"Like violence," he agrees. "Turns out I had a talent for it. Special forces was a natural fit."
"Is that where you met your club members?"
"Just Tank," he says. "He was different from the other guys. Ex-cop who got fed up with the corruption in his department, thought the military might be more straightforward. Found out the hard way that humans are humans, no matter what uniform they wear."
I think of the man I met earlier. Intense, suspicious, fiercely loyal to King. "You two seem close."
"We survived things together that would have broken most people. When we got back, civilian life was... impossible. The nightmares, the rage, the feeling that everyone around you is living in a fantasy world while you know the truth about what humans are capable of."
The matter-of-fact way he describes the aftermath of war breaks my heart a little. I've treated veterans in the ER, seen the thousand-yard stares and the jumpy reactions to loud noises. But hearing King describe it from the inside makes it more real somehow.
"So you started the Savage Riders," I prompt when he falls silent.
"Not right away." His voice takes on a harder edge. "Tried to do things the 'right' way first. Got a job at the lumber mill, rented a shitty apartment, tried to pretend I was just like everyone else in this dying town. But the nightmares got worse, and the drinking got out of hand, and one night I nearly killed a guy at the bar who grabbed my shoulder from behind."
I can picture it so clearly—a younger King, wound tight as a spring, violence simmering just below the surface.
"What changed?" I ask.
"Tank found me," he says simply. "Dragged my ass out of the drunk tank, told me I needed purpose, not just a paycheck. Said there were others like us, guys who couldn't fit back into the world they'd left behind. We started meeting, just talking at first. Support group for fucked-up soldiers, basically."
"And it evolved from there?"
King nods against the top of my head. "Town was dying. Businesses closing, drugs moving in, law enforcement too underfunded to handle it. We saw an opportunity to create our own order in the chaos. Started small. Security for local businesses, keeping the nastier elements out of certain neighborhoods. People started seeing us as protection rather than trouble."
"And now you run the whole town," I observe, without judgment.
"Someone has to," he says with a weariness that suggests the responsibility weighs on him more than he lets on.
The way he talks about the club, I can hear how much it means to him. Not just power or control, but a genuine sense of purpose and belonging. Something he built from nothing after comingback to a town and a country that didn't know what to do with men like him.
"What about you?" he asks, shifting the conversation. "How did you end up fighting with your mother over a house three thousand miles away from where you live?"
The question touches on wounds that are still raw, and I tense slightly before forcing myself to relax. "It wasn't always like that between us," I admit. "When I was little, before I started spending summers with Grandma, Mom and I were close. She worked so hard to keep us afloat after my dad left… Double shifts at the diner, picking up cleaning jobs on the weekends, always exhausted but still making time to read me bedtime stories."
"What changed?" King asks, his voice gentler than I've heard it before.
"When I was ten, she couldn't afford summer camp anymore, so she sent me to stay with Grandma Emma for the summer." I smile at the memory. "It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Grandma was so different from Mom. Calm, patient, always teaching me things instead of just telling me what to do."
"And your mom was jealous," King guesses.
"I didn't understand it at the time, but yes. Every summer I spent here widened the gap between us. I'd come home talking about the books Grandma had given me, the medical techniques she'd taught me, how I wanted to be a nurse just like her." My throat tightens. "I didn't realize how much it hurt Mom to hear me idolize Emma when she was the one sacrificing everything to raise me."
King's arm tightens around me. "You were a kid. You couldn't have known."
"By the time I was in high school, we were barely speaking. I worked after school to save money for nursing school, spent every summer here with Grandma." I wipe away a tear that's escaped despite my best efforts. "When Grandma died and left the house to me instead of Mom, it was like the final insult. Mom contested the will, hired expensive lawyers, dragged it out for three years."
"And now you've won, but the prize isn't what you expected," King says, understanding immediately.
"Exactly. I burned through my savings fighting for this house, only to find it's practically a ruin." I sigh. "But it's all I have left of Grandma. I couldn't let Mom get it just to sell it to developers or let it rot."
"It's more than just a house to you," King observes. "It's her legacy. And maybe a chance to build the life you really want, not just the one you ended up with."
"Yes," I say, surprised and touched by how quickly he understands. "It's the last piece of her I have. And now it's also the first piece of the life I want to build here."
King shifts to look at me directly. "Even knowing what you know now? About the Iron Eagles, about the danger?"
"Especially knowing that," I tell him. "Grandma never backed down when something mattered. Neither will I."
