Then, quieter now, with something shifting in his voice. “Sophia. How is she? Really.”
The question lands somewhere specific.
“She’s good. She’s living her life. Working. She got a big client, a hotel in Vegas.”
Tracker is quiet, looking out at the ocean, then he turns and looks at me with those eyes that have always seen more than is comfortable.
“Is she hurt? Is there something you’re not telling me?”
I hold his gaze and say nothing, because there is nothing adequate, nothing fair to Sophia, to Tracker, or any of us, nothing that can be said in the dark outside a Mexican villa at the end of all of this with my brother sitting alive beside me and the question of whether she will still choose me pressing down on everything.
“She’s good.”
Tracker looks at me for a long moment, weighing the words, the silence, and the quality of what isn’t being said. I watch him decide not to push, not here and not tonight. “Okay,” he says.
But he doesn’t entirely believe it.
And we both know it.
***
We ride back to the border in the dark, the vehicles quiet around us with Luke up front and Flame beside him and Quill in the seat to my left, carrying his own version of everything we’ve just been through.
Looking out at the Mexican dark going past, I think about Sophia, the house, everything built in the months since shearrived, and about coming home and my brother, alive, coming home beside me.
Will she still choose me?
The question sits in my chest the whole way back without an answer, because it doesn’t belong to me. Sophia loved Tracker with everything she had. He was her person before he was ever a Blood Brother or anyone’s road name, and now he is coming back from the dead, and there is no way of knowing what that means for what is between us.
I only know what is felt.
And knowing that feeling doesn’t guarantee anything.
Everythinginmypower, I think into the dark.
But this isn’t something power can touch.
This is Sophia’s, whatever comes next, entirely and completely hers.
***
Tracker wants to come to the house, and I talk him out of it.
“Give me time. I need to tell her first.”
He looks at me for a long moment, those eyes reading something in my face that I’m not ready to explain, and then nods. “Okay.”
So instead of going home, I drop him at the Sinners’ clubhouse and drive straight to the house, knowing only that nothing about what comes next is going to be simple.
The house is quiet when I let myself in.
Too quiet.
Memphis doesn’t come to the door, and standing in the entrance for a moment, I feel the absence of something that should be present before moving through to the kitchen.
New flowers on the island. She’d replaced them before she left. The painting is still on the wall. Her coffee mug is on the shelf beside mine. And on the counter, a folded piece of paper ispropped against the coffee machine where she knew it would be found.
Standing there for a moment before picking it up, already knowing its weight, understanding it before the paper is unfolded.