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I walk into a memorial night and find another woman sitting where I used to. She wears my biker's spare cut as if it belongs to her. "It's cold in here." Emmalynn sat there in Cassius's leather like a woman trying to explain why she was wearing another wife's robe. I nodded once. "Then you should tell whoever gave you that to fix the heat." The room kept breathing around us. Cassius lowered his voice. "Tiana, not here." I pressed both palms flat against my thighs until the shaking stopped. For eight years, I had mistaken knowing for belonging. No ring. MC men liked words like claimed and mine, but Cassius gave me keys instead. The clubhouse. His house. His truck. A whole life in metal teeth. I reached into the front pocket of my jeans and worked it free. I stepped closer and dropped the key into his palm. The same hand that had slid beneath my shirt in our kitchen. The same hand that had, at some point, offered his jacket to another woman. He went still. Good. Let him feel one small thing coming and not be able to stop it. I looked past him to Emmalynn. "Keep it," I said. I moved toward the hall and didn't turn around. Cassius did not follow me when I pushed through the hallway door. He did not call my name. Maybe he knew I would not answer. Maybe he had chosen, again, the room behind him. ————— Tiana Floyd balanced the tray of clean glasses against her hip and shouldered open the clubhouse door with the part of her body that didn’t already ache from twelve hours in the garage. Noise hit first. Bass from the old speakers near the pool table. Men shouting over a card game. Bottles clinking. Someone laughing too loud near the bar like grief had rules and everybody was trying to break them before midnight. The memorial banner for Big Ron hung crooked over the far wall, black cloth, white letters, one corner sagging where the tape had given up. Tiana noticed that before she noticed anything else because she always noticed what needed fixing. The banner. The sticky patch by the bar mat. The stack of plates nobody had moved from the kitchen pass-through. The Harley carburetor Pierce had left on the end table like furniture. Her hands were still damp from the dishwasher at Black Harbor Cycles. She had stayed after closing to finish the glasses because Molly said the clubhouse was short tonight, and because Big Ron had once driven forty minutes in sleet to bring Tiana a torque wrench when hers snapped during a rush job. She had not come for Cassius. She told herself that while she stepped inside. Half the room went quiet. Not all the way. A biker clubhouse never went silent unless there was a gun on the table or blood on the floor. But the sound dipped wrong. A card slapped down too soft. Someone cut off a laugh before it landed. Molly Bradley looked up from behind the bar and then looked down so fast she nearly knocked over a bottle of Jack. Tiana kept walking. One boot in front of the other. Tray steady. Chin level. She had learned that from the men in this room, though none of them knew it. Don’t flinch where they can see. Don’t bleed on their floor unless you plan to charge them for cleanup. Her corner was taken. The old corner booth sat beneath the framed photo of the club’s first Tacoma run, the one where Cassius was twenty-three, leaner, meaner, wearing no VP patch yet and grinning at the camera like he didn’t know how rarely life let a man keep anything. Tiana used to sit under that photo during long nights, one knee tucked up, parts catalog open, Cassius’s hand warm on the back of her neck whenever he passed behind her. Emmalynn Shields sat there now. Not just in the booth. In Tiana’s place. She had one leg crossed over the other, pretty boot swinging, pale hair falling over the shoulder of Cassius Parrish’s spare leather jacket. His jacket. The black one with the torn inner cuff Tiana had stitched by hand last winter because Cassius refused to replace leather that had “good road left in it.” She had used gray thread because black was missing from her kit, and he had teased her for three days, telling everybody his woman marked him like a bad repair job. The gray stitches flashed under the clubhouse lights when Emmalynn lifted her drink. Tiana’s fingers tightened under the tray. One glass shifted. Barely. Cassius sat beside Emmalynn, not touching her, which somehow made it worse. If his hand had been on her thigh, Tiana could have thrown the tray, cursed him out, made the room take sides. But he sat with a few inches between them, shoulders turned toward Devon Black, expression carved down to business. Respectable. Manageable. Nothing to see here unless you were the woman who