Chapter 16 Nitro
Nitro
Augustine loitered behind me, picking dried blood from his cuticles with a switchblade I’d given him as a joke.
The tension wasn’t in the air; it was the air, dense as bunker concrete and just as breathable.
The boys were all here—Seneca, Augustine, two of the prospects—and every last one of them tracked the blue-and-white taillights till they vanished over the rise.
Damron stood with his back to the flag, arms crossed, the scars on his knuckles whiter than the crossbones tattooed above them. He didn’t say a word until I’d finished watching the road. When I turned, he pointed at the long table and said, “Sit,” voice flat as steel in snow.
The chapel wasn’t for prayer. It was for business that didn’t belong on paper.
The walls sweated old motor oil and bad decisions.
The table was oak, but you could barely see the wood beneath a palimpsest of cigarette burns, knife gouges, and the acid signatures of three generations of outlaws.
Even the air here tasted like a dare—half nicotine, half death wish.
I sat, folding my hands to hide the swelling and the new tape. Seneca flanked me, knife already sheathed, eyes scanning the ceiling as if the Russians might drop in from above.
Nobody lit a smoke, not yet.
Damron let the silence bloom. He wanted to see who would crack first. His own eyes were clear, but the rest of him looked built from scavenged parts—jaw stitched where a bottle had once introduced itself, brow caved at the bridge from years of getting in the last word.
His President’s patch was the only thing on his body without a scar.
He laid his hands palms down on the table, and just like that, the room was in session.
“Anyone wanna tell me what the fuck is going on?” He aimed the words at me, but his gaze swept the whole table, daring anyone else to volunteer.
I felt the tick of my jaw, like an old wound testing itself. I tried to keep my voice low, but it still came out tight. “It’s Russians. Or whoever’s writing their checks. They took her.”
“Her?” Damron’s lip curled. “You mean the scientist. The one whose face is currently melting my phone with news alerts.”
I nodded. “Seraphina. She’s not just some—” I stopped, felt all four sets of eyes pin me to the chair. “They want her for what she knows. And I let them have her.”
Seneca leaned in, his ruined jaw gleaming under the strip lights. “You sure it’s not just the feds playing grab-ass again?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “The way they moved, the way they covered the exit… It was pro. Not federal, not local. They didn’t want to arrest her. They wanted her to disappear.”
Augustine snorted. “You got all this from a news report?”
“I got it from the way she looked last time I saw her,” I said. “And from the fact that nobody’s claimed responsibility, not even a ransom call. That’s not how the Feds work. It’s how black-market extraction works.”
Nobody spoke. I felt the words bounce around the room, looking for somewhere to stick. Seneca flicked a Zippo open, closed, open, closed, but didn’t light. Damron stared at me with the patience of a snake sunning on a hot rock.
“You got a thing for this woman, Nitro?” His tone was almost gentle, which made it worse.
I let the lie die on the table. “Yeah. I do.”
He chewed that over, tongue worrying something in the gap of his teeth. “You think she’s worth this much trouble?”
“She’s not a civilian,” I said. “And she’s not just a one-night stand. She’s…” I fished for a word, failed, and went with the only truth I had. “She’s one of us.”
Seneca’s grin was a skull. “So we go to war for her?”
“Not war,” I said. “Just extraction. In and out, like a night job.”
Damron tapped the table, slow and deliberate. “What if it’s not Russians? What if it’s someone using her to get to you?”
I shook my head. “I’m not that important.”
Damron laughed, a dry, mean sound. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
The words hung there, daring someone to knock them down. Seneca finally lit his cigarette, inhaled, then let the smoke fan out toward the ceiling.
Augustine broke the tension. “If they wanted Nitro dead, they’d have done it in his sleep. They want the girl for something else.”
Damron nodded, once. “So we find out what. And we get her back, or we bury the men who took her. Either way, we finish this.”
He looked at me, gaze unblinking. “You got any other surprises?”
I met his eyes. “No. Just one thing: If it goes bad, I’m the only one who burns. You keep the club out of it.”
He smiled, but it was all teeth. “That’s not how this works. You know that.”
Seneca crushed out his smoke on the bare table, left the butt in a scorched ring. “So what’s the move?”
Damron folded his hands, thinking it through. He spoke like a man who’d already decided, just wanted the world to catch up. “We bring everyone in. Full red. I want every patch in the state ready to roll by morning.”
