Chapter Seven #3
I bit his bicep, hard, and let myself believe him.
We kept at it until the sheets were a disaster and my whole body ached. After, we breathed together, the kind of heavy, animal breathing that only happens after a really good fight or a first fuck that changes your posture for days.
Eventually, I rolled over, stared at the ceiling fan. “Jack’s not gonna let you help us,” I said, the words tasting like gunmetal.
Zeke sighed, stretched, and reached for a cigarette from the bedside stand. “I know.”
“He’ll kill you,” I said, because nobody else would.
He looked me over, cigarette poised. “You might, too.”
“Not until after,” I said.
He grinned, and the whole room softened for a second. “I promise.”
We lay quiet, just the hum of the city and the old pipes groaning in the walls.
In the morning, I woke with his arms locked around my torso. I rolled out from under him, put on jeans, and checked my phone.
Twelve missed calls. All from Boss.
Zeke sat up, hair wild, scratches blooming red across his chest. “What’s wrong?”
“They started already,” I said. “Jack hit Mary’s. Two girls are missing.” I’d fucked up by waiting. I’d fucked up by wanting dick last night.
He was out of bed before I finished the sentence, pulling on a tee and his patched-up jacket. “We need to move.”
I snatched my cut, laced my boots, and we were out the door before the sun was up. I didn’t bother with makeup. I didn’t need to look alive. I needed to be it.
Out in the lot, our bikes sat side by side, engines hot from the night before.
He revved his, held my eye, and said, “Ready to fuck some shit up?”
The others filed out of the club and mounted their bikes. No plan. Just a ride into chaos. I fired up the Harley, felt its thunder rattle my knees, and grinned at him.
“I think I know where he took them,” Zeke said. “Overheard some shit before I left.”
***
What waited was a cinderblock farmhouse, half an hour off the main road, locked up with chain-link and the paranoia of men who trust nothing.
As we got close, I saw the SUVs parked out front and knew immediately it was a trap.
Didn’t matter. If you wanted to kill a wolf, sometimes you had to stick your arm in the hole.
I hit the comm. “Everyone in position?”
Aces was the first to answer. “Ready.”
Spade chimed in, voice excited. “Go signal in two.”
Joker said, "Come on, boss, make it loud.”
I twisted the throttle and skimmed the gates, Zeke at my flank. Security came out, guns up, all male, all dumb. We didn’t even stop. We rode straight through the line, scattering them like bowling pins, and as soon as we cleared the open ground, I braked and rolled off the bike.
Gunfire lit the air. Zeke barreled forward, not dodging but absorbing, moving with the confidence of nobody caring if they got shot.
I took cover behind the overturned grill, fired two rounds, clipped a guy in the knee, and watched him dance. Aces was already over the chain-link, silent and perfect, taking down two men.
The girls were in the basement. I knew the design.
I charged the side door, Zeke turning to cover me.
A man grabbed my arm from behind and tried to put me in a chokehold.
I slammed him into the doorjamb, elbowed him in the teeth, then used his head to unlock the door. Zeke followed, clearing the hall.
Down in the root cellar, two men stood watch. They looked up, saw me, and for a second, nobody moved. Then Zeke swung a length of pipe and broke one’s arm. The other reached for a gun, but I’d already shot him in the foot. He screamed, fell into the jam, and Zeke kicked him in the temple.
The girls huddled by a water heater, gagged and zip-tied. Zeke got them loose while I checked the perimeter. No more guards. I double-checked by firing a warning shot into the floor. Nothing but the sound of frantic breathing and someone sobbing.
The minute the girls were up, Zeke scooped one over his shoulder. The other ran on her own, limping but fast. We made it out to the bikes, gunshots still echoing.
Spade met us at the gate, blood on her face and a wild glint in her eye.
“Bit of a mess,” she said, voice high from the adrenaline.
“It was a test,” Zeke said. “He’s studying your resolve.”
When we got back to the strip, nobody followed. No cops ever came; Jack owned too many of them. The girls ran inside the casino, crying and hugging Boss, who wrapped them up with the tenderness of someone who’d seen too much loss.
I spent the next twenty-four hours moving between war rooms and battlefields, but the real fight had been happening in the closet-sized office Buck left me, now filled with blueprints, city records, and the raw heat of Zeke Smalls breathing down my neck.
Men had been few and far between since I arrived in Vegas.
Working too hard and trust issues were two things I could never move past until now.
