Epilogue
Wrecker
Istepped into the church room at the compound, the air thick with sweat and old gun oil, and the burn of the overhead fluorescents strobing each man’s face into a mask of ruin.
It was built to look like a regular boardroom—shitty paneling, heavy Texas Star table, a print of the Alamo to give outsiders a history lesson—but that was a lie.
The ghosts here weren’t colonial; they were recent, and they all had my name carved into their teeth.
Bronc sat at the head of the table, forearms spread like a bar bouncer’s barricade, eyes fixed on the documents in front of him but not seeing them.
He looked older than usual, and for a moment I wondered if the weight of Menace’s departure had settled the decades he’d always managed to outrun right into his spine.
If it had, I owed Menace a beating for leaving me alone with this crowd.
Arsenal was to Bronc’s right, next to an empty chair, his hands locked in a cathedral, face unreadable.
Most would call him taciturn; I called him a human polygraph with a hair trigger.
On Bronc’s left, Big Papa nursed a cup of black coffee, calm radiating off of him, belying the scars he carried.
He watched me walk in, his eyes following me like I had the answers to the universe.
At the end, Doc leaned back in his chair, black frame glasses, like fucking Superman looking for a phone booth.
Mine was the only empty chair besides Menace’s, sitting there reminding us our second was no longer here.
Bronc didn’t say anything for a minute. He just waited for me to take my seat, which I did. We all were looking at him. The clock on the wall ticked at quarter speed.
“Let’s start,” he said, not so much an order as a mercy killing. “First thing—” and here he picked up a single piece of paper, then set it back down, as if the effort of holding the truth was just too much, “Menace is gone.”
He let the words hang. No surprises in the room; just the way it needed to be said, to be ritualized.
“You make it sound like he’s dead,” Arsenal grumbled, so flat you could iron a shirt on it. “He’s just King of the Midwest now. But might as well be the same thing.”
Bronc cracked a smile, but it was the kind of smile you give a dying dog before you put the bullet in.
“Means we’re down a VP,” Bronc continued, glancing at the list but not reading it. “Rules are rules. Even if the last six months have proven we’re the only pack or MC in America that gives a fuck about rules anymore.”
He looked at me, and I braced for the axe.
“Wrecker, I want you as VP,” Bronc said.
I didn’t move, didn’t even blink, because to do so would be to admit I hadn’t seen it coming, and nothing is more dangerous than being predictable in this club. But my stomach did a weird somersault, and a thin vein in my temple throbbed so hard I thought it might tap out on its own.
“Vote?” I said, because someone had to say it.
Arsenal’s hand went up instantly. “Aye.” He looked at me as if daring me to question it.
Big Papa followed, slower, but with more weight. “Aye.”
Doc shrugged. “No one else on the payroll could keep up with Bronc’s disaster curve. Aye.”
That left Bronc. “I don’t get a vote,” he said. “But if I did—” and here he dropped the mask for just a second—“it’d be a fuck yes.”
I could have said something glib, something to bleed the tension out, but my throat was suddenly full of static. I just nodded, letting it settle over me like a bad tattoo.
“Good,” Bronc said. “Gavel it.” He rapped a fist on the table. “Next, we need a new enforcer. Arsenal, thoughts?”
Arsenal didn’t hesitate. “Finn. ‘Gunner’ Walsh. Cattle foreman. Busted two coyotes last month with his bare hands, then made breakfast for the ranch crew before the sun was up. Never missed a church service. Never missed a Sunday ride. Never snitched, never soft.”
Doc looked skeptical. “He’s what, twenty-six? Kid’s got the emotional IQ of a whitetail.”
“He’s got the fear response of a tornado siren,” Arsenal said, dry. “That’s what I want in an enforcer. Loyalty, speed, and the willingness to go through a wall if I tell him to. He learns the rest.”
Big Papa nodded. “We’ve seen worse.”
“Wrecker, thoughts?” Bronc asked.
“Never had a problem with Gunner,” I said. “If you want him, I’ll break him in.”
Bronc signed off with a wave. “Done. I’ll talk to Gunner tonight.” He eyed Arsenal. “Get the initiation planned. Make it memorable. Next.”
The rhythm of these meetings was clockwork—officers first, then the club business, then the dark shit. The last category was always the longest.
“Now, Skeeter,” Bronc said. “We got him locked up. Someone was pulling his strings, and he ain’t sayin’ who. Before I beat him to death, got ideas?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I gotta lead.”
I leaned in, because the walls had ears, even here.
“Server breach two weeks ago wasn’t just the MC.
The Dairyville Bank’s database got mirrored.
Someone’s been filtering withdrawals and deposits for over a month.
I built a dummy network off our own router to feed them fake logins, but they keep coming.
Whoever’s running Skeeter is smarter than we thought. ”
Arsenal actually looked impressed. “You’re feeding them honey-trap data?”
“Every day,” I said. “So far, they think they’re bleeding us dry. But the money they’re stealing doesn’t exist. Not in the real world. It’s a shell game.”
Doc grinned, the first time all morning. “Beautiful.”
Bronc drummed his fingers on the table. “You got a trace?”
I nodded. “Last ping was from an IP block outside Plainview. Rural. Could be a relay, could be a trailer park. But I’ll find out tonight.”
Big Papa frowned. “Going alone?”
“Yeah, I got this. It needs to be quiet.” He knew I had it under control.
Bronc eyed me one last time, like he was measuring the difference between what I was and what he hoped I’d become. “Don’t die, Wrecker,” he said, not unkindly. “I need someone to give Menace shit when he comes back for a visit.”
The meeting ended in a slow dissolving of bodies—Arsenal out first, then Doc, then Big Papa. Bronc and I were last, and when it was just us, the air in the room got thinner.
“Anything else?” I asked.
Bronc looked at me, and for a moment, he didn’t look like an Alpha, or a boss, or a soldier. He just looked like a man who’d lost too much.
“You sure you want this?” he asked, quiet. “It’s never what you think it’s going to be.”
I thought about the last week—the blood, the betrayal, the way every old story had replayed itself with new actors.
I thought about Savannah and Menace, alone up there in the dead heart of the country.
I thought about the hollow place inside me that had never gone away, not since I was a kid, and learned what it meant to be prey.
“I never wanted anything more,” I said, and for once, I meant it.
Bronc nodded. “Good. Then go break some heads.”
He left, the door closing with a soft click.
I sat in the silence for a while, counting the cracks in the ceiling. There could be a war coming, and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t just a weapon. I was the man who pointed it.
Outside, the sun was starting to sink. I zipped my jacket, checked my sidearm, and got on the road.
There was a job to do.
Dusk had already gone gray when I ditched the bike behind a patch of scrub brush, a mile out from the mark’s location.
I walked the rest, boots silent on the powder dirt, the loaded 9mm bouncing against my ribs with each stride.
The wind was sharp, dry, and full of the distant stink of livestock and burning mesquite.
It felt like every molecule in the world was waiting for the next mistake.
The house sat on an acre of nothing, a white box with a black shingle roof and fake colonial shutters, the kind that always came pre-aged from a manufactured lot.
This one had a deck built all the way around.
The windows were shut, curtains drawn, but warm light leaked from the living room, a bad yellow that made my eyes ache.
There was a single car in the gravel drive—a basic sedan, silver, with a vanity plate bracket for a college no one outside of Texas would recognize.
I slid around the perimeter, eyes cataloging the vulnerabilities: one camera on the eave, a motion light over the porch, locks from the seventies.
I’d seen harder targets at the Dairy Queen.
First move: kill the video. I dropped prone behind the back fence, rolled out the pocket laptop, and pinged the signal.
The camera was live, but routed through a generic Chinese app, so it took two minutes to set a loop, twenty seconds to spoof the timestamp, and less than a breath to render the system blind to everything that mattered.
I checked for other cameras on the network.
Four pointed inside—living room, bedroom one, bedroom two, and the kitchen.
Nobody home. All cameras looped for the same twenty seconds.
