“What’s your call?” he says over a smoke break, flicking ash off the side of his boot. “How would you move if a shipment gets held up at the border and a rival club’s already sniffing blood?”
I pause, offer a cautious route with two contingencies.
He nods once, doesn’t praise it, doesn’t shut it down. “Why that route, not the other?”
Sometimes, the questions come fast, rapid fire, like drills in the yard. Other times, they come after long stretches of silence, like he’s been thinking on them for days, and just now decided to throw one at me like a live grenade.
He’s testing me without a scoreboard. No grades, no nods of approval. Just this weight in the air between us. Every mile we ride, every turn we take, like he’s waiting to see if I crawl out of the firewith something that burns.
I do, but not without scars.
First time I take a meeting solo, it’s with Bobby Vance, the zoning director and arrogant prick who’s been pocket-fed by the club since the nineties. Dad always handled him with a firm handshake and a lazy joke about golf courses and mayoral skeletons.
I walk in clean. Button-up shirt. No cut. No patches. Just me and the weight of expectation like a second spine.
Vance looks up from a half-eaten deli sandwich. His eyes sweep over me like I’m some kid trying on his old man’s shoes. “You King’s boy?”
I don’t blink. “No. I’m the man who comes when King can’t.”
He leans back in his chair, amused. “Is he finally sitting out a round?”
“Just spreading the weight.”
“Uh-huh.” His smirk says he’s not sold.
The meeting isn’t flawless. I fumble once and misquote a line in the updated permit structure. Vance catches it immediately, a sharp grin widening like a shark tasting young blood.
I hold my ground and recenter. Ask the right follow-up. Watch his posture shift by the end when he realizes I’m not just a shadow in my father’s wake, I’m learning how to cast my own.
Later that night, I’m back at the garage. Dad’s tuning up an old carburetor, slow and methodical like it’s the last one he’ll ever work on.
“How’d it go?” he asks without looking up.
“Vance sniffed me for weakness.”
“Did you flinch?”
“No.”
He doesn’t saygood joborthat’s my son. Just grunts and nods once, like that’s the most he can allow himself to give, while coughing up blood, trying to hide it from me.
Later that night, after I finish at the garage and Dad’s gone quiet again upstairs, I head to the back porch. The moon’s low, the kind of pale that makes the world feel brittle.
Aria’s already there. She’s sitting on the wooden railing, hoodie zipped halfway, her long legs stretched out, a bottle of whiskey at her side and two tumblers waiting like she knew I’d come.
“You look like hell,” she says gently.
I sit down beside her and don’t answer right away. She pours, doesn’t ask if I want any.
After a moment, I say, “He coughed blood again today. Didn’t even blink about it.”
She nods, eyes soft, shining blue in the moonlight. “He’s holding you up even while he’s going down.”
I drink. “I don’t know how to watch it happen.”
She leans in, close enough that I feel the heat of her body. “You don’t have to watch it alone.”
The next morning, there’s a note in the kitchen:
