Butcher
Savage stepped forward, standing chest to chest with him now. “You don’t get to question me. Not here, not ever.”
Brothers tried to intervene, but the two men were fire and gasoline—unstoppable, inevitable. Chairs toppled, curses flew, and the bond that had held them together for years snapped like a chain under too much strain.
“I’m done,” he said, voice raw and final. And then he walked out of Savage Hell, into the night, into the unknown, into the kind of freedom that tasted like shit and promise all at once.
The fight replayed in his mind on a loop—Savage’s fist connecting with his jaw, the taste of blood, the look in his brothers’ eyes when he threw down his kutte. All he saw was judgment, betrayal, and now, he lived with the silence that followed him everywhere.
He’d told himself he was done being Savage’s weapon, done bleeding for a man who treated loyalty like a leash. But now, with the wind clawing at him and the night pressing in, doubt crept in like poison.
The what-ifs were playing through his mind at warp speed. What if I was wrong? What if I just burned the only family I had left?
Butcher gritted his teeth, twisting the throttle harder, as if speed could outrun regret. He’d lived his whole life by the patch, by the brotherhood, by the code. And now he was nothing but a man with a bike. He didn’t belong anywhere anymore, and that thought both thrilled and terrified him.
The guilt cut deep, but beneath it was something sharper—longing for a place where he belonged again.
He missed the clubhouse—the laughter and the sense of belonging that came with knowing someone had your back no matter what.
For the family he’d just walked away from.
Butcher had always believed the Bastards were unbreakable. Tonight proved otherwise.
He slowed as the highway bled into backroads.
They were the kind of forgotten places where men like him disappeared.
The night was quiet here, too quiet, leaving him alone with the truth he couldn’t escape.
He wasn’t just running from Savage. He was running from himself.
And sooner or later, he’d have to face both.
Ten Years Later
Butcher hadn’t expected the news to hit him the way it did. Savage was gone.
Hell, the man had always lived like he was bulletproof, like nothing could touch him—not cops, not rivals, not even time.
But time had a way of collecting debts, and Savage had been living on borrowed minutes for years.
His wife and husband both knew it. Everyone did.
The old Prez’s heart had been a ticking time bomb, but Savage was too damn stubborn to let anyone fix it.
Butcher sat on the edge of his bed, the phone still feeling much too heavy in his hand. He was almost twenty years younger than Savage, but it didn’t matter. Death didn’t care about age. It cared about pride, about choices, about the kind of man who thought he could outrun his own body.
He should’ve felt nothing. He had left Huntsville and the Royal Bastards ten years ago, and Savage had been the reason he walked away, the reason he’d spent a decade carving out a life without the patch, without the brotherhood.
He had gone it alone and told himself that was what he wanted.
But instead, guilt twisted in his gut. Because once upon a time, Savage had been more than a Prez.
He’d been a brother. He was a friend, and a man whom Butcher had bled beside, fought beside, and believed in. And now he was gone.
He didn’t really regret running from the Bastards that night.
He had landed in a little town called Natchez, Mississippi.
Butcher opened a body shop, and business was booming from the very beginning.
People loved that they didn’t have to drive three towns over just to have their vehicles worked on.
His specialty was bikes, but he worked on everything over the years to pay the bills.
He was able to buy a little piece of land on the edge of town and build his dream home.
Those things wouldn’t have happened if he had stuck around Huntsville and stayed with the Bastards.
But leaving his friends and club behind was the hardest thing that he had ever done.
He had become a loner, and looking for a new club wasn’t even on his to-do list.
Butcher dragged a hand down his face, the weight of his memories pressing him harder than he wanted to admit.
He thought about the fight, the betrayal, and the way he’d thrown his kutte down and walked out into the night.
He thought of the silence that followed, the years spent pretending he didn’t care.
But the truth was, he did care. He always had.
Savage’s death wasn’t just the end of a man’s life. It was the end of an era. And for Butcher, it was the beginning of something he couldn’t yet name—something that felt like reckoning, like unfinished business clawing its way back to the surface.