“I’d give up anything for her.”
Jagger let out a long, ragged breath. “She wouldn’t want that. I don’t want it. Before you do anything drastic, you need to talk to her about it first.”
Jagger was right. Evie wouldn’t want him to give up his cut. But he was wrong about the talking. Zane had a plan. He’d already talked to Richard, the club attorney, and worked out the details. If he stayed, Evie might talk him out of it. If he left, it would be done and they could move on.
“I want to give her the option.” He scraped a hand through his hair, and it came away black with soot from the fire. “As long as I’m a wanted man, I can’t give them a normal life. And I’ll always be looking over my shoulder, waiting for the day Viper or someone like him goes to the cops. But it’s not just that. I’ve lived my whole life in hiding. I’ve lived in the shadows. Evie brought me to the light. I don’t want to hide anymore. I want the truth to come out. The truth about what happened the night I left Stanton. The truth about how I feel.”
He shrugged off his cut, folded it carefully, and handed it to Jagger. “I talked to Richard. He says if I go up to Stanton and turn myself in they’ll process me and stick me in the slammer for a coupla days, maybe a week. He’ll be there for the interview and to arrange bail.”
“Fuck.” Jagger scrubbed his hands over his face. “Don’t do this. You know we’ll protect you.”
“I gotta do it, Jag. It’s the only way.”
“The club will bail you out then,” Jagger said. “Whatever the cost.”
Zane nodded his appreciation. “Richard said the bail conditions usually include not associating with known felons or criminal organizations. I’m guessing he means the club. I’ll be there for T-Rex’s funeral unless something goes wrong, but I’ll stay away from the brothers. He says our big chance is the preliminary hearing where we try to show the judge there’s not enough evidence to go to trial. Best-case scenario, I walk. Worst-case scenario, I spend the next twenty years in jail for something I didn’t do.”
“That won’t happen. If it gets to that we’ll break you out.”
Zane laughed. “I thought you were gonna say you’d hire a better lawyer. But, yeah, break me out. I’d go fucking crazy if I had to spend twenty years staring at the same four walls. Grand gestures are only good if there’s someone to appreciate them.”
“She might not take you back if you leave her again,” Jagger warned.
Emotion welled up in Zane’s throat. “This time I’m not leaving her alone or unprotected. And this time I’m not running away. I’m trying to come home. Make sure she understands that.”
He brushed his lips over Evie’s cheek and then he and Jagger clasped shoulders. “Look after her and Ty until I get back.”
“Like they were my very own.”
Zane stood in the doorway and drank in the sight of Evie, her hair fanned over the pillow, her face restful in sleep.
After all he’d been through, he had come full circle. He loved her. And yet he had to leave her again.
TWENTY-THREE
If your repair doesn’t work, don’t give up, Go back to the beginning and start again.
—SINNER’S TRIBE MOTORCYCLE REPAIR MANUAL
Evie squeezed Connie’s hand as the biker procession entered the cemetery. Although there was no body to bury, the Sinners had erected a tombstone in their dedicated plot at the Conundrum Cemetery and invited support clubs and local friendlies to honor T-Rex’s memory. T-Rex’s parents had declined the invitation to attend the ceremony, saying that T-Rex had been dead to them for many years and they had already mourned his passing. Jagger had smashed the phone after that conversation and added T-Rex’s family to his blacklist, to be punished at a later date.
Almost two hundred bikers converged on the cemetery, a testament to T-Rex’s popularity, not just in the club, but in the biker community. Of course, politics factored into who showed and who didn’t, which clubs sent presidents or VPs and which sent junior patch. All duly noted, of course, by Tank who had been assigned secretarial duty for the day and stood with Evie and Connie translating biker funeral customs into civilian terms so they could understand what was going on.