He looked at Seneca. “You run recon. Start with the Russians, but don’t sleep on the feds. I want every phone in this county tapped and every car followed.”
To Augustine, “You watch the doors. No one comes in or out without us knowing.”
Finally, to me: “You do what you do best. Find the pattern. Figure out who’s running this, and why.”
I nodded, heart rate spiking so hard I almost missed the next line.
“We move at midnight,” Damron said. “You bring the heat, but don’t bring it here.”
The meeting adjourned without ceremony. The brothers peeled away, each carrying a slice of the job with them.
I stayed at the table, the burn scars on my hand stinging every time I flexed a finger.
I stared at the grain of the wood, at the blackened rings and knife marks, and let myself imagine Seraphina’s face behind each one—a ghost in the circuitry, a problem I might never get to solve.
Damron lingered, just for a second, hand heavy on my shoulder as he passed. “You did the right thing,” he said.
I laughed, the sound thin and desperate. “For who?”
He didn’t answer, just left me with my ghosts and the echo of his confidence.
I sat there, alone in the chapel, the world outside waiting to break its next promise. I pulled a pack from my pocket, hands shaking so bad I dropped the first cigarette. The second time, I got it to my lips, lit, and drew in so deep I thought it might set my lungs on fire.
The smoke was a comfort and a sentence, all at once.
I locked myself in the comms room and started dialing every off-book number I’d ever used in this county.
First, the local snitches—meth-heads, scrapyard drunks, the kind of men who heard whispers before the rest of the world learned how to listen.
Then the sober contacts, a cop on permanent desk duty, a paramedic with a taste for cash, the old security guard from LANL who owed me his son’s life after a bad weekend with fentanyl.
None of them knew a thing. Or pretended not to. With every dead end, my hands shook harder, the tape on my knuckles fraying into sweat-soaked curls. I switched to a new burner halfway through the list, then again, burning through the box Augustine kept stashed in the kitchen freezer.
By ten, the club was thick with nerves. The boys had cleaned and re-cleaned every weapon we owned, down to the ancient M1 in the back of the safe.
Augustine ran the armory like a mad priest, triple-checking each magazine and laying out Glocks and shotguns in neat, sacrificial lines on the pool table.
The armory wasn’t just a room; it was a mausoleum, concrete walls lined with steel racks, a single lightbulb buzzing like a trapped hornet.
The only way in was through the freezer, past a wall of beer that doubled as an emergency barricade.
Augustine met me at the door, holding a stubby AR with a custom grip. “Take it,” he said, pressing the weapon into my hands. “You’ll need it.”
I slung it over my shoulder, tried to ignore the quiver in my fingers. “You hear anything from Seneca?”
He shook his head, jaw tight. “He’s out with the prospects. Says if he finds something, he’ll bring it here.”
I nodded, checked my phone again. No messages, not even from the ghost numbers.
Damron drifted through the club like a ghost, never in one place long enough to catch, but always watching.
Every now and then, he’d slide into the kitchen, say nothing, just pour black coffee, and stare at the parking lot.
He was running his own math, trying to see the game five moves ahead.
It made me feel better and worse, all at once.
By midnight, the only thing left was waiting. I paced the common room, burn scars on my hand standing out like a roadmap of every mistake I’d ever made. Each time the phone buzzed, my heart nearly flatlined.
When it finally rang for real, I almost dropped it.
Seneca’s voice was so calm that it made my skin crawl. “We got movement.”
“Where?” I asked, breath like razor wire.
“Old ranger station, up in Jemez. Prospect spotted a black van, same plate block as last time.”
“How many?”
He hesitated. “Four men. Maybe five. All big, all geared. Look like Spetsnaz or the best knockoff money can buy.”
My mouth went dry. “You see her?”
Another pause. “Not yet. But they’re holding something tight. No traffic in or out since they arrived.”
I closed my eyes. “Hold position. Wait for us.”
Seneca grunted, then hung up.
I was already moving, barely registering the way the brothers fell into step behind me.
Augustine checked the breach on my rifle, then on his own.
He handed me a vest, lightweight but lined with enough Kevlar to keep you breathing until the ambulance showed.
I shrugged into it, felt the familiar press against my chest, and remembered all the reasons I’d sworn never to do this shit again.
Damron appeared at my side, shotgun slung low, eyes unblinking. “You ready?”
I nodded. “Yeah. More than.”