Damron rolled the cigar in his teeth, eyes never leaving me. "You volunteering for the suicide run?"
"If it keeps the war off our doorstep, yeah," I said. "Saint Etienne is not going to negotiate. He’s not going to parlay.He’s going to burn us down and piss on the ashes. The only thing he respects is force."
Seneca nodded, as if conceding a chess move. "The Sadist" wasn’t just a nickname; it was a job description. He’d been doing wet work for the Scythes since he got back from Iraq, and he had a way of looking at a problem that made it clear he enjoyed the process as much as the result. "What about the prospects?" he asked, glancing at the kids lined up by the wall. "They won’t stand up to a firefight."
"They’re not supposed to," I said. "They’re the bait."
Now the room went all the way silent. One of the prospects, the girl, set down the bottle and wiped her mouth, looking pale but stubborn. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. We’d all been the bait at some point.
Damron leaned over the map, hands planted on either side. He looked old tonight, older than the forty years he claimed. "We fortify the compound. Prospects and families go into lockdown. The rest of us set up pickets at the north and south approaches. If they come, we bleed them. But we don’t go hunting, not until we know who’s really behind this."
I stared at the map, watching the lines of attack, the fallback positions, the choke points. It was a good plan—ifyou wanted to survive. It was a shit plan if you wanted to win.
"I say we hit them first," I said, keeping my voice level. "We take Saint Etienne off the board, make it personal. We show them what happens when you poke a real MC."
Damron’s eyes narrowed. "You want to go back to the way things were in the nineties? Bodies in the river every week, ATF crawling up our ass? Because that’s what happens if we escalate."
I shrugged, flicked ash into an empty beer can. "Maybe it’s already escalated. Maybe they’re just waiting for us to blink first."
Seneca spoke up, tone flat as a dead battery. "The way I see it, we can either die slow or die interesting."
A couple of the older guys nodded, their faces lit by the shitty fluorescent light and the flicker of memory. They remembered what it was like, back before the treaties, when a man could settle a beef without worrying about federal prison or cartel blowback.
Damron finally broke the standoff. "We vote. That's the rule. All in favor of fortify and hold?"
Five hands up. All the old guard, the ones with kids and side businesses to protect.
"All in favor of hit first, hit hard?"
Four hands. Mine, Seneca’s, and two of the wildcards who’d never met a bad idea they didn’t like.
Damron counted, then nodded. "It’s decided. We hold. Augustine, you’ll run point on perimeter. Seneca, you take the picket teams. Prospects, you’re on lockdown. Nobody leaves unless I say so."
The meeting broke up in a flurry of boots and arguments. The prospects hustled out, the girl throwing me one last look—anger, maybe, or respect, or just plain survival. Seneca clapped me on the shoulder as he passed. "You get your war, eventually," he said, voice low. "Just not tonight."
Damron waited until the room was empty, then sat down heavy in the chair next to mine. He poured two fingers of cheap bourbon and slid it across the table.
"You ever think you were born for peacetime?" he asked, not quite joking.
I picked up the glass and downed it. "Never crossed my mind."
He stared at the map, fingers tracing the edge of Leatherback territory. "You keep pushing like this, one day you’ll have to run the club. You ready for that?"
I didn't answer. I didn’t need to. He knew.
Damron stood, the weight of decision settling on his shoulders like a winter coat. "Get some sleep. We might need you alive tomorrow."
I left the chapel and walked back into the dark, the taste of bourbon still on my tongue.
The night felt colder, and the silence was waiting for the first shot.
I didn’t even make it to the door before I heard them go at it again, voices rolling up the hall like a bar brawl in a hurricane. The club never did like closed-casket decisions. Nothing got buried in the Scythes without everyone first pissing on the coffin.
So I doubled back, boots thudding the length of the hall, and ducked inside to see the chapel already full again. This time it wasn’t quiet; it was a knife fight of arguments and smoke, with half the brothers up on their feet, red faces, fingers poking holes in the map or jabbing at each other’s chests. The Mr. Boston bottle was making rounds at speed. You could almost see the testosterone condensate dripping from the ceiling.
Damron was in the middle, holding court like a bastard bishop, but even his glacier-cool had limits. Seneca was perched on the edge of the table, tracing something on the map with a knife, not paying attention to anything but his own thoughts. Carl Dalton had parked himself near thewindow, his arm in a fresh white sling, still smelling like hospital bandages and stubbornness. Every time the room got too loud, he’d whack the table with his good hand and shout until he got his point across.
"We hit ‘em at the old cannery," Carl was saying, nostrils flared. "They’re not expecting shit there, it’s too public. We roll hard, hit and run, just like Augustine said." He gestured at me, like I was the prize pig in a county fair.
