I pulled cash from my wallet and tossed it on the bar. Enough for damages. Enough for silence. “For the mess.”
He looked at the money, then at me. “Out.”
“Already going.”
We walked outside into desert night, boots crunching over gravel. Edge came off his phone just as we hit the lot, his face sour when he realized we were leaving before he’d even gotten inside.
“What the hell? Already?”
“Bar had a short attention span,” River said.
Edge looked at my hands. “You bleed?”
I flexed my fingers. Knuckles red, skin intact. “Not worth bleeding over.”
Bullet swung onto his bike, still buzzing with fight energy. “Speak for yourself. I was just getting friendly with that blonde.”
“She looked relieved,” Tank said.
“Women are often overwhelmed by me.”
“Sure that’s the word?”
Engines roared alive one by one, and the sound rolled through the lot like thunder dragging chains. That never got old. Steel. Fire. Power. The kind of music a man felt in his bones before he heard it. I threw my leg over my bike, settled into the seat, and let my palms close around the grips.
The road waited black and open.
We pulled out in formation, headlights slicing through the dark, dust kicking up behind us. Wind hit hard, cold against skin still heated from the bar. The desert at night was a different animal. Less glare, more teeth. It opened around us in wide empty stretches, the mountains crouched in the distance, the sky punched full of stars.
People called this freedom. Most of them didn’t know what they meant. They thought freedom was doing whatever you wanted, taking whoever you wanted, walking away clean. That wasn’t freedom. That was appetite with good publicity.
Riding was different. Riding stripped a man down until there wasn’t room for lies. No noise except the machine. No perfume. No soft hands asking for pieces. No woman looking at me like she could upgrade me if I just let her sand down the rough. No morning-after silence while somebody waited for me to become a different man.
Just road.
Machine.
Brotherhood.
My brothers fanned out across the asphalt, steady and solid under moonlight. Edge rode ahead, probably thinking about Regan and whatever chaos she had waiting for him at home. Tank had a wedding coming, a woman who looked at him like he hung the damn stars, and kids who somehow turned that big bastard soft without making him weak. Tarak had little feet running through the clubhouse now, little laughs, toys under furniture, family built out of blood and choice and second chances. River had his old lady waiting, which meant he’d be useless tomorrow but smiling about it.
Everybody was building something.
A future. A life. A place to go when the ride ended.
I had roads. Runs. Bars. Fights. A room at the clubhouse that held my bed, my safe, and not much else. I had women if I wanted them, though wanting had become more habit than hunger. I had brothers I would die for and a patch I’d earned the hard way.
It should’ve been enough.
For a long time, it had been enough.
But lately, when the road went quiet and the miles dragged long, something opened in me that I couldn’t patch with whiskey or chrome. A hollow place. Not dramatic. Not bleeding. Just there, like a room in a house nobody used anymore. I could ignore it in daylight. Laugh over it. Fight over it. Ride over it.
At night, it stretched.
The bike thundered beneath me. The desert ran endless ahead. And for the first time in a long damn while, home didn’t feel like enough.
We rolled into Santa Fe with sunrise cracking over the mountains. The sky burned orange and pink along the ridgeline, throwing fire across the desert while dust trailed behind us likesmoke. The city still slept in pieces. Gas stations blinking awake. Delivery trucks nosing into alleys. A dog barking somewhere behind a fence. The whole world caught in that thin quiet before heat and people ruined it.
