Chapter 14 Reckoning
RECKONING
IRISH
Four months of recovery, and my body had finally sent me a letter of apology.
The ride home from the depot was ninety minutes of desert highway in the blue hour before dawn, and I spent every one of those minutes cataloguing the miracle that was my rebuilt self.
My Harley rumbled between my thighs with the low, steady vibration that had been the heartbeat of my adult life—engine heat rising through the frame into my palms, my wrists, the bones of my forearms. The handlebars buzzed against my split knuckles inside the leather gloves, a dull throb of torn skin stuck to the lining, and the pain was good.
The pain was earned. The exhaust popped on a downshift as we crested a ridge, and the desert wind hit cold and clean below my visor, carrying sage and the fading ghost of smoke from a depot we'd ripped apart, and underneath the wind and the engine note and the ache in my ribs where an elbow had connected during the dock fight, the inventory kept running.
Four hostiles. Two with my fists—a jab-cross-hook that had dropped the first one cold, a wrench off a workbench for the second because the bastard was wearing Kevlar and punching body armor was a lesson you only ever needed once.
My rebuilt leg pivoting under me without a whisper.
Footwork instinctive, the calf muscle firing exactly as Rosa's program had promised, four months of agony translating into a body that moved the way it used to move.
And Blade's face afterward—the hard angles going soft, the awe quiet and genuine—and two words that rewired every shitty morning of those four months into the prologue of a comeback: "Welcome back. "
Welcome back. Yeah. I was.
The white line flickered under my headlight in a rhythm that hypnotized if you let it, so I didn't let it.
I listened instead. Behind me, Dec's V-twin held its position two bike-lengths back, the deeper growl of his engine distinguishable from every other bike in the convoy the way his breathing was distinguishable from every other sound in a room—lower, steadier, a frequency I'd been tuning to for eight years.
Blade rode beside him. Behind them, Axel, then the rest, a chain of headlights threading through the dark desert like a lit fuse burning toward home.
The sky was cracking open ahead of us in long strokes of copper and gold, the horizon shimmering where the heat of the coming day met the cold of the dying night.
I breathed through the visor and felt the engine's vibration travel through the pegs into the soles of my boots, up my shins, into the rebuilt leg that held steady on the highway the way it had held steady in the dock bay, and I should have been thinking about victory.
About the one hundred and forty-seven serial numbers.
About the case that would bury Raymond Holt.
Instead I was thinking about seventeen seconds.
The memory had been sitting in my chest since the dock fight, patient and heavy, waiting for a quiet moment to detonate. It found one now, on a desert highway at sixty miles an hour with the sky turning colors I didn't have names for.
Dec's comms channel going to static. Not a pause, not a break in transmission—a hard, percussive burst of white noise that obliterated his voice mid-sentence, followed by a low rumble that I felt through the speaker even from the other building, followed by silence.
A silence that had weight. That had mass.
The green indicator light on Bravo's console had stayed lit, which meant the channel was open, which meant the silence wasn't a disconnection—it was an absence.
His voice had been there and then it hadn't, and the difference between those two states was the difference between the world having a floor and the world being a hole.
Seventeen seconds. Nolan had counted. Nolan counted everything, and he'd told me later that it was seventeen seconds between the explosion and Dec's voice coming back, and in those seventeen seconds I had stood in a dock bay surrounded by stolen military weapons with a wrench in one hand and serial numbers blurring on the crate in front of me because the part of my brain that processed language had shut down.
Redirected. Every available resource rerouted to one task: listening for a frequency that wasn't there.
My stomach had dropped through the concrete floor.
My chest had filled with a cold, liquid thing that tasted like metal and spread like drowning, and somewhere around second eight or nine, tears had started running down my face—involuntary, silent, the body expressing what the mind couldn't articulate—and I'd turned away from Blade so he wouldn't see.
Seventeen seconds of believing the person I'd built my life around was dead.
Then his voice had come back. Rough. Alive.
Calling positions like a man who'd just walked out of a detonation and was already cataloguing the next threat.
