Chapter Two
Evan
Rain slicks the pavement into a mirror as I cut behind the closed bait shop and park where the streetlight doesn’t reach. The air smells like river rot and old gasoline. Perfect place for men who don’t want witnesses or have a fetish for fish guts.
My phone buzzes once—one vibration, then dead. A pin drop on the map. A reminder that they always know where I am.
I walk anyway.
It isn’t far.
Five minutes down the back road, I come upon a warehouse stained the color of dried blood, its corrugated siding sagging under the weight of years.
The loading dock is a ruin, ringed with busted pallets and slick with algae from seasons of rain.
The sign overhead has been painted over so many times that the old letters bleed through: Sutter Mills, then something else, now nothing at all.
A perfect void. The warehouse door stands half-open, like a mouth expecting prey.
Inside, a single bulb swings on a chain, throwing light in slow, sickly circles that slide over the uneven concrete.
Shadows leap and vanish with every movement, turning the stacked pallets and rusted machinery into hunched, watching beasts.
In the center of it all stands Midnight, enforcer for the Sons of Sorrow MC, dressed head-to-toe in black, boots planted as if nothing in the world could move him.
His hands are in his pockets like he’s waiting for a city bus, not holding my life by the throat.
He doesn’t smile, doesn’t blink, just tracks my approach with the cold confidence of a raptor. The only break in his silhouette is the white stitching of his cut: SONS OF SORROW, the patchwork of violence that has stitched him together.
“Evan,” he says, voice calm as a morgue. “You’re late.”
“I’m on time,” I answer, because I’m stupid enough to pretend pride still matters. My ribs tighten as I step closer. “Before I say another damn thing, show me the proof.”
Midnight lifts an eyebrow, more gesture than facial expression.
He glances to the shadows behind him — a human shape stirring, silent, always at his back.
Another one of the Sons, because even Midnight wouldn’t be so stupid as to meet me here alone.
With the smoothness of a magician, he slides a phone from his inside jacket pocket and holds it up so I can see.
He taps the screen.
June’s face fills the screen, a ghost broadcast from another world.
She’s slumped on a stained mattress—her hair tangled, her lips cracked, a bruise blooming purple along her cheekbone.
Her eyes are glassy, pupils blown wide, and there’s a strip of duct tape on her wrist where she must have fought them and lost. When she blinks at the camera, the sound that comes out of her is barely a whisper.
“Evan… please…”
Then the video cuts.
I freeze. It’s as if some hinge inside me snaps loose. My heart stutters, my breath saws between my teeth, and all the anger I carried here melts into the kind of terror that turns grown men into children.
“She’s alive. For now.” Midnight slips the phone back into his jacket, casual as a man putting away a wallet. “That’s what you came for, right? A little hope? Just enough to keep you obedient?”
My jaw locks so tight that it hurts. Every word he says is like a hand squeezing my windpipe. “What do you want?”
He takes a step forward. The swinging bulb paints his face in slices—eyes, cheekbones, the faint edge of a scar near his mouth. He looks like violence in human form, polished and patient. He takes time with his words, as if savoring the taste of them before spitting them at me.
“You already know,” he says. “I’m running out of patience. We sent you in to get information. You said you had a way — they’d trust you, you could get close, you could get access. The bartender.”
Molly.
The word is a knife with a familiar handle stuck right in my heart. He doesn’t say her name — he doesn’t need to; they’ve made her a target, and they’ve made me the weapon.
“I’m working on it,” I say. I hear how desperate it sounds, even before the words die out.
“Working on it.” Midnight repeats it, slow, as if he’s tasting spoiled food. He doesn’t look angry — just bored, the way a lion is bored before it bites.
“I asked her out.” I drag the words up, each syllable a lead weight.
“And?”
“She said no.” The words taste like ash.
Midnight tilts his head, as if he’s examining a puzzle with a missing piece. “She said no?”
“She panicked,” I say, and now the panic’s in my voice, too. “She said she had homework. She ran.”
Midnight stares at me like I just confessed I can’t read.
“Homework,” he says flat. “Cute.”
“It’s not —” I stop myself. Explaining Molly to him would be like explaining gravity to a rabid bear. “She’s cautious. Guarded. I’ll get another shot.”
“You don’t have time for shots,” he says. Quiet. Certain. “You have time for results.”
My pulse hammers. “I’m doing everything you asked.”
‘Asked’ is being generous. Midnight doesn’t ask. Midnight determines what he needs, tracks down every weakness you have, and introduces himself by barging into your life with a smile and a ransom letter showing your little sister bound and gagged.
He moves so fast it almost feels like I imagined it.
One second he’s eight feet away, the next he’s in my face, hand closing around my neck.
He backs me into a stack of empty crates so hard the wood splits.
His grip isn’t frantic—it’s measured, a demonstration of force.
I can feel the heat of his skin through the collar, thumb pressed right over my jugular.
“I need you to listen carefully,” Midnight says softly.
His breath is cool, his words almost kind.
“The Sons of Sorrow didn’t pick you because you’re charming, or trustworthy, or even smart.
We picked you because you’re a nomad, a nowhere man, a coin that spends easy because it’s never meant anything to anyone.
” His grip tightens, not enough to choke, but enough to let me know exactly how it would feel if he wanted to.
My vision sparks at the edges, the world tunneling down to the blue fire of his eyes.
“You get close to the Twisted Devils,” he murmurs.
“Through the bartender, like you said. But if that doesn’t work, you go through an ol’ lady who’s bored with her ol’ man and is looking for someone to fuck on the side.
Or you use a prospect. Or one of their hang-arounds.
I don’t care if you have to blow the fucking clubhouse dog, you get us what we need to know about their operation, or you find out what happens to your sister when I run out of patience. ”
I choke out, “I’m trying.”
Midnight’s eyes are empty. “Try harder.”
He releases me, straightens the collar of my shirt, then shoves me backward. I stumble, coughing, throat burning. Midnight watches like he’s bored.
“You don’t do the job,” he says, “June pays the price. And I promise you, no matter what you can imagine, we will do worse to her. By the time she dies, she will not be human.”
The words land clean. Casual. Like her torture is just a fact of life.
Every piece of me wants to shake, to scream, to throw myself at him and beat him into the concrete floor until my hands are bloody, useless stumps.
But I see my sister’s face on that cellphone screen, bruised and begging.
So I do what they’ve trained me to do.
I swallow my pride, and my hate, and I nod.
Midnight steps back into the swing of the light, the bulb carving shadows across his cut — SONS OF SORROW arched like a funeral banner. He turns like he’s done with me.
“One more thing,” he says over his shoulder.
“What.”
He stops, profile sharp against the line of light. His mouth twitches — not a smile, but something worse.
“If the bartender keeps saying no,” he says, “make her say yes.”