War had taken another piece. It would takemore before it was done.
But standing there—in a clubhouse that wasn’t mine, under patches that weren’t my colors, with Jersey at my side and Liberty in my ear and Roman somewhere plotting failsafes—I felt something I didn’t expect.
Not peace. That was a fairy tale.
Alignment.
They’d picked a war. They’d picked their sides.
We weren’t just reacting now. We were in it. Planning. Bleeding. Loving. Refusing to fold.
Raptor’s eyes stared back from the frame, frozen mid-smirk.
“We make this count,” I murmured. “For him. For all of them.”
Jersey’s hand brushed mine briefly, fingers tangling for half a heartbeat before letting go as the room moved around us.
“Yeah,” he said. “We will.”
Outside, the day was too bright for how the world felt.
Somewhere down the strip, The Black Velvet’s staff were still scrubbing blood off the walls.
Somewhere in Philadelphia, Tesauro Vincino was smiling at numbers and thought he understood how this game was going to end.
Little did he know, the ball was in our court now. And we were about to take our own shots.
Seventeen
Jersey Boy
War didn’t know how to take a day off.
It just changed volume.
The day after the club hit felt like that. Not quiet, exactly. Just muffled. Like somebody had thrown a heavy blanket over the world and left all the sharp edges under there with us.
We were back in Blackjack’s office. Same map spread across the desk. Same notebooks with half-legible scribbles. Same coffee that had been reheated one too many times.
Blackjack had one hand wrapped around a mug, the other braced on the desk near the map. 8-Ball sat on the corner of the desk, arms folded, eyes tracking everything. Snake Eyes slouched in a chair with his boots planted wide, flipping a pen between his fingers. Spade leaned against the filing cabinet. Valkyrie stood near me against the wall, arms folded, face unreadable, safe key glinting at her collarbone.
The phone on the desk sat between us all, screen dark, like we were just waitingfor it to bite.
Liberty’s voice then crackled through the speaker.
“…middle column, four pages up from the bottom,” she said. “Little notation that says ‘shore investment.’ That’s our states side of their shit.”
Blackjack traced something on the map with his finger, eyes narrowed. He had copies of the ledger photos laid out—pages from the war book Valkyrie and I had snapped in her basement. Now Liberty was adding more into the mix she had taken herself.
We then heard the faint thunk of a safe door through the line. Metal on metal. Valkyrie’s eyes flicked down like she could see it from here.
“Okay,” Liberty said. “It’s locked up. Judging from what I sent you, there’s a little shell business tied to a warehouse in South Jersey. Listed as an auto salvage, which we all know means anything but that. Also unconnected to that bike and the junkyard on my turf but maybe a Steel Serpent cover?” she asked aloud. “Another one’s a storage spot in an industrial park outside Camden. And a third that’s pretending to be a plumbing supply place in a nothing town off the turnpike.”
“All possibilities,” Blackjack said.
8-Ball leaned in as Blackjack flicked through the photos. Clean handwriting. Columns of numbers. Company names that meant nothing until you looked at the LLC tucked under them and saw the Vincino fingerprints pressed into the margins somewhere.
Blackjack grunted.
