I want to ask the dozen questions already piling up behind my teeth. I want to argue that Johnson calling a mandatory meeting feels wrong in a way I can't articulate, thatspecifically requested your presencesounds less like an invitation and more like a trap closing. I want to say:something is wrong, something is deeply wrong, and my body knows it even if my mind hasn't caught up yet.
Instead I nod and go upstairs to change. My hands shake on the buttons of my jeans.
Twenty minutes later I'm climbing into Zay's truck with the strange, dissociated calm of someone bracing for impact. Xavier insisted on coming despite the PT session cut short — typical, infuriating, the kind of stubborn that lives in his bones. Zay drives with both hands on the wheel and his jaw set. Asher sits inthe back seat with me, and every time I catch his reflection in the rearview mirror, he's already watching me with that analytical stillness that's always been his tell — the look that means he's taking inventory, running calculations, reaching conclusions he's keeping to himself for now.
"This doesn't feel right," Zay says finally, like he'd been holding the words behind his back teeth and had to get rid of them. "Johnson calling a meeting without Xavier's approval?"
"It's within his rights under the bylaws." Xavier doesn't turn from the window. "Any senior member can call an emergency meeting if they have critical information affecting club security."
"What kind of information?" I ask, even though I think — with a cold certainty I don't want to examine closely — that I know exactly what kind.
"We'll find out."
The compound is packed in the way that tells you before you've even gotten out of the truck that something is badly, fundamentally wrong. Every parking spot swallowed. Bikes and trucks crammed into gaps that aren't really gaps. The kind of attendance you only see for funerals or crises.
My stomach rolls.
Inside, the clubhouse has been swallowed by bodies — seventy people in a space meant for forty, the air thick with body heat and something anticipatory, something hungry. The energy is the energy of a crowd that has gathered to watch something happen rather than to prevent it. I can feel it on my skin, a low vibration, the way you feel a bass line before you can identify the song.
Johnson stands at the head of the room near the bar, and the look on his face — that particular cat-and-canary satisfaction — sends a cold wave through me from throat to feet. George is beside him, expression neutral but eyes moving, calculating, marking exits and alliances. This has been planned. Whatever is about to happen has been rehearsed.
We move through the crowd and people make way for Xavier's wheelchair, but I feel their eyes sliding off him and onto me. Assessing. Waiting. Sharing the knowledge of something I don't yet know they know.
"Xavier," Johnson greets with warmth so false it should have audible quotation marks around it. "Glad you could make it. And Valentina." His gaze finds me last, lets it sit there a beat too long. "Perfect."
"What's this about, Johnson?" Xavier's voice is a cold blade. "You called an emergency meeting. It better be warranted."
"Oh, it is." Johnson lets the smile do its predatory work. He turns to the room with the ease of a man who has been rehearsing this for weeks. "Brothers, sisters — we've been through a lot lately. Our president was shot. Spent weeks in a coma. Came back—" a deliberate pause, thick with implication, "—changed. And during that time, we trusted his inner circle to keep us safe. To keep us informed. To tell us the truth."
"Get to the point," Asher says from behind me, his voice carrying the cold authority he rarely deploys — the one that reminds you he is not, in fact, a person you want to antagonize.
"The point," Johnson continues, unfazed, "is that we've been lied to. Manipulated. Critical information has been kept from us." Hesets a folder on the bar with the careful deliberateness of a man placing a bomb. "Information about a murder."
The room goes completely silent.
My heart doesn't slow — it stops. For one absolute, crystalline second I exist in that silence like an insect in amber, suspended between the moment before and the moment after, and I know I will never again be the person I was three seconds ago.
"What murder?" someone asks from the crowd.
"Marcus King." Johnson says the name like he's been savoring it. "Xavier's brother. Died six months ago. We were told it was the Vipers. Told it was retaliation for a territory dispute. Told it was just another casualty in a war we've been fighting for years."
"Itwasthe Vipers." Xavier's voice, but thinner now. Uncertainty seeping in at the edges of the certainty, the way water finds its way through cracks.
"Was it?" Johnson pulls papers from the folder with the slow theater of a man who has waited a long time for this moment. "Because I have witness statements. People who were in the area that night. People who saw what really happened." He looks directly at me, and the eye contact is a physical thing, a lance. "People who saw Valentina Torres leave that alley covered in blood."
The room detonates. Voices overlapping, crashing into each other — shock and accusation and questions and the nauseating sound of a crowd deciding what it thinks before it has heard all the facts.
"That's bullshit," Zay snarls, already moving forward, already putting himself between me and the room the way he does without thinking. "You're making shit up?—"
"Am I?" Johnson holds up a photograph and even from ten feet away I can see what it is: security camera footage, grainy, time-stamped, showing a figure leaving an alley, dark stains spreading across her clothing. A figure who moves like me. Who has my bike in the frame at the edge of the shot. "From a camera two buildings over. Time-stamped to the night Marcus died."
"That could be anyone," Asher argues, but there is something happening in his voice — a small, terrible fracture where conviction should be solid.
"Could be. Except I also have three witnesses who identified her specifically." Johnson's eyes haven't moved from my face. "Who saw her leave that alley. Who saw Marcus King go into that alley alive and come out of it as a body."
The room is pressing in on all sides. The seventy bodies have drawn closer without my noticing, the crowd tightening like a fist. I can't get enough air. I try to breathe through it — try to find something steady to fix my eyes on — and what I find is Xavier.
He's turned his wheelchair toward me. His face is doing something I've never seen it do before: coming apart, very quietly, behind his eyes. The shuttered blankness has cracked just enough to let the desperation through.
