“Welcome to the safehouse,” I said, trying for a joke.
She peeled her arms from my waist, slow like her body didn’t want to leave mine. She climbed off the Harley, boots crunching in the gravel, and swayed a little. I got off too, legs stiff, and set the kickstand.
The guards on the porch clocked us immediately, eyes raking Melissa’s frame before landing on me. The one in the middle, a guy named Porkchop, raised his chin.
“You bringing home strays now, August?” he called, not unfriendly but not friendly, either.
“Emergency pickup,” I said. “She needs a place to lay low. The real story’s not porch material.”
He grunted and pushed off the rail, but didn’t approach. Respect for the battered and the bleeding.
Melissa didn’t look at the men—she looked at the doors, the windows, the battered pickup trucks in the yard. I watched her do the math: how fast she could run, where she’d hide, what she’d use for a weapon if it all went sideways.
“You wanna go in, or hang out here?” I asked.
She squared her shoulders, like she could muscle her way through the barbed wire with attitude alone. “I want a phone.”
“I can do that.” I offered my hand again, open-palmed.
She ignored it, limped a step forward. Her gait was off—probably the bruised hip or the way her thigh had started to swell up from the earlier fight. She wore the pain like she wore the blood: like it belonged to someone else.
I led her up the walk. As we passed the first line of bikes, she let her hand drift over the handlebars—reading the plates, tracing the custom grips, scanning for clues. She was all in, senses dialed up to eleven, like a deer learning to shoot back.
The door banged open, and another club guy stepped out, this one with a beard thick enough to smuggle contraband in. He clocked Melissa’s face, the split lip and broken blood vessels, then looked to me.
“Trouble?” he asked.
“Not ours. But it might be, soon.”
He stepped aside, letting us in. Inside, the air was heavy with cigarette smoke and old fryer oil.
4
Melissa
I’d been in plenty of shit motel rooms and back-of-the-bar offices, but nothing prepared me for Augustine’s sanctum at the Bloody Scythes clubhouse. It was the kind of space a person made when they didn’t expect to live long enough to clean it. Pinned on the walls: chrome sprockets, rusting exhaust pipes, a full rack of machetes like a butcher’s set for serial killers. Scattered everywhere else: stacks of old gun magazines, a dented skull-shaped ashtray packed with blackened butts, a stack of VHS porn. The battered leather couch I sat on could’ve told its own horror stories, and probably still held DNA from three different decades.
My knees were hugged up tight to my chest, torn stockings doing their best to hide blood and mud. I’d stolen Augustine’s cut for warmth, but even with that and a fleece blanket thrown over me, the chill wouldn’t quit. My body didn’t know if it wanted to shake, puke, or pass out. I sipped water and focused on the poster above the couch—a topless girl straddling a Harley, staring me down like she’d survived every one of my bad decisions and dared me to try hers.
Augustine reappeared in the doorway, shirtless, holding a first-aid kit and a bottle of water. He had the kind of arms that were all corded muscle and utility, the kind you couldn’t fake with a gym membership or a sleeve tattoo. His movements were surgical, like he’d spent his whole life taping up bullet holes and busted lips. He sat next to me, close but not touching, and started lining up supplies on the coffee table.
He opened the kit, yanked out a wad of gauze, and looked at me. “How’s your head?”
“Still attached, I think.”
He grunted—a small, approving sound—and started picking at the glass in my elbow. His hands were so gentle that it made my throat tighten. The weirdest part was how safe I felt in a place where the air smelled like gasolineand blood, and the couch springs could’ve doubled as a weapon.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but you don’t really fit your nickname.”
His mouth quirked up. “If I was going to torture you, I’d start with country music and work my way down.”
I actually laughed, then winced. “If you ever want to get me talking, put on Kenny Chesney. I’ll confess to anything.”
“Noted.”
He swabbed iodine over my scrapes, his fingers methodical and precise. The wound stung, but I bit down on the inside of my cheek and watched him instead. I’d never seen someone with so many tattoos that you had to work to find actual skin. Every inch of Augustine was inked—names, dates, crosses, a map of the state of New Mexico that spanned from shoulder to wrist. Most guys used their bodies as a brag sheet. His was more like a diary you’d have to kill to read.
He wrapped my arm, then pressed a bandage into the crook of my neck where one of the cemetery fuckers had tried to choke me out. The Band-Aid had smiley faces on it. I almost lost it.