knew the jacket smelled like cedar soap, gun oil, and Cassius’s skin after a ride. Emmalynn looked up. Her smile came slow, careful around the edges. The kind of smile a woman wore when she wanted to look sorry without giving anything back. “Tiana,” she said, voice soft enough to make Tiana sound rude if she didn’t answer. “Hey.” Cassius turned. There it was. Not guilt first. Not shock. Calculation. His eyes moved over the tray, her grease-stained cuffs, her wet hairline from the kitchen steam, the empty space by the door behind her. He took in the room like a VP before he took her in like a man. That was the first thing that cut clean. “Tiana,” he said, already rising. Too late. She walked to the bar. Molly reached for the tray. “I can take those.” “I’ve got it.” “Tee—” “I said I’ve got it.” Molly’s mouth closed. Her hands curled around the bar rag until the terry cloth twisted white between her fingers. Tiana set the glasses down one by one instead of dumping them. Pint glasses on the lower shelf. Shot glasses near the register. Big Ron’s old chipped mug, washed and dried for no good reason, behind the tap where he used to leave it. Her body knew the work. Her hands could do it while the rest of her stood in that half-second of room silence, still hearing it stretch. ...... Behind her, Cassius moved. She knew his walk better than she knew the sound of her own truck. Heavy right step from the knee injury he pretended didn’t bother him in cold weather. Chain at his belt. Boots that never scraped because he picked up his feet like a man who expected broken glass. “Tiana.” She reached for the bar rag Molly wasn’t using and wiped a ring of beer from the counter. “You working tonight?” Molly asked, too bright. Tiana looked at her then. Molly had been the one who brought soup when Tiana had the flu two winters ago. Molly had helped her paint the garage office blue because Cassius claimed he didn’t care about wall colors and then spent the next month leaning in the doorway like he loved watching Tiana get specks of paint in her hair. Molly had sat in this very clubhouse and said old ladies survived because they told each other what the men were too stupid to say. Now Molly couldn’t hold her eyes. “No,” Tiana said. “I’m not working.” The words settled. A couple of brothers near the pool table stopped pretending not to listen. Cassius came up on her left. Close, but not crowding. He knew better. That almost made her want to laugh. “Can we step outside?” he asked. She wiped the same clean spot again. “Why?” His jaw ticked once. “Because this isn’t the place.” Tiana folded the rag. Made the corners meet. Pressed it flat with her palm. “Funny.” “Tiana.” She turned then, and the first full sight of him hurt in a way she had not prepared for. Cassius Parrish still looked like the man who used to come home after midnight and peck her shoulder before washing his hands because he knew she hated oil on the sheets. Broad chest under his black cut. VP patch at the front. Dark beard trimmed close. Eyes the color of coffee left too long on the burner. Controlled. Watchful. Dangerous in a room full of dangerous men. And tired. That part almost got her. The faint shadow under his eyes. The tension at the sides of his mouth. The two fingers tapping once against his thigh before he stopped himself. She hated that she noticed. She hated more that her body answered him before her pride could lock the door. Her stomach pulled tight. Her skin remembered his hand at the back of her neck, his mouth near her ear, the low laugh he gave only when she said something filthy enough to surprise him. Emmalynn shifted in the booth. The jacket creaked. Tiana looked at the sound. Cassius followed her gaze, and something in his face changed. Not enough. Never enough when the whole room had already seen what he had given away. “It’s cold in here,” Emmalynn said. Nobody asked her. Nobody needed her to talk. Still, she did, sitting there in gray stitches and borrowed leather like a woman trying to explain why she had wandered into somebody else’s house and put on the wife’s robe. Tiana nodded once. “Then you should tell whoever gave you that to fix the heat.” Pierce Dickson muttered, “Screw,” under his breath by the pool table. Devon Black’s eyes narrowed from the officers’ table. President eyes. Warning eyes. The kind men used when they thought a woman had forgotten where she was. Tiana had not forgotten. That was the problem. She knew exactly where she was. She knew which floorboard dipped near the jukebox. Knew which cabinet stuck in the kitchen. Knew the names of the brothers who took sugar in their coffee and the ones who lied about not needing reading glasses for