“No,” she says in a plea. “He was my father, and I have as much right to ride as any of his brothers do.” I shouldn’t be surprised that Elle, who’s been riding since she was seventeen, would demand to ride alongside her father’s brothers. She may be somewhat estranged from the club and her father, but there’s no doubting that she loved him as fiercely as I hope Cheyenne feels for me.
Jim closes the distance between them and wraps her into a tight hug. We’ve never allowed someone from outside of the club—family or not—to ride alongside us at a time of tribute to one of our brothers, but I can’t see anybody saying shit about it.
“I’m glad you came, Little Bird,” he says, using the tribal name she was gifted at birth. Chief couldn’t have known that the child he declared Little Bird would turn into something of an Amazonian-type woman who knows four ways to kill a man without the use of weapons. When they pull away, Jim holds her at arm’s length and looks her over.
“This club has never allowed a non-member to ride with us to bury a brother,” Jim says, telling everybody what we already know. Having known the man for the last twenty years, I know where he’s going with this—he’s giving Elle her wish. He just has to make sure everybody knows that he knows this move goes against tradition. “But there’s a first for everything.”
She doesn’t smile, nor does she say a word. Her face hardens, and she nods her head. It’s a long moment before she pulls away and crosses the room to where her stepmother and younger half-brother and sister, Stephen and Izzy, sit. Izzy jumps up and wraps her small body around Elle’s immediately. Stephen is slower to follow. After the kids have had their moment with her, Barbara uneasily reaches out and gives her step-daughter a hug. It’s an awkward moment between the two, but at least they’re both trying to mend fences.
My brothers move to congregate around Jim as he starts giving orders. I pat Cheyenne’s back, and she lets go, and then I join my club. Jim scratches at his chin and looks at Ryan and says, “You know the order best. Put Elle in the back with the prospect. Don’t care which side.”
“Prospect hasn’t even been riding a month now,” Ryan says with obvious annoyance in his voice. “I don’t think he should ride.” The kid’s dad is an incarcerated brother, so he was fast-tracked into prospecting—we gave him a cut and told him he was going to have to earn his top rocker. The kid had no fucking clue how to ride when we did it, but he’s family and apparently we’re all about making exceptions for family these days. Jim gives Ryan the order again, and, like the idiot he is, he’s about to argue when Wyatt closes in on him and he backs down. He’s not a total moron after all.
We break, and the room empties as we all head outside. Between the line of bikes and the line of SUVs is a glass hearse with a Harley trike attached to the front of it. It’s a bit extravagant for our usual tastes, but we let Ruby do some of the planning, and this is what we ended up renting. No fucking clue where she got a hearse attached to a Harley, but fuck if it doesn’t make a statement.
Fish, Bear, and the prospect help get the women and kids into the SUVs. Jeremy tries to put his sister, Nic, into an SUV, but she refuses. Nic’s as much Duke’s Old Lady as Ruby is Jim’s. She’s just not voted in yet—that’s going to take a while. But I suspect Jeremy’s insistence on sticking her in the SUV comes from the fact that she’s carrying his nephew. I watch as Duke catches sight of the disagreement and lumbers over. We ride with our women on the back of our bikes—pregnant or not—all the time, but Duke’s been a special kind of protective over Nic since the moment she let him in. It surprises me when he pulls her into his side and tells Jeremy that it’s cool.
“They’re cute together,” a soft voice says from beside me. The words are filled with love and happiness. If it were anybody else who sounded so happy right now, I’d have their face in the pavement beneath my feet. But as I look over at Ruby, knowing all the hardships she’s endured in her life, I can’t help but let her have this. “You used to look at Layla like that,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“How she doing?” she asks. I quickly glance around and breathe a sigh of relief when I catch Cheyenne standing by an SUV with Barbara, the kids, and my mother at the other end of the parking lot. “Relax, you know I wouldn’t ask if she could hear me,” Ruby says, always so in-tune with everybody’s feelings.
“Fuckin’ jacked. Got an Old Man up in Redding who’s got her sucking dick for crank.” Lying to Ruby and telling her I don’t keep tabs on Layla is useless. She knows me too well.
“Stupid bitch,” she says and places a hand on my upper arm. “Gave up a lot for a couple of rocks and a high, didn’t she?”