“You don’t have to. You’re smiling like someone who once got arrested for glitter bombing a city council meeting.”
“It was biodegradable glitter and that mayor was corrupt,” Ruby shoots back, lifting her glass in Darla’s direction with a wicked grin.
Darla meets her gaze, smiles faintly, and nods; a silent, shared understanding passing between them.
The current mayor is her father. The dig doesn’t go unnoticed.
“What’s the idea?” I ask, because apparently I’m reckless now.
Ruby looks at each of us the way a general surveys soldiers in her private army of chaos. “We prank the guys.”
Silence. Then—
“How hard?” Darla asks, rubbing her hands together.
Ruby’s grin spreads with the speed and chaos of wildfire. “Full send. They’ve all been broody and testosterone-poisoned sincethe Darla thing, the Candace thing, every thing. I say we remind them who really runs this place.”
Frankie leans on her elbow, considering. “I’m listening.”
Sloane groans. “Y’all. My man is already emotionally constipated. If we prank him too hard, his soul might just leave his body.”
“Exactly,” Ruby says. “We’re giving them group therapy, but with mild emotional distress and maybe a little property damage.”
“What’s the plan?” I ask again, already bracing myself.
Ruby sits cross-legged, hands gesturing the way an evil mastermind plots her villain arc. “We hit all their weak spots. Malachi? Scary calm, never breaks. We convince him the clubhouse is haunted. RealThe Ringshit. Voices in the vents. Disappearing boots. A child’s laughter echoing at 3 a.m.”
I snort. “You want to ghost-gaslight a biker gang?”
“Exactly.”
“...Okay, I’m in,” I say with a smile.
Ruby continues, “Knox hates clowns. We fill his garage with balloons and one very lifelike dummy clown that only moves slightly between visits.”
“Oh my God,” Sloane says, half-horrified. “He’ll have a stroke.”
Darla shrugs. “Good cardio.”
“And Nash,” Ruby goes on, “has that whole ‘I see all, fear nothing’ vibe. So I say we flip it. We watch him. I’ve got a baby monitor with a night-vision camera. We strap it to a feral possum and release it in his room.”
“Where are you going to get a possum?” Frankie asks.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ruby says, sipping her whiskey with the calm of someone answering a perfectly normal question.
We’re all cackling by this point, hysteria bubbling over the way champagne does when the cork cracks before you’re ready. Theidea of haunting Malachi cracks me up, and I haven’t even seen the man blink in fear before.
“We should rope Maggie in,” Sloane says, wiping tears from her eyes. “Make it official. She knows all their tells.”
“Oh she’s already in,” Darla says. “I texted her twenty minutes ago.”
The door bursts open a second later the way it would in a movie scene where someone’s been summoned by pure chaos. Maggie steps in with a tray of brownies, a bottle of tequila, and a determined glint in her eye.
“What’s the timeline?” she asks. And just like that, it’s war.
We have a whiteboard now. A literal whiteboard Frankie rolls in from the back room, covered in a chaotic map of revenge, glitter trails, and fake ghost sightings. It’s titled: Operation: Outsiders of Chaos – No Man Left Standing.
It has columns. Color-coded names. It has bullet points such as: Knox = clownophobia? Exploit. Malachi = haunt with emotional girl-child ghost. Nash = possum with night cam. East = mustache dye + decoy mission. James = the long con.
