Augustine broke the tension. “If they wanted Nitro dead, they’d have done it in his sleep. They want the girl for something else.”
Damron nodded, once. “So we find out what. And we get her back, or we bury the men who took her. Either way, we finish this.”
He looked at me, gaze unblinking. “You got any other surprises?”
I met his eyes. “No. Just one thing: If it goes bad, I’m the only one who burns. You keep the club out of it.”
He smiled, but it was all teeth. “That’s not how this works. You know that.”
Seneca crushed out his smoke on the bare table, left the butt in a scorched ring. “So what’s the move?”
Damron folded his hands, thinking it through. He spoke like a man who’d already decided, just wanted the world to catch up. “We bring everyone in. Full red. I want every patch in the state ready to roll by morning.”
He looked at Seneca. “You run recon. Start with the Russians, but don’t sleep on the feds. I want every phone in this county tapped and every car followed.”
To Augustine, “You watch the doors. No one comes in or out without us knowing.”
Finally, to me: “You do what you do best. Find the pattern. Figure out who’s running this, and why.”
I nodded, heart rate spiking so hard I almost missed the next line.
“We move at midnight,” Damron said. “You bring the heat, but don’t bring it here.”
The meeting adjourned without ceremony. The brothers peeled away, each carrying a slice of the job with them. I stayed at the table, the burn scars on my hand stinging every time I flexed a finger. I stared at the grain of the wood, at the blackened rings and knife marks, and let myself imagine Seraphina’s face behind each one—a ghost in the circuitry, a problem I might never get to solve.
Damron lingered, just for a second, hand heavy on my shoulder as he passed. “You did the right thing,” he said.
I laughed, the sound thin and desperate. “For who?”
He didn’t answer, just left me with my ghosts and the echo of his confidence.
I sat there, alone in the chapel, the world outside waiting to break its next promise. I pulled a pack from my pocket, hands shaking so bad I dropped the first cigarette. The second time, I got it to my lips, lit, and drew in so deep I thought it might set my lungs on fire.
The smoke was a comfort and a sentence, all at once.
I locked myself in the comms room and started dialing every off-book number I’d ever used in this county. First, the local snitches—meth-heads, scrapyard drunks, the kind of men who heard whispers before the rest of the world learned how to listen. Then the sober contacts, a cop on permanent desk duty, a paramedic with a taste for cash, the old security guard from LANL who owed me his son’s life after a bad weekend with fentanyl.
None of them knew a thing. Or pretended not to. With every dead end, my hands shook harder, the tape on my knuckles fraying into sweat-soaked curls. I switched to a new burner halfway through the list, then again, burning through the box Augustine kept stashed in the kitchen freezer.
By ten, the club was thick with nerves. The boys had cleaned and re-cleaned every weapon we owned, down to the ancient M1 in the back of the safe. Augustine ran the armory like a mad priest, triple-checking each magazine and laying out Glocks and shotguns in neat, sacrificial lines on the pool table. The armory wasn’t just a room; it was a mausoleum, concrete walls lined with steel racks, a single lightbulb buzzing like a trapped hornet. The only way in was through the freezer, past a wall of beer that doubled as an emergency barricade.
Augustine met me at the door, holding a stubby AR with a custom grip. “Take it,” he said, pressing the weapon into my hands. “You’ll need it.”
I slung it over my shoulder, tried to ignore the quiver in my fingers. “You hear anything from Seneca?”
He shook his head, jaw tight. “He’s out with the prospects. Says if he finds something, he’ll bring it here.”
I nodded, checked my phone again. No messages, not even from the ghost numbers.
Damron drifted through the club like a ghost, never in one place long enough to catch, but always watching. Every now and then, he’d slide into the kitchen, say nothing, just pour black coffee, and stare at the parking lot. He was running his own math, trying to see the game five moves ahead. It made me feel better and worse, all at once.
By midnight, the only thing left was waiting. I paced the common room, burn scars on my hand standing out like a roadmap of every mistake I’d ever made. Each time the phone buzzed, my heart nearly flatlined.
When it finally rang for real, I almost dropped it.
Seneca’s voice was so calm that it made my skin crawl. “We got movement.”
“Where?” I asked, breath like razor wire.
