. I doused everything in the cheap vodka we kept for the regulators who wanted their coffee Irish. "Okay," I said, and I was talking to him but really I was talking to my hands, which were shaking. "Okay, this is going to be ugly. I'm not a surgeon. I'm not even a nurse. But I've got steady-enough hands and you've got no other options, so we're going to be best friends for about nine minutes and then you're going to leave and I'm going to bleach this counter and we're both going to pretend tonight didn't happen." I dug for the bullet. He came alive at the third stitch. His hand was around my throat before I even saw his eyes open — and there was a gun, a matte-black .45 that had been under his cut the whole goddamn time, and the barrel was under my jaw and his grip was the kind that doesn't shake because it's done this before. His eyes locked on mine. Gray. Not blue-gray or green-gray. Gray like ash. Gray like the sky before it decides to ruin your day. "You a nurse?" "I'm a waitress. Hold still." "That's not a waitress stitch." "And that's not a polite way to say thank you. Hold. *Still*." His fingers shifted on my throat. Not squeezing. Finding. His thumb settled over my pulse like he was taking attendance. "Name." "Indie." "Indie what." "Indie *none of your business*, and if you don't let go of my throat I will push this needle through your nipple." A breath that might have been a laugh. Might have been a groan. "Jesus." "He's not here. I am. And you're getting blood on my pie case." He didn't let go. But the gun dropped an inch and his eyes did something I wasn't ready for — they went from *threat* to *curious*, and curious on a man like this was worse than the .45 because curious meant he was going to remember my face. I couldn't afford to be remembered. "Finish it," he said. "Say please." "Finish it or I'll bleed out on your counter and you'll explain the body to a badge." "That's not please." His mouth twitched. Just the left side, where a scar cut through his brow and down to the cheekbone. "Finish it. *Please*." I finished it. Eighteen stitches. He didn't make a sound after the first five, just watched me with those gray eyes like he was filing me somewhere he'd never lose me. Then the headlights came. Not one set. Twelve. Maybe fifteen. They swept the lot like searchlights, and the engines were a sound I knew in my bones — the low, mean rumble of men riding in formation with intent. Two clubs. I could see it through the window. Iron Vow on the left. Black Chapel on the right. He was off the counter before I could stop him, one hand on his stitches, the other pulling me behind him, and I said, "Let go of me," and he said, "Shut up," and then we were in the doorway, rain on both of us, and fifty men were staring at the girl holding a bloody needle and the president holding a bloody girl. He turned me toward him. His hand came up to my jaw — not the gun hand, the other one. The one that had found my pulse like he owned it. "Look at me." "Go to hell." "Already live there. *Look at me.*" I looked. His mouth came so close I could taste the copper on his breath. His voice carried across the lot like a verdict. "She's mine. Anyone touches her, I take a charter. Black Chapel. My own table. I don't give a fuck." His thumb pressed my bottom lip. Soft. Worse than the gun had been. "Say it back." "I am *not*—" "Say it, or they kill you in this diner and I let them, because a corpse I claimed is still less trouble than a girl I didn't. *Say it.*" My hands were shaking. My chest was on fire. I was furious and terrified and something else, something underneath, something I was going to hate myself for later. "…I'm his." He almost smiled. "Good girl. Now hate me quieter." The rain didn't stop. The engines didn't cut. And a man in a Black Chapel cut stepped out of the line, looked past him, looked at *me* — my face, my hands, the scar at my hairline I'd stopped covering two states ago — and went white. "I'll be goddamned," he whispered. "We *killed* you."