And I'd wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and picked up the next crate lid and read the serial number into the comms because the mission didn't stop for the fact that my heart had just been returned to me.
I filed it in the mental cabinet labeled THINGS THAT WILL DESTROY ME IF I LOOK AT THEM DIRECTLY and twisted the throttle.
The engine responded with a surge that I felt in my teeth, the vibration deepening, the wheels eating asphalt, and the clubhouse appeared over the last ridge like an answer to a question I hadn't known I was asking.
Scarred. Standing. Gate patched with plywood and welded steel. Windows still boarded. Garage roof sagging where the fire had weakened the beams. Our home, battered and stubborn, refusing to fall down.
Like us.
The convoy rolled through the gate in a low thunder of engines, bikes peeling off toward the courtyard, the truck with the wounded rumbling toward the infirmary entrance.
I killed my engine and swung off the saddle and the sudden absence of vibration after ninety minutes made my legs feel like they belonged to someone else, the ground too still beneath boots that had been humming for an hour and a half.
Tyler was already out of the command van, the driver's door open, his lean frame silhouetted against the interior light. And beside him—stepping down from the passenger side with a laptop clutched against his chest like a shield he'd built from data and conviction—was Nolan.
I caught the moment his eyes found Dec dismounting three bikes over, the way his body went rigid with a relief so violent it looked like pain, and then his gaze swung to me and the laptop was on the van's hood—abandoned, discarded, the most important evidence in a federal conspiracy case set down on sheet metal like a coffee cup—and he was moving.
Walk to jog to nearly a sprint, his stride uncoordinated, desperate, the urgency of someone who'd spent the last three hours listening to gunfire through a speaker and hadn't known if the voices on the other end would still be breathing at dawn.
He hit Dec first. Both arms around his neck, his whole weight colliding with Dec's chest, and the force of it staggered Dec backward half a step—Dec, who didn't stagger for anything, who absorbed force the way mountains absorbed weather, rocked back on his heels by a hundred and eighty pounds of forensic accountant.
Then Nolan's hand shot out sideways and grabbed the front of my cut and pulled, and I went, and the three of us tangled together in the courtyard of a motorcycle clubhouse at dawn while the sky burned orange above us.
Dec's arm circled my waist. Nolan's forehead pressed into my neck.
I had one hand fisted in Nolan's shirt and the other gripping the back of Dec's cut, and we held on.
Not briefly. Not politely. We held on the way you hold on when the alternative is falling apart, three bodies locked together with the full-contact desperation of people who'd spent a night listening to each other almost die.
Around us, the courtyard went quiet. Boots stopped on gravel. Conversations trailed off mid-sentence. Every man within fifty yards could see exactly what we were, and the word for it wasn't complicated.
"You're shaking," Nolan whispered against my collar, his breath hot and unsteady on my skin.
"So are you."
"Both of you stop shaking." Dec, low, his mouth against my hair, and the fact that his own voice carried the faintest tremor made the instruction beautifully hypocritical.
The compound stirred back into motion around us the way a river resumes flowing around a stone.
Rosa emerged from the infirmary, silver-streaked hair pulled back, hands already gloved, scanning the dismounting riders with the clinical efficiency of a woman who'd been triaging bikers since before most of us were born.
Kai was behind her, and the moment Axel swung off his Harley—upright, intact, a cut on his forearm but walking—Kai's expression did the thing it always did when the worst thing he'd imagined didn't happen.
A fracture. Relief so sharp it looked like breaking.
He crossed to Axel in three strides and gripped his arm and just held it, fingers pressing into the bicep, confirming through touch what his eyes were telling him.
Maria appeared at the infirmary door, apron still on, her twins behind her peering around her legs with wide-eyed curiosity.
She moved to the wounded being helped off the truck—Tank guiding one brother with a shrapnel graze across the tailgate, Tyler appearing at his side to take the weight of another, the two of them moving in the instinctive coordination of men who'd been working together long enough that communication was muscle memory.
Maria's hands were calm. Practiced. The hands of a woman who'd married a club president with her eyes open and would make the same choice tomorrow.