27. Gideon
GIDEON
My skin crawls. I know these woods better than the lines on my own palms, and right now, the silence is too heavy. It isn’t the natural quiet of the mountains—it’s the bated breath of a trap.
I check my watch again. Two-fourteen.
Rex should have checked in from the eastern ridge five minutes ago.
I click my radio once. Static. I click it twice.
Nothing but the low-frequency hum of the trees.
My jaw aches from grinding my teeth. I pull up the digital log on my tablet, my scarred thumb swiping through the patrol timestamps.
The sensors at the perimeter fence flickered at midnight—a three-second gap where the infrared went dark.
Coincidence is a lie we tell ourselves to sleep better. I don’t sleep.
I move through the underbrush like an animal, the weight of my piece comforting against my hip.
I’m a blunt instrument, but Savannah taught me how to walk without making the leaves scream.
I track the faint heat signature of a body moving near the old ranger shed—a rotting tooth of wood a mile out from the main gate.
Then I hear it. The low, rapid-fire clicking of a burner phone’s keypad. A voice, thin and desperate, cutting through the fog.
“Three kilometers east of the main gate. The sensor gap is active for ten minutes every hour. Just like I said.”
My vision goes crimson. I recognize that voice. It’s Rook.
I don’t wait for him to finish the sentence. I’m a landslide of muscle and rage. I burst through the pines, my boots slamming into Rook’s chest before he can even look up. The phone flies into the mud as I drive him back into the splintered wood of the shed.
“You fucking rat,” I growl.
My knuckles find his jaw. The crack is sickeningly sweet.
I don’t use a weapon. I want to feel the marrow of his betrayal through my skin.
I drag him by the collar into the dirt, my knees pinning his chest while my fists rain down.
He’s sobbing, reaching for his face, but I don’t stop until the white of his eye is a map of burst vessels.
“Who else?” I roar, pulling him up by his hair. “Who else is selling us out?”
“Gideon, please!” Rook chokes out a mouthful of blood and teