He swung at me with his free hand, a slow, wide haymaker. It probably worked for him in every parking lot from here to Knoxville, but I’d seen it coming before he had. I leaned back, felt the wind of it on my face, and then drove my palm into hisnose. Bone crunched, blood gushed out, and he went down to one knee, howling.
He came up wild, both fists ready, but I kicked his leg out from under him, and he dropped hard, teeth clacking together like dominoes. He tried to scramble up, but I stomped him once in the ribs, not enough to break anything but enough to let him know the ride was over. He lay there, gasping, blood soaking into the floor. I stepped around him and poured Red a shot from the nearest bottle.
She downed it without a word, hands only shaking a little.
Vin’s two goons hauled Donny up by his armpits and frog-marched him out the front door. Nobody said a thing. The silence was thick, not with fear but with respect. Even the guys who’d been ready to rumble earlier now watched me with something like appreciation.
Vin stood and crossed the bar in three heavy steps. He stopped right in front of me and looked down. I could smell the smoke on his breath, feel the heat of him. But there was something different about him from every other biker I’d met along the way. Something old. Something dark. Something fucked up.
“You handle yourself well,” he said.
I wiped a fleck of Donny’s blood from my knuckles and nodded. “Comes from practice.”
He grinned, and it was all teeth. “Got a name, tough guy?”
“Axel.”
He rolled it around in his mouth, seeing how it fit. “You got a job yet, Axel?”
“Not unless you’re hiring.”
Vin laughed, loud and long. “Maybe I am.”
He clapped me on the shoulder, nearly sending me into the bar. “You finish your drink, then we’ll talk.”
I finished it in one. Red poured another, eyes flicking to me and away, like she was trying to decide if I was the cure or the disease.
Vin didn’t waste any more time with the barroom show. He jerked his chin at me, and I followed him through a swinging door marked "Employees Only" in black tape. The hallway behind was barely wide enough for two men to pass, and smelled of bleach, rot, and death.
He led me into a room that looked like it doubled as both office and war room. The table in the center had been sanded down so many times that it was more splinter than wood. Three chairs, none of them matching, ringed the table. The walls were papered with maps of Kentucky and Tennessee, pushpins marking God-knows-what, and a few sun-faded photos of men with faces like sledgehammers. At the far end was a battered safe, combination lock gleaming.
Vin pulled a chair out and gestured for me to sit. He sat opposite, arms folded across his chest, tattoos climbing over one another like snakes fighting for the last patch of sunlight.
He started without preamble. “You ever prospect before?”
“Nope,” I said. “But I’ve done my share of shit work.”
He nodded, not impressed, just moving to the next item on the list. “You got any family? Anyone gonna come looking if you wind up in the river?”
“Not anymore.” I didn’t want to get into my mother’s death while I was out fucking around two states away. It was a memory full of regret and not something I wanted to share. It needed to stay locked away in the corner of my heart where it belonged.
He eyed me, then grunted. “You’ll fit right in.”
He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “This club? It’s everything. You fuck us, you’re done. You even think about crossing me or the patch, you’re fertilizer.” He let that hang. “Butyou show up, do your job, bleed when we say bleed—you’ll find the club’s better family than anything you left behind.”
I met his stare. “That what happened to you?”
He cracked a smile, but there was no warmth in it. “I don’t ask, you don’t ask. That’s the rule.”
He rattled off the prospect gospel of no colors till you earn ‘em. You run the errands, collect the debts, back up the muscle. You clean the blood off the floor if you’re lucky. If not, you’re making it. Weekends are mandatory; you don’t answer the call, you don’t come back. Zero tolerance for snitches, posers, or anyone dumb enough to pull heat on another member without clearance.
“We ain’t a charity,” Vin said. “You fuck up, you answer to me. That clear?”
“Crystal.”
He waited, like he expected me to twitch or break. I just stared at the knicks in the table and wondered how many heads had bounced off it before.
He took a breath, slower this time. “So why Lexington?”
