Around me my brothers are doing what we do. Someone has a phone to his ear. Someone is checking the men in the tree line. Cash and Ramsey are already at the damaged wall with their flashlights out. Ramsey is saying something low and Cash is listening. Whatever they're deciding, they'll decide it together.
Decker has been a prospect for seven months. He got on his first bike at sixteen with his grandfather watching from the porch. He spent two years in the army and came home quieter than he left. He took gate duty seriously on his first day and has never stopped taking it seriously. He told me once that he joined this club because it was the first place since the army where he understood the rules and the rules made sense to him.
He asked me in the yard if his leg was still there.
I think about that. I think about who he's going to be on the other side of tonight and whether we're going to be enough for what he needs. We will be. That's not nothing, knowing that. This club has never walked away from one of its own and it's not starting with a twenty-four-year-old kid who stepped in front of a grenade because he thought the fight was over.
I look at the compound. The houses behind the clubhouse with their lights still on. The bikes in their row, untouched. The vegetable garden along Jules and Pops' wall that somehow took no damage at all.
I think about the night EJ was shot and Sav's hands working under the operating room lights without hesitating.
I think about Decker's white face between my hands.
I think about six months ago, Brick saying Sprog's old lady and the door that opened in her eyes.
This is what I chose. Every part of it, the brotherhood and the cost of it. The specific weight of being responsible for something worth protecting. The risk that runs underneath the ordinary days. The things you carry when one of your own goes down.
I would choose it again. All of it, without hesitation, every single time.
I put my hands in my pockets and I stand in the yard and I wait for news from the hospital.
Epilogue - Savannah
The Next Morning
I come back at just after seven in the morning.
The compound gate is already open, prospect on duty nodding me through without making me stop. The clubhouse front is destroyed in the morning light, worse than it looked in the dark last night. The whole east wall cracked open, and the windows are black with smoke damage. There are brothers working on it already, moving debris, someone up on a ladder assessing the roof.
The old ladies have set up in the house nearest the clubhouse, the door propped open, the smell of coffee and food coming out. The kind of feeding that happens after something hard, not because anyone is necessarily hungry but because there has to be something to do with your hands.
I walk into the clubhouse.
It's quieter than last night. The brothers who are inside look up when I come in. Austin is at the far end, and he gets to me in four steps and I put my hand on his chest and look up at him.
"He made it," I say, loud enough for the room.
No one cheers. That's not how these men are. But the quiet changes. It goes from the held-tight kind to the kind where you can breathe again. I watch it move through the room the way a wave moves. Knuckles lets out a slow breath, Cash puts a hand over his face for just a second, Pops closes his eyes. Shadow, who has been watching the door all morning, stops watching the door.
"He's going to lose the leg," I say, because they need the whole truth. "The blast damage was too severe; they couldn't save it. But he's stable and he's awake and he asked me to tell you he's annoyed about missing the clean-up."
That gets a sound. Something between a laugh and a breath.
Razor crosses the room.
He stops in front of me and he looks at me for a moment, the level look he has, the one that doesn't give anything away, and then he holds out his hand and I shake it.
He looks at Austin. Then back at me.
"We're glad you came home, Doc," he says.
That's it. That's all he says. But from Razor, in this room, after this night, it's everything. I know enough about this world now to understand what it means when this man says a thing like that.
"So am I," I say.
AUSTIN
I get her outside before anyone can start talking to her.