I put the laptop away, slid on my leather gloves, and eased up to the kitchen door. It was locked. I picked it in less than a minute, the rattle of tumblers as easy as flipping a light switch. I ghosted inside and closed the door behind me.
The kitchen was immaculate. No dishes, no stains, nothing in the sink but the silver gleam of the garbage disposal mouth. The only clue that anyone lived here was a single mug by the coffeemaker. I palmed it, checked the lipstick, and put it back exactly where it was.
I moved room by room. The living room was a catalog spread: mid-century couch, a rug that probably cost more than my first car, everything arranged with obsessive symmetry.
The TV was wall-mounted; the remote nested perfectly parallel to a paperback book on the glass coffee table.
I flipped the book open—no annotations, but the title was some kind of stalker romance. I scanned a few pages. Wow. Dark shit.
I ventured into the first of the two bedrooms. Looked like a guestroom, barely slept in, a hospital-cornered twin bed and a bookshelf full of more questionable romance novels.
I pulled one and found lots of dog-eared pages.
My eyes scanned a few paragraphs that contained some fucked-up shit. I put the book back, stifling a laugh.
The main bedroom was next. The bed was made, the closet open.
No men’s clothing, no shoes larger than a size seven.
I touched the hangers, let my fingers glide across little black dresses and a variety of concert t-shirts.
Some brands were everyday wear, some were high end—Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, a few pieces with French names I couldn’t pronounce.
I checked the dresser, finding nothing but folded lingerie, all black or red, and a collection of silk scarves.
I looked under the tray of jewelry—no gun, no drugs, just a box of business cards from banks and title companies in Amarillo.
The nightstand was more interesting. Second drawer: two paperback romance novels with the spines broken and a dog-eared page in each.
Beneath, a baggie with a spare key and a prepaid Visa.
At the bottom, a small zippered pouch with a high-dollar pink cordless dildo.
In another velvet pouch, a silver butt plug with a jeweled heart at the top, a bottle of lube, and a small black notebook with an elastic band.
I pocketed the notebook. If it turned out to be a sex journal, it’d be the second-most embarrassing thing I’d read tonight.
Last, the office area. The desk was spotless, but the desk calendar was full of names and numbers, each scribbled in a different colored pen. I used my phone to photograph each page, then searched the desk for a laptop. Not here. She must have it with her.
I went back to the kitchen. I was about to leave when I saw, pinned to the fridge by a smiley-faced magnet, a cheap five-by-seven photo in a plastic frame. The kind you’d get at a fair.
Four people in the photo: a man, grinning like he was about to kill the cameraman; a woman in a pastel dress; and two teenagers—a boy and a girl, almost identical except for the length of the hair. The boy was Axel Reid and the girl, his twin sister, fucking Parker.
The Reids were Iron Valor Pack until Valorie and Roger died in a car accident several years ago.
Tragic. We stood by their kids Axel and his fucking twin sister, Parker.
Took care of them. Axel handled the books at Bronc’s shop for two years while Parker went to college.
She graduated, and they both decided to leave the pack.
Gotta do research to see where they supposedly went.
Fucking traitors.
A car crunched onto the gravel outside. I blinked the sweat from my eyes, shoved the photo back, and headed to the back door as her feet hit the front porch. I heard the front door lock code beep as I let myself out.
I’d put on the mask I used anytime I needed to conduct any kind of stealthy shit. Black with creepy as fuck white eyes and mouth. Wearing black from head to toe, there was no way she could identify me. I fucking wanted the bitch to see me.
She turned on the back porch lights and pulled back the curtains on the large picture window so she could check the back deck and yard.
That’s where I waited just off to the side.
Then she turned out the lights, and I took a step directly into her line of sight.
Mother fucking fuck. She was gorgeous as she stood frozen, with a look of terror on her face when she saw me standing just feet away from her on the other side of that window. My dick was instantly hard.
I blew her a kiss with my gloved hand and walked away. I knew she wouldn’t call anyone for help. Matter of fact. My bet was, she went straight to her bedroom nightstand.