I looked at the dead phone. Thumbed the power button out of habit. No response. No little glowing apple. Nothing.
“Fantastic timing,” I said.
Blackjack thought I was sitting here with an anonymous bike in the dark, waiting for his call. He had no idea I’d cracked the shell and found the heart that had been beating inside.
I picked the book up again. Felt its weight. What it meant. Evidence linking our partners to the Vincinos, the Bolivar Cartel, and other international syndicates. Proof the Russians and Yakuza were tied in deeper than anyone admitted out loud.
If the Feds ever got this, they wouldn’t just grab the Philly family. They’d peel back the whole net. Giorlandos included. Anyone standing too close would be dragged under too.
That meant us. The Devil’s Aces. Every brother. Every old lady. Every kid who slept with a stuffed animal and a leather cut for a blanket.
I closed the book carefully. The leather creaked like a sigh. My reflection in the small chrome wrench hanging on the pegboard looked different. Eyes harder. Face older.
“We are so fucked,” I said.
Saying it out loud didn’tmake it less true.
Sure, we could just destroy the evidence, but someone was expecting this drop, and the Giorlando’s handed it off to us. If we didn’t deliver… they’d be out for our blood. They wouldn’t take the fall for this, whether they even knew what it was or not.
The hum in my bones came back a third time. Not from the bike now. From outside. From the future. If the Steel Serpents had followed my trail and been smart enough to hang back, they could be watching Redline right now. Waiting to see if anyone else came to back me up. Reporting. Every minute I sat in one spot with this much leverage sitting in my hands, the more likely someone else was getting into position to snatch it.
Blackjack had told me to stay put. Let the heat simmer. But he’d given that order when he thought I was babysitting a fancy courier job, not sitting on the black book of the East Coast underworld.
I had two choices.
Sit tight, hope nobody had eyes on the building, pray the mercs hadn’t tagged the bike with a tracker. Trust that the Giorlandos would handle this cleanly. That Roman and Vlad and their pretty sons wouldn’t decide we knew too much.
Or move it. Take the risk. Get the bike deeper off the grid, closer to a second safehouse we maintained just beyond our usual radius near Shore Vipers territory. A little garage with a trapdoor and an escape route that didn’t show up on any city plan.
I could hear Blackjack’s voice telling me I was anidiot already.
I set the book back in the tank compartment and put the drive on top of it. Both together. Closed the panel. The seam disappeared. From three feet away it looked like nothing had ever opened.
I walked to the small side window and edged the curtain back with my knuckles. The yard looked empty. Street beyond it empty too. No glow of a cigarette. No idle engine. No gleam of gray and steel patch leather.
It didn’t mean they weren’t out there though.
Redline had one thing going for it. Nobody who wasn’t ours was supposed to know it existed.
But that bike had come off a Vincino shipment with or without Giorlando knowledge. And the Vincinos had sent Steel Serpents after it like they’d done this before. If they’d learned what yards the Giorlandos used, what trucks, what drivers, they might have started to figure out which shadows the Aces preferred when we needed to disappear.
I let the curtain drop and went back to the bike.
“Okay,” I said. “New plan.”
I talked more when I was nervous. Quinn always teased me about it. When she was here, she’d have been sprawled on the couch, legs crossed, watching me with that lazy smile, asking if the mysterious death machine turned me on as much as she did. Then she’d tell me to stop pacing and handle it.
She wasn’t here. Good. Shedidn’t need this.
I grabbed the bars and rocked the bike off the stand. It rolled smoothly. No metallic rattle. No telltale ping of loose parts. Whoever engineered that compartment had thought about weight distribution. Handling. Hiding in plain sight. Even hid the actual tank itself lower on the bike.
“You’re coming with me,” I told it.
No phone. No way to update Blackjack. The smart move would be to wait until someone noticed the silence and sent a brother. But time was the enemy now. Every second felt like it could be the one where a door blew open and bullets came in.
Redline was a good hide. The other place was better.
Out past the edge of our official territory, there was a forgotten little strip of workshops and old houses that the city pretended weren’t its problem. The Shore Vipers had a soft claim on that area. Women and strippers and strays they collected when the world tried to chew them up passed through there. We kept to our side. They kept to theirs. Respect.
