“Couldn’t sleep.” I set the coffee to drip and pulled a banana from the fruit bowl, which was always perfectly arranged, even though nobody in the house actually ate fruit.
He grunted. “Busy day. Women’s shelter fundraiser, then choir, then I’m with the deacons until eight.”
“Don’t forget the bake sale,” I said, because I knew he would. Schedule management was my price of rent.
He nodded, scribbling in his planner. “And you?”
I unpeeled the banana with short, angry tugs. “School. Library. Dinner at Heather’s.”
“Church group starts at seven. You’ll be home by then?”
It wasn’t a question, and we both knew it, but I drew it out anyway. “If Heather doesn’t keep me too late.”
He caught my eye, and there it was again—the twitchy, careful scan, like I was a puzzle he couldn’t finish.
5
Axel
Week one as a Royal Bastards Prospect was equal parts Groundhog Day and boot camp run by glue-sniffing war criminals. There’s a myth that motorcycle clubs are all guns, drugs, and raw-dogging groupies, but the truth is ninety percent chores and humiliation. The other ten percent is the hangover you get after drinking with men whose blood types have more letters than your last name.
First day’s alarm was Red’s voice, catcalling up the stairwell. “Move it, sunshine! I got more crusty shot glasses than you got pubes.”
I rolled off the mattress, boots still on, and shambled down to the main bar, where the air was already thick with cigarette ash and last night’s sweat. Even with no windows, I could tell it was before nine by the sound of lawnmowers starting up two streets over—suburbia’s revenge for all the years of two a.m. bike rumble.
Red was waiting, arms folded, staring at the clock like she was timing my pace. “Morning, Ax,” she said, not looking up from the stained bar top she was disinfecting with a shot of bottom-shelf tequila.
“Thought you only served the good stuff,” I said, trying to find a clean glass.
She grinned. “You want good stuff, earn it. For now, you mop floors and wrangle barf buckets.”
That was the first test. How low would I go? Turns out, pretty fucking low. If I had a superpower, it would be taking a hit and pretending not to care.
Mornings started with a scrub-down of the bathrooms, which were less a place to piss and more a testament to the human capacity for atrocity. Day one, I found a condom floating in a urinal, three used tampons in the sink, and enough blood on the stall wall to summon a demon. By day three, my only goal was to keep the mop from dissolving in whatever leaked out of the women’s room after Ladies’ Night. Prospects were banned from gloves, a lesson in either humility or hepatitis.
After that came trash detail, the bar’s dumpster was a fifty-yard hike down an alley patrolled by feral cats and, if you believed the old heads, one actual coyote with a taste for chewing through brake lines. The trash was liquid and solid in all the worst ways. After the second day, I stopped using my arms to haul the bags, just deadlifted them onto my shoulder like body bags. I started thinking of myself as a mobile landfill.
Lunch break was never actual food. Sometimes Red threw me a Slim Jim, sometimes she didn’t. Usually, she just handed me a list of shit to restock—beer, limes, ashtrays, paper towels—and sent me into the walk-in cooler. The only time I felt like a human being was the thirty seconds I spent in there each day, shivering in the meat locker, lungs full of crisp air and the faint, sweet rot of forgotten potatoes.
On my fourth morning, one of the patched members—Moses, six-four, sixty years old, and carved from gristle—sent me to “polish the trophies” in the back room. The trophies were two actual bowling league plaques and a dented brass cup labeled “Worst Bastard 2003.” I spent an hour buffing them with a rag until I realized he was watching from the doorway, smiling like a snake that’d just learned to wink.
“You do that for all your jobs, Prospect?” he asked.
I shrugged. “If I’m gonna eat shit, I wanna know what flavor.”
Moses laughed, the sound like a chainsaw chewing through ice. “Good answer. You might make it if you don’t get stabbed first.”
The bar connected, via underground tunnel, to the actual clubhouse house, a large warehouse where a back room was the nerve center of the Royal Bastards MC Lexington chapter, but nobody called it the nerve center. Everyone just called it “Church.” It was where club meetings happened, where punishments were dealt, and where at least one member each year got “voted out” in the kind of way that made you miss the world’s best janitor on Monday.
The Church was wallpapered with street maps of Kentucky and Tennessee, thick lines drawn in permanent marker to outline “turf,” “no-go,” and “call before entering” zones. There was a hand-painted mural of a skeleton riding a hog, flames shooting from the tires, and above it the phrase, “Heaven’s Full, Hell’s Full, Try Here.” It looked like it was done by a guy who’d spent most of high school in detention. The one window was spray-painted black, but light still leaked in around the edges, cutting a dirty gold outline across the carpet stains and mismatched folding chairs. The head table, where Vin presided, was a slab of reclaimed barn wood scarred with names, slurs, and at least one crude drawing of a dick.
At my first meeting, I was told to stand by the back door and “keep it shut.” I got the feeling this was less about security and more about seeing how long I’d stand there before passing out from boredom or nicotine withdrawal.
The patched members filtered in, each one bringing his own gravitational field of drama and silent threats. Vin took the center, flanked by his VP (a slick, mountain of a man named Canon) and Sergeant-at-Arms (Moab). There were eight patched, three prospects—including me—and a handful of hangers-on who’d do anything for a chance at the bottom rung.
Red wasn’t a member, technically, but she hovered behind the bar at all times, taking notes, refilling drinks, and occasionally shoving a club member back into his chair if things got out of hand. She wore a patched “support” vest but didn’t need a single thread of it to make grown men shit themselves.
“Meeting called to order,” Vin barked, not waiting for the room to quiet down. The din died on command. “First up, collections. We’re a week out from the poker run, and we’re short. Any ideas why?”
