“We get what we need,” I echo. His eyes briefly drop to the dog tag at my chest, then return to my face.
French clinks her mug on the table. “To the plan.”
We all echo it, a chorus of hard voices. Family, fists, forgiveness, and a plan to follow the money until the Vultures have nowhere left to hide.
Outside, the night breathes cold and patient. The plan waits, and so do the syndicates. We have a day to set baits, plant cameras, and make sure the women in The Haven sleep without nightmares. Then we move.
I look at Carter for a long second at the line of his jaw, the stain of dried blood on his collar, and I think, this is dangerous, but it’s honest work. If Alex’s name is being used as a shovel, tonight we start digging it up, and we’ll bury whatever crawls out.
Carter nods, and the nod is permission, threat, and promise all at once. This time, as the darkness presses in, I don’t face it alone.
10
CARTER
The Royal Harlots clubhouse doesn’t sleep, it just changes rhythm. By the time the meeting breaks, it’s past midnight, and the air tastes like smoke and gunpowder. The compound hums with restrained power. Engines cooling, boots echoing down steel corridors, women laughing low to shake off tension.
I should stay. Rest. Pretend the world can wait till morning.
But I can’t shake Rebel’s face when she saidtextile plant.It’s the same look Alex had the night we ran our last op. Jaw set, fire in his eyes, already halfway to hell.
So instead, I rode out after the meeting, before anyone could ask where I was going. The fire in Rebel’s eyes looked exactly like the way Alex did the night we ran our last op. It jerked me back like a hook in the ribs. I needed to see him before I walked into whatever Rebel’s about to start. I’ve seen what that look costs, and I don’t plan to bury another Slade.
The road unwinds under me like an open scar. Downtown fades into industrial gray, the streetlights thinning until it’s just me, fog, and the faint hum of the city breathing behind me.
The cemetery sits where the concrete ends. Half hidden behind a chain-link fence, eaten by weeds and time. It’s quiet out here. The kind of quiet that presses down until you start hearing what you’ve tried to forget.
I cut the engine and walk the last hundred feet. Gravel crunches under my boots. Same lot. Same silence.
Her tire tracks are still faint in the mud. There’s a cracked coffee lid near the marker, half-buried in dirt, rain-warped, pale from the sun. She must’ve left it the last time she came. The thought hits harder than it should.
Alex’s grave isn’t really a grave. It’s just a shallow dirt patch with a rusted metal tag that says:A. SLADE – CLASSIFIED.
The kind of burial you give ghosts no one claims, but I claimed him anyway. I paid a mortuary worker to bury him off the books. And I made sure Rebel and Bones found this place.
I set all of this up so Rebel and Bones thought they found it by chance. Something I could control, because I couldn’t control Alex’s outcome the night he was gunned down by the cartel at the Royal Bastards clubhouse.
I kneel, my knees sinking into damp soil, as fog curls low around the marker. The cemetery is quiet in the way only forgotten places are, with no flowers, no headstone, no name carved deep enough to last.
“Hey, brother,” I whisper. My voice comes out rough,quieter than the wind. “She found me. Just like you said she would.”
Nothing answers except the groan of the fence in the wind and the whisper of grass bending under dew.
“She’s got your fire,” I add. “Your temper, too. Walks like she owns the earth and dares anyone to take it from her.” A humorless breath leaves me. “She’s also got your talent for finding trouble.”
I pull the dog tag from my pocket, the second in the pair. The other hangs around Rebel’s neck. Twin ghosts. I press it into the dirt beside the marker, fingers leaving smudges.
“I should’ve stopped it,” I say finally. “All of it. You, the op, the deal… maybe you’d still be breathing, and she wouldn’t be dragging your name through every dead end in L.A.”
The silence that follows feels like judgment. I deserve it.
I stare at the grave until the fog starts to thin. “You deserved better than this. I’ll make sure she gets it. One way or another.”
The steady rain dripping around me brings back a memory I relive every time I close my eyes.
Four years ago
Rain slicked the Royal Bastards MC clubhouse roof until it gleamed like gunmetal. Alex crouched beside me, rifle braced against a vent pipe, eyes scanning the yard below.From up here, we could see everything, the long stretch of concrete drive, the chain-link perimeter, the glow of the Royal Bastards' skull sign burning through the rain.
