In the distance, I could still hear the Leatherbacks howling up the road, hungry for blood.
War was coming, and I couldn’t wait.
***
The real war, as always, started in the back room. Our “boardroom” was a scarred slab of wood ringed with mismatched chairs, and by the time I got there, it was alreadyfilling with the club’s old guard and young guns, all of them stinking of sweat and fear and cheap lager.
The second I set foot in the room, the noise hit like a shot. Everyone had an opinion, and every opinion was a fist:
“We give her up, we live.”
“We stand, we die like men.”
“They’ll steamroll us. D’Agossa’s not bluffing.”
“He never bluffs, you fucking idiot—”
Damron sat at the head of the table, hands folded tight, jaw clenched. He didn’t bother trying to talk over the pack. Instead, he let the chaos burn until it threatened to collapse the roof, then barked, “Sit down and shut the fuck up.”
It worked. The room fell into a hostile, breathing silence.
Seneca Wallace stood, pale and calm as ever. Most people called him The Sadist. He had the kind of face you could never picture as a child, just a battered adult’s mask with dead eyes and a long white scar along the jaw. He cleared his throat. “Leatherbacks roll in heavy,” he said. “At least thirty patched, another fifty hang-arounds. Call it forty who can handle a weapon.”
Someone cut in. “Half of ‘em couldn’t hit a barn sober.”
Seneca ignored it. “We got a dozen full-patch. Fifteen prospects. Five on suspension or parole.” He met Damron’s stare. “We can hole up, but we’re dead by Saturday.”
A ripple of nervous laughter. Nobody really believed in the strength of numbers; most wars in New Mexico were settled by who had the worst friends.
Damron looked to me. “Your call, Augustine. She’s yours; you brought her in.”
I looked at the faces around the table. Most of them had spent the last five years waiting for me to fuck up. Now I had, and it was biblical.
“We don’t hand her over,” I said, my voice coming out raw. “She’s ours now.”
A few heads nodded; most didn’t. Seneca scratched at his jaw and stared at the table, then said, “So we fight. And we die.”
“Better than living as turtle bitches,” said the youngest prospect—Razor, I think his name was, but it hardly mattered.
Damron silenced him with a look. “Anyone else want to weigh in?”
The room spun out again, everyone talking at once. I tuned it out, watching the door to the hallway. Out of habit, I counted the seconds since I’d last seen Melissa. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. My palms started to sweat.
Seneca went on, voice dry and even: “Cutler’s a bastard, but he’s not an idiot. He knows if he takes a shot at the Scythes, he’s looking at six months of federal heat and a half dozen dead. He wants the girl, not a massacre.”
“Then why the threat?” Damron asked.
Seneca shrugged. “He needs her scared enough to come back. Or desperate enough to run.”
My stomach dropped. I pushed up from the table so hard the chair skidded back on the tile. “Where’s Melissa?” I asked, loud enough to cut the din.
Nobody answered. I stalked out of the room, boots pounding the hallway. Her borrowed boots were gone from by the couch. The door to my quarters hung half-open, and the tiny prickle at the base of my spine became a full-body scream.
I checked the room—bed made, water bottle gone, window wide open. There was a dusty footprint on the sill, and beyond it, a splash of sun catching on a bright red jacket as it ran up the dirt path.
She was gone.
My hands shook. I turned and sprinted back to the meeting, every part of me locked in the same dead panic as the night I buried my uncle.
