Let’s not make this difficult, Carrie. We both know you’re not cut out for this. Take the offer, walk away. No one has to get hurt.
—M.E.
I’d recognize Marcus Ellery’s handwriting anywhere. It always looked like he’d stabbed the page, every letter a knife wound.
I read it twice. Then I burned it with a book of matches from the Trophy Room, because if you let a letter like that linger, it made you sick from the inside out. I ground the ashes into the glass tray, the scent of sulfur mingling with the bourbon fumes.
The silence was broken by the ring of my personal cell, muffled and urgent. I checked the screen. Lila Vargas, Daddy’s attorney.
I answered on the second ring, trying to sound awake. “Stillwater.”
“Carrie. I know it’s late, but I had to call.”
Lila never sounded frazzled, not even when half the bourbon district tried to sue her at once. Tonight, she was breathing hard, words clipped.
“What is it?” I said.
“The Board’s moving up the meeting. They’re calling a vote to accept an acquisition offer—Marcus’s, if I’m reading the fine print right. He’s got the support of at least four members, maybe more if he buys out the O’Shaughnessy proxy.”
I swore, then bit my tongue. “How soon?”
“Tomorrow morning, 9 AM. They’re trying to catch you off guard.”
I pictured the sharks from the wake, already circling, ready to feast on whatever was left of us.
“What do I do?” I asked, hating how small my voice sounded.
Lila didn’t hesitate. “You show up. You fight. That’s what your father would have done. And don’t sign anything. Not after midnight.”
She hung up before I could thank her.
I sat in the dark, phone in my lap, watching the shadow of my own hand ripple across the desk. The 25-year glowed where the lamplight caught it, gold as a sunrise and twice as fragile.
I got up, wandered to the family photo on the wall. I raised the glass, bourbon trembling in the crystal.
“I won’t let Stillwater fall,” I said. This time, my voice didn’t shake.
Shivs
Night owned the Kentucky woods, even the wind holding its breath between the naked hickories. I burned through it, fur slick and close to my body, every limb extended to the edge of breaking. Wolf. That’s what they called it. Most never understood the run—never tasted the way wet earth seared your tongue or how the blood beat in your chest grew so loud it could have drowned the engine of God himself. But I was built for it, and tonight, I craved the violence of it more than I craved air.
The sky was new-moon black, no glow from above, just the eternal ache of stars if you had the patience to look. I didn’t. I was a missile of meat and bone, brain shrunk to a single lancing need: move, escape, hunt, fuck, howl, kill. I leaped over fallen trees like they were matchsticks. My nostrils swelled with scent—deer piss, the cold slick of copperhead under leaf, and somewhere far off, the burnt-oil tang of diesel exhaust. My tongue lolled, drawing air deeper, sweeter, the taste of it so much more than you’d get as a human. Every sound was raw asrazor wire. A mouse dug frantically under frost-burnt grass fifty yards ahead; two owl feathers clipped each other overhead; the huffing groan of a boar, angry and territorial, shivered all the way up my spine.
The run wasn’t an escape. It was a confrontation. Every muscle tore and remade itself, again and again, because that’s what power felt like—like always being half an inch from destroying your own skin. My paws slammed the wet clay, digging divots that’d last until spring. At some point, I realized my mouth was open in a silent scream, tongue streaked black with mud and blood from where I’d bitten it on a sharp stone miles back. The pain was an old friend, the kind that reminded you this body was real, was yours, was unstoppable.
The forest thinned in a sudden break. Ahead, through the black lace of branches, the land sloped up to a clearing. The grass there, left uncut for years, hunched under its own weight like drunks at closing time. In the center: the bastard’s cathedral, the Royal Bastards Motorcycle Club’s “sanctuary.” Four stories of timber, cinderblock, and metal, ringed by security lights that were always off this time of year. To the right, a crude fire pit still smoldered from last night’s burn—diesel and pine, still alive in the wind.
I slowed, almost tripping over my own paws, the animal part of me furious at the need to stop. But that’s the bitch of being what I am. You’re always caught at the crossroad of instinct and memory. I limped into the tree line and let my back legs fold under me, front paws digging for purchase as the world jerked sideways and the change started.
Every shift is an execution. The wolf brain—hungry, perfect, full—fights it, always. I bit down on my own foreleg to keep from screaming. Then the first bone cracked. Then a dozen more. A fistful of tendons unzipped in my haunches, my whole ribcagebuckling, reshaping. My tongue, still heavy with blood, tried to form a curse, but all I managed was a growl.
Then the world exploded, white and red and agony, as my spine collapsed inward, each vertebra shearing itself into a new shape. My vision doubled, tripled, blurred with pain, and then my nose—so huge, so sharp a second ago—flattened, cartilage spitting wetly as the bridge collapsed and reformed. The fur peeled away in strips, leaving a web of raw, dripping skin. My claws curled, splintered, then withdrew into fingers that flexed and twisted without coordination, like the hands of a newborn.
Eventually, I was something like a man again, though it felt more like being flayed alive and then stuffed back inside my own skin. I gasped for air, chest heaving, every nerve ending singing. I rolled over onto my back, arms splayed, feeling the cold earth against my raw, sweat-lacquered body.
I always came out of a run naked, not just in the flesh but in the soul. Every fucked-up thing I’d done, every joy or regret, hung suspended in the air, ready to swarm. I lay there a long moment, not ready to stand, not ready to face what waited inside the clubhouse. The breeze bit down on me, and I shivered, but it felt good, clean, earned.
Somewhere inside, someone had just opened the side door. I heard the scrape of a boot on the concrete landing. The scent of cigarettes drifted out, followed by the warm rot of spilled beer. I grinned, or tried to, my lips still clumsy on my teeth.
