Chapter 26
Legend
Fog rolls off the cemetery hill like spilled breath from something sleeping beneath it. The tail lights of the last patrol bike fade into the pines, swallowed whole by the dark. I stay mounted for a moment, my hand locked tight around the handlebar, cigarette burning down between my fingers.
We staggered patrols. We took every back road, every forgotten trail. Sent Derby, Oaks, Rye, and Vandal out in rotating pairs. No engines roaring. No club presence. Just shadows watching shadows.
Nonetheless, it appears we are already failing. This ain’t a war with patches and territory. It’s something that wears the dark like a second skin. Something that moves when the wind does. Something that takes girls we should’ve protected long before now.
And all this time?
We were too busy fighting our own damn ghosts.
I flick ash to the gravel, stare at the creaking cemetery gate. It opens a few inches, no wind to push it. Like some dead bastard is inviting me in.
Or warning me away.
Derby swears he saw something out here last night. Something tall. Wrong. He ain’t easy to rattle. The biker walked away from a fiery crash once without screaming. But last night he came back pale, shaking, saying the woods felt… aware.
“You think the Reverend’s behind this?” I asked him.
He just stared at the tree line.
“I think he ain’t as human as he pretends. Man’s evil and evil invites sick company.”
That thought hasn’t left my spine since.
I inhale deep and swing off the bike. The fog curls around my boots, thick as wool. This whole damn town feels cold lately. Not weather-cold—bone-cold. The kind that seeps into the places you don’t talk about.
And Sophie. Shit.
She cornered me before sunrise, rage under her skin like a fever.
“She’s still here,” she snapped.
“Becki hasn’t left the cell.”
“I don’t care where she is. You said she’d be gone.”
She’s right. I did say that. But the longer this missing-girl mess grows teeth, the more I see the truth. Keeping Becki locked up is safer than sending her back into the Reverend’s waiting arms.
I didn’t tell Sophie that.
Didn’t tell her I could smell real fear on Becki. The kind you don’t fake.
And now Sophie can’t look at me without thinking I’m choosing someone else.
Maybe I am.
Maybe the past claws deeper than I want to admit.
Because truth is, I remember too much.
The cemetery has always been a fucked-up kind of sanctuary. Before the club. Before power. Before my name meant anything. Back when I was still Hudson, and she was just Becki Crowley with bare feet and a stolen flask.
She used to sit beside me under the angel statue, reading psalms like secrets, not scripture. Whispered questions about the stars like she believed I knew how to answer them.
We fucked in the graveyard too many times to count.
One night, before I patched in, she lit a candle between us. Read a verse about vengeance in a voice that trembled like it wasn’t fear, but excitement.
Then she leaned close enough I felt her breath slide down my neck. “Hudson.”
No one but Sophie calls me that now.
“Someday, Daddy will pay.”
Taking a swig of bourbon from the flask, I shake the memory off and move toward the gravestones. Fog snakes around the stones. The air hums, static, faint, wrong. The ground feels too soft beneath my boots.
Then something crouched behind a tombstone snaps its head toward me.
Tall. Ragged. Skin pale like moonlit bone. Eyes glowing like a dying coal. We stare at each other, the fog thickening between us. Then the thing flickers, gone in a blink.
No footsteps. No rustle. Just absence.
My heart slams high into my throat. My knife’s already drawn, and I didn’t even feel myself pull it.
“Son of a bitch,” I whisper to the empty graves.
Too much bourbon.
Returning to the clubhouse, unease hits like a punch.
Whiskey’s pacing. Derby sits stiff-backed, watching the door like something’s coming for us. Oaks keeps glancing toward the hallway where Becki’s locked up, like he expects someone to come crawling out of it.
Royal’s missing.
That’s what worries me most.
The man is a shadow by nature. Knowing him better than anyone, I get that, but tonight there’s something else in the air. Something like grief wearing skin.
I go to Becki’s door. No answer. I unlock it with my master key.
She’s curled on the mattress, chain taut, face turned toward the wall. Breathing slow, steady. She looks small like this. Tired.
Not dangerous. I shouldn’t care.
But the knot in my gut tightens anyway before I slam the door shut.
Royal finally appears an hour later, jaw ticking, eyes dark enough to swallow whatever light dared exist in him.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Something’s coming.”
“You mean more girls going missing?”
“Yeah.” He shakes his head once, slow. “But no, I mean something worse.”
The silence stretches, thick and suffocating.
“She ain’t just punishment,” I say finally.
His jaw flexes. “No. She ain’t.”
“You think the Reverend’s using her?”
“Yes.”
And I know he’s right. I’ve known since I found out they tried to blackmail Sophie. There was desperation behind her threats. Rage, yes, but fear too. Fear so sharp it tasted like truth.
“She’s safer here,” Royal says.
“I know that,” I say. “Try telling Sophie.”
He doesn’t answer.
His eyes flick to me. Searching. Weighing. Asking questions he won’t voice. Until he does.
“Do you still want her?” he asks.
It punches the air out of me. He means Becki. Not Sophie. I don’t respond. Because I remember that candlelit night. Her whisper. Her fire. Her body under mine. Too easy to remember since Sophie’s gone cold.
I remember the way Becki saw what I was long before the gavel, the patch, the violence.
“You were born for fire, Hudson,” she’d say.
And the fucked-up thing is, she wasn’t wrong.
What’s worse is seeing Royal want Becki. No, he always has. Becki wanting him. If she truly does, makes me pause. I won’t answer. Not just because he’d take it as permission.
Later that night, I dream again.
Becki kneeling in the cemetery, praying to something older than God. Her long dark hair whipping wild around her face. Her voice echoing across the graves like a prophecy.
“You were born for fire.”
The ground splits beneath us.
I wake with my fists clenched and her name in my mouth like a damn curse I never learned how to break.