paperwork. Knew the spare blankets in the back room smelled like dust because nobody remembered to wash them unless she did. She knew this room. She had loved this room. For eight years, she had mistaken knowing for belonging. Cassius lowered his voice. “Tiana, not here.” There it was. The room kept breathing around them. Harlee Singleton stood frozen near the hallway with a tray of empty bottles, eyes wide, young enough to still believe silence meant safety. Richard Cruz leaned against the far wall, arms folded, face unreadable. Devon didn’t move. Molly rubbed at the bar until her knuckles reddened. ...... Tiana looked at Cassius’s hand. No ring. They had never married. MC men liked words like claimed and old lady and mine, but Cassius had never put papers between them. He had put a key on her ring instead. Clubhouse. Garage. His house. His truck for emergencies. A whole life in metal teeth. She reached into the front pocket of her jeans. Cassius went still. Good. Let him feel one small thing coming and not be able to stop it. The key ring was warm from her body. She found the clubhouse key by touch because she had used it more than any other. Brass, worn smooth, a notch near the top from the night Cassius dropped it in the parking lot and ran over it with his boot. She had laughed until he pecked her against the truck and told her a bent key still opened the right door. Tiana worked it free. Her thumbnail split at the edge. A thin bite of pain, clean and useful. Cassius watched the key come loose like it was a blade. “Tee.” Nobody called her that in his voice. She hated him for using it now. “That’s the first honest thing you’ve said,” she told him. “You never wanted it here.” His face hardened, then cracked at the edges before he could stop it. “That’s not what this is.” “No?” “No.” She stepped closer and dropped the key into his palm. His fingers closed around it by reflex. The same hand that had rested low on her back in this room. The same hand that had slid beneath her shirt in their kitchen while pasta boiled over because neither of them cared enough to turn off the stove. The same hand that had, at some point, offered his jacket to another woman and left Tiana to find out under clubhouse lights. Tiana looked past him to Emmalynn. “Keep it,” she said. Emmalynn’s smile vanished. Cassius took one step after Tiana when she moved toward the hall. Devon’s chair scraped. “Cass.” Cassius stopped. Of course he did. Tiana didn’t turn around. She pushed through the hallway door, past the framed ride photos, past the dent in the drywall from the night Pierce had gotten drunk and tried to prove he could do a handstand. Her boots hit the back entry tile, and the clubhouse noise thinned behind her. For one second, alone by the exit, her hands shook. She looked down at them like they belonged to somebody else. Grease under her nails. Split thumbnail. A faint crescent scar near her wrist from the first engine she had rebuilt for Cassius, back when he still stood over her pretending he wasn’t impressed. She pressed both palms flat against her thighs until the shaking stopped. Then she opened the back door. Rain struck the alley hard enough to bounce off the pavement. Cold water slid under her collar before she made it three steps. She did not run. Running would give the room a story. So she walked across the gravel lot past Cassius’s bike, past Emmalynn’s little white car parked too close to the officers’ row, past the old oil drum where Big Ron used to smoke when Devon banned cigarettes inside. At her truck, she stopped. The clubhouse door opened behind her. Cassius filled the frame, leather cut dark against the yellow light, her key still in his fist. He did not call her name this time. Maybe he knew she would not answer. Maybe Devon had told him not to follow. Maybe he had chosen, again, the room behind him. Tiana got into her truck and shut the door. The engine took two tries because she had been meaning to replace the starter for a month and kept fixing everybody else’s machines first. When it caught, the clubhouse music kicked up loud enough to reach the parking lot. Same bass. Same laughter trying too hard. Same building she had once opened before sunrise to make coffee for men who now could not look her in the face. Tiana put the truck in reverse. Cassius stayed in the doorway with her key in his hand. She backed out slowly, wipers dragging rain across the glass, and did not look away until the clubhouse turned into a blur of yellow light behind her.

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"It's cold in here." Emmalynn sat there in Cassius's leather like a woman trying to explain why she was wearing another wife's robe.