PROLOGUE: THE LAST RIDE
ISAIAH STEEL KING
Present Day
The Chapel is more than a room. It’s where legends are judged, kings crowned, and betrayals laid bare.
Tonight, it’s quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that settles into your bones and clings like ash after a funeral. The lights hum softly overhead, casting long shadows over the scarred table. It smells like motor oil, cedar, and memories in here, just the way he always liked it.
I sit in the President's seat, elbows on the table, staring at the cut hanging on the wall in the hallway to the entrance of Church. In remembrance, in honor, and in death.
It’s old and faded. The leather’s cracked at the seams, and the patchwork has bled from black to charcoal gray. But the name is still there, etched like a brand into my memory.
The General
Prez.
My father’s cut.
The first one. The original. Worn during blood wars and peace rides. Baptized in sweat, gasoline, and gunpowder. Everystitch tells a story, and every story echoes in my chest like a war drum that won’t quit.
I lean back and let the silence wrap around me.
Most nights, I come in here after everyone’s gone. After the prospects finish sweeping the floor and the old-timers shuffle back to their rooms. After the patched members settle into their midnight rhythm of patrols, watches, and bruised dreams. That’s when I let myself remember.
Tonight, I remember his last ride.
That morning, he left without a word. I heard the rumble of his Harley just past dawn, before the sun crested the pines. I followed from a distance, boots crunching cold gravel, my heart riding shotgun to the fear curling in my gut.
Dad’s body was already starting to betray him by then, with stiff limbs, weight dropping, the kind of sickness that doesn't give second chances. But he didn’t look weak that morning. No. That morning, he looked like fire on chrome.
He rode out of the compound like he was twenty years younger, wind in his face, cut flapping behind him like a flag of rebellion. No escorts. No club at his back. Just him, the open road, and the ghosts he couldn’t leave behind.
He made it to Deerfield Road and back. Took the long loop past the river and through the reservation lands. Every stoplight turned green. Every crow sat quietly. The world gave him that ride.
His last ride.
I met him at the gate when he came back, barely able to hold himself up. He looked at me and smiled through a face carved with pain.
“This club’s yours now,” he said. “Don’t let ‘em forget what we stood for.”
Then he handed me his cut.
I stare at it now, still hanging in the same spot he left it.
And I think about all the things this club has become. All the weight it carries. The brothers I’ve buried. The bastards we’ve bled. The oaths we’ve broken, and the ones I damn well kept.
I hear footsteps coming down the hall toward me, but I don’t turn. I keep my eyes locked on that cut and say the words I say every time I come in here.
“I got us now.”
I rise from my seat, jaw tight, heart steady.
Time to remind the world who the hell we are and where the Saints Outlaws came from.
Time to tell the truth. Not the kind we feed to the news or the prospects, but the one buried beneath the blood and road dust. From the beginning.
ONE
