Menace turned to me, all the bravado gone. “You ever think we’d wind up here?” he asked, voice low.
I shrugged, then pressed my head to his chest, over the healed wound. “Not on a bet. I was just hoping they’d let us stay mated.”
He kissed the top of my head, then led me up the stairs, through the quiet hallways, back to the room where we’d started.
We stood together at the window, looking out over the kingdom that was now ours: the fountains, the manicured gardens, the sky that would never again be the same.
I thought about my mother, about my brother Griffin, about how their lives were about to change. I thought about the ghosts still rattling around this mansion and wondered if we could ever teach them to rest.
Menace pulled me in, arms around my waist, and I let him.
“I love you,” I said, and I meant it down to my toes.
He smiled. “I know. That’s why we’re going to burn this world down and build something better.”
Outside, the last of the day’s light hit the horizon.
It was ours now.
And I was not afraid.
Epilogue
Wrecker
Istepped into the church room at the compound, the air thick with sweat and old gun oil, and the burn of the overhead fluorescents strobing each man’s face into a mask of ruin. It was built to look like a regular boardroom—shitty paneling, heavy Texas Star table, a print of the Alamo to give outsiders a history lesson—but that was a lie. The ghosts here weren’t colonial; they were recent, and they all had my name carved into their teeth.
Bronc sat at the head of the table, forearms spread like a bar bouncer’s barricade, eyes fixed on the documents in front of him but not seeing them. He looked older than usual, and for a moment I wondered if the weight of Menace’s departure had settled the decades he’d always managed to outrun right into his spine. If it had, I owed Menace a beating for leaving me alone with this crowd.
Arsenal was to Bronc’s right, next to an empty chair, his hands locked in a cathedral, face unreadable. Most would call him taciturn; I called him a human polygraph with a hair trigger. On Bronc’s left, Big Papa nursed a cup of black coffee, calm radiating off of him, belying the scars he carried. He watched me walk in, his eyes following me like I had the answers to the universe. At the end, Doc leaned back in his chair, black frame glasses, like fucking Superman looking for a phone booth.
Mine was the only empty chair besides Menace’s, sitting there reminding us our second was no longer here.
Bronc didn’t say anything for a minute. He just waited for me to take my seat, which I did. We all were looking at him. The clock on the wall ticked at quarter speed.
“Let’s start,” he said, not so much an order as a mercy killing. “First thing—” and here he picked up a single piece of paper, then set it back down, as if the effort of holding the truth was just too much, “Menace is gone.”
He let the words hang. No surprises in the room; just the way it needed to be said, to be ritualized.
“You make it sound like he’s dead,” Arsenal grumbled, so flat you could iron a shirt on it. “He’s just King of the Midwest now. But might as well be the same thing.”
Bronc cracked a smile, but it was the kind of smile you give a dying dog before you put the bullet in.
“Means we’re down a VP,” Bronc continued, glancing at the list but not reading it. “Rules are rules. Even if the last six months have proven we’re the only pack or MC in America that gives a fuck about rules anymore.”
He looked at me, and I braced for the axe.
“Wrecker, I want you as VP,” Bronc said.
I didn’t move, didn’t even blink, because to do so would be to admit I hadn’t seen it coming, and nothing is more dangerous than being predictable in this club. But my stomach did a weird somersault, and a thin vein in my temple throbbed so hard I thought it might tap out on its own.
“Vote?” I said, because someone had to say it.
Arsenal’s hand went up instantly. “Aye.” He looked at me as if daring me to question it.
Big Papa followed, slower, but with more weight. “Aye.”
Doc shrugged. “No one else on the payroll could keep up with Bronc’s disaster curve. Aye.”