He sat across from me, knees spread, hunched over the table with his forearms flexed and his eyes locked on the diagrams. Even when he was still, he radiated a kind of violence that shared the potential energy of a grenade with the pin barely hanging on.
He smelled like cold sweat and expensive leather, and every time he leaned closer, I felt my own body echo it, pulse kicking up, muscles coiling.
He traced a line on the map with one thick finger.
“Here’s where you go in,” he said, voice a low drone.
“Kitchen staff parks around back. Doors are alarmed, but Dad got lazy with the codes. Every Thursday, they rolled them to the same sequence.” He scrawled a string of numbers in the margin, then leaned back, chin up, daring me to question it.
I didn’t. I memorized the code and started mapping exit routes. “What about cameras?”
He shrugged. “Mostly for show. The night manager is a drunk; he sleeps through half the feeds. You hit him first, and the place goes blind.”
I liked the way he spoke in absolutes. No hedging. No ‘maybe’ or ‘if we were lucky.’ He was a man raised in a world where certainty was the only weapon that ever counted.
I caught him staring at my hands as I worked. My nails were bitten raw, the tips black with ink. “Something on your mind?” I asked.
He grinned, slow and wolfish. “Just trying to figure out if you are as dangerous as you pretended to be.”
I didn’t rise to it. “More than you know.”
He nodded, not offended. “That’s what I was hoping for.”
We worked in silence until my phone buzzed. It was a ping from Nines. The video feeds were ghosted.
I closed the folder and looked at him. “You sure about this?”
He cracked his knuckles. “I am.” He tapped the table. “You never asked why I left my father?”
“Or about what happened to Simone,” I said.
“Fucking Simone wouldn’t leave. I tried to make her.
I’ve tried before. But he gives her shit.
Money. Cars. And then he goes back to treating her like shit.
” He looked down at the table. When he looked up, a sadness filled his eyes.
“I told my father I’d had enough, and he pulled a gun.
He pressed the end of the barrel to my forehead.
I got up and walked out, wondering if he’d shoot me in the back.
Instead, he told me I was just like my mother.
I took it as a compliment; he meant it as an insult. ”
“I’m sorry, Zeke.” I got up and stood behind him, placing my hands on his shoulders.
He placed a hand on mine and stood, towering over me, pressing his lips against mine, the hunger deeper, more intense. Aces walked in and turned around, and left, closing the door as Zeke lay me on the table.
He had my jeans off before I had a chance to breathe, my panties dangling around my left foot while he buried his face between my legs.
The sound of him eating me was exquisite to the ears; his moans and gasps touched every inch of my soul.
I shook and came with his tongue inside me, his thumb slowly rubbing around my clit.
He sat me up, his lips wet with my juices.
I kissed him hard, tasting myself, wanting to enjoy what he worked so very easily to create.
“Fuck, Zeke,” I said, “you can’t just up and do that anytime you like.”
“I can and I will,” was his only reply.
***
As the sun went down, I climbed to the roof. From up there, the city didn’t look so tough. Vegas was just a sprawl of lights, flickering promises and lies, stitched together by highways and broken dreams. I let the wind whip through my hair, the cold bite making my eyes sting.
I let myself feel fear, just for a second. The kind that got under your ribs and shook your bones. The kind you couldn’t ever talk about, not to anyone.
I closed my eyes and remembered every time someone told me I’d end up dead in a ditch. I remembered my mother, her voice and her ghosts. I remembered the old woman by the lake, Buck, and the look in Zeke’s eyes when he’d told me he wanted his father dead.
I opened my eyes and let the city burn itself into my memory. The war was real now, not just a metaphor. The cut on my back felt heavier than ever.
***
Just before midnight, I straddled my Harley and waited by the gates. The rest of the crew lined up behind me, engines coughing and rattling in the cold desert air. We all wore our colors, but that night it felt like we were naked—exposed, raw, nothing between us and what was coming.
Zeke rolled up last, his bike black as sin and twice as loud. He parked beside me, boots planted, arms crossed. He looked at me, and for a second, all the noise faded away.
“You ready?” he asked.
I met his gaze. “Born ready.”
He smiled, but there was no joy in it. Only the shared knowledge that we were about to do something unforgivable.
I revved the engine, the sound drowning out doubt and mercy and every last trace of my old life.
We rolled out as one, the road ahead dark but not empty. That’s when the two calls came in, sending Zeke in one direction and me in another.