“Alice,” she said, stalking a few steps away, but not so far we couldn’t hear her side. “You brought a war onto my turf.”
No sugar. No soft preamble. That was Liberty.
I turned away like I wasn’t listening and pulled out my own phone. My thumbs moved on autopilot, fingers hitting saved names without needing to think.
First up was Birdie.
Birdie’s an RN at Shoreline. Small, wiry, looks like a cute art student. Once put a man twice her size in achokehold when he tried to get past the nurses’ station at three in the morning. One of ours before she ever put on a scrubtop.
I typed.
Next up was Mink.
Mink’s badge sits behind a desk at the precinct, but her loyalty belongs here. She sees things in the station. Files. Footage. Names. Makes it disappear. It’s convenient to have a snake in a sty of pigs, but in the end she’s a civilian and not an official member of the club to protect her as our source on the inside.
I then tucked my phone away.
By the time I looked up, Liberty had gone from fury to something calmer. Not soft. Never soft. Just tightly controlled. Her mouth was a harsh line.
“I need to know what’s in my house. Or I make my own way to the answer.”
She glanced at Jersey as she said it. He didn’t flinch. He just looked back. Like he understood the math and agreed it was fair.
Blackjack then growled something loud enough that I could hear the rhythm if not the words. Liberty cut him off.
Liberty’s tone sharpened. “You need my help…” she said. “… So, swallow whatever pride you have left and let me do what I’m good at. Locking shit down. When 8-Ball gets here, we talk. You owe me a full picture. Until then, I’ll keep your piece on the board standing. That’s the best deal you’re getting.”
She ended the call with a low, “Yeah. You too,” that carried more history than I wanted to unpack.
Then she came back to us.
“Until I say otherwise,” she told Jersey, “consider yourself leverage.”
He lifted his hands slightly, palms open. “You feed me, I have no complaints,” he said. “You cage me, we might have a disagreement.”
Her smile spread slow. “You don’t get to disagree right now,” she said. “You stepped into my nest. You either let me wrap coils around you until I know you’re not going to explode, or I put you in the ground and see if digging through your bag is easier without you attached to it.”
My girls laughed. Not kindly.
He took it. Didn’t puff up. Didn’t spit back. Just took it. I filed that away too.
“Ladies,” Liberty said, without looking back, “get him inside. He’s a guest. Treat him like one. But a guest we’ll shoot if he does something stupid.”
“Best kind of guest,” Medusa muttered.
Rosé and Raven flanked him. I fell in a half step behind and to the side. Indigo posted up at the door to the clubhouse, eyes never leaving his patch. The rest fell back into their patterns, but I could feel their attention clinging to us all the way through the doorway.
Inside, the main room hummed like a living thing. Music low but constant. The smell of oil, whiskey, sweat, a hint of perfume someone had sprayed too liberally near the couch earlier. The overhead lights were strung through welded bike frames. Photos lined the walls. Women on bikes. Women with bruises fading. Women laughing with cuts on their shoulders and middle fingers raised like flags.
We led him toward the bar.
California was behind it, black hair tipped in red fluffing around her shoulders, eyes lined thick. She clocked the cut immediately and went still in that coiled way that always made me proud. Then she lifted a brow, smirked, and let the tension bleed into amusement.
“What’s your poison, Devil?” she asked.
“Whiskey,” he said. “If Liberty allows it.”
“Liberty said treat you like a guest,” California replied. “Guests drink. You start acting like a prisoner though, that list changes.”
