Chapter Nine #2
When we finally pulled off the highway, out by the dry lakebed where nothing ever lived, I dropped the bike and fell to my knees. The rest of the crew watched me, silent. Nobody said a word about the money. Nobody even touched the bags.
I stared at my hands, slick with blood. The wind dried it to a sticky film, but I could still smell it—Zeke, everywhere, all over me.
Joker limped over, sat next to me, and lit a cigarette. She passed it my way, her hand shaking.
"Sorry, boss," she said.
I smoked it down to the filter. I didn’t remember breathing in, just the burn in my chest and the acid in my stomach. I looked up at the sky, hoping for stars, but all I got was black.
Jack Smalls had killed the only man I ever trusted. And now, there was only one thing left to do.
I stood, wiped my hands on my jeans, and looked at the crew. "This isn't over," I said. My voice sounded dead, hollow.
The women nodded, eyes hard.
Joker said it first. She took the burnt end of the cigarette, flicked it onto the sand, and looked right at me. “We fuckin’ kill him.”
There wasn’t any debate. There had never been. Just a moment where I had to remember how to breathe, how to stand, and not shake, while everyone around me waited for my word. Even Glitz, who mostly cared for the green, looked at me like money wasn’t worth shit if we didn’t end Jack Small for good.
I nodded, and that was it. The plan was gospel. Kill Jack Small at all costs.
We rode back, the long way, around the skeleton suburbs east of town, each neighborhood more unfinished than the last. I didn’t remember the ride, just the heat of the wind and the way the blood stuck in the seams of my jeans, drying but never, ever leaving.
At the clubhouse, the lights were all off, but I saw the movement inside.
Stephanie was there, sitting at the head of the old bar, two of her own crew from the NYC chapter behind her.
She was dressed for a biker funeral, wearing all black, with a silver chain at her neck.
The look she gave me when I entered was a mix of anger, pride, and something else.
Pity, maybe. Or the ghost of pity, stretched too thin to show.
I hung my cut on the chair and walked right to her. “It’s done,” I said. My voice cracked.
She stood. “Your crew took three million off a cartel warehouse. Cops are turning the city inside out.”
I shrugged. “Let them.”
She studied my face. I realized then that, for the first time, I was older than she’d ever seemed to me before. I wasn’t a kid anymore. If I ever had been. “Jack will answer for it,” I heard myself say.
Stephanie nodded, but her jaw was tight. “We’ll fix this, Selene. But not with a gunshot on the Strip. That’s a war nobody wins.”
“Maybe that’s what it’s supposed to be,” I said, and felt the bitterness burn up through my teeth.
Stephanie didn’t flinch from it. “He killed club members.” Her eyes flicked to the other women, all of them battered and rimed in sweat, all of them pretending not to watch the scene. “So what’s your move?”
I looked at the money, at Joker’s leg where she’d tied off the wound with an old club scarf, at the way Spade kept her arms crossed and her eyes locked on the wall, as if by sheer will she could bring Zeke back.
I thought of my mother’s voice, when she’d take the switch to me and say, ‘What you start, you finish.’
“I kill him,” I said. “I take it all.”
Demise let out a low whistle. “Just you?” she said, and I realized she meant it. Not a challenge. Not a taunt. Just a question of logistics, a practical inquiry from a woman who’d killed more men than I’d slept with.
“Just me,” I said. “He’ll expect a crew. He won’t expect… this.”Stephanie took a step closer and, impossibly, hugged me. I felt her ribs through the jacket, her head pressed against mine. It lasted only a second, but it was a second I needed.
“Whatever you do,” she whispered, “make it clean. And leave them something to fear.”
“I always do,” I said, and she smiled—just a flash of teeth and then gone.
I turned to Joker. “You good?”
She laughed, dark and wet. “You gonna ask me to stay home?”
“You can’t run,” I said. “You can bleed, though, if you’re stupid.”
She winked. “I’ll take the pain.”
The rest watched, waiting for orders. I gave them anyway. “Lay low till midnight. He’s coming for us. We get him first.”
Tempest arched her back, yawned like a dog. “You want him alive?”
“Only his head,” I said.
Glitz, expression sour, said, “You want the money split or burned?”
“Both,” I said. “Dump half in the canal. Send the rest to the girls.”
Nines nodded, already tapping out instructions on her phone. “I’ll get the word out.”
Joker clapped me once on the back, more bruising than anything, and peeled off.
Spade and Tempest did too, like wolves vanishing into the night.
I waited until the room was empty, until it was only me and Demise and the slow tick of the ancient clock.
The vodka on the table glistened, untouched.
I poured two, then pushed one across to her.
She raised it, and we drank, silent. When it was done, she said, “You loved him.”
I didn’t answer. What was there to say?
She reached into her own jacket, pulled out a single round. “Hollow point,” she said. “No exit wound. If you want it to hurt, you shoot him just under the ribs. If you want it quick… aim for the eye.”
I took the bullet, rolled it in my palm. It felt heavy as a wedding ring.
“He has it coming,” Demise said. She smiled, got up, and left me to the quiet and the ghosts.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the sound of Zeke’s laugh, the heat of him behind me, but memory is a liar. All I could conjure was the hollowness of his chest, the way blood pools and spreads when a heart stops working.
At midnight, I put the bullet in my Glock, chambered it, and counted to ten. I left nothing behind when I walked out, not even a note. I had nobody to write one to.
The sky was still black. The city was still dead. But for the first time, as I rode west into the core of Vegas, I felt every nerve of myself alive, singing with hate and the promise of ending.
I was going to kill Jack Smalls.
And it wasn’t about revenge, not anymore. It was about creating a new world from the ashes of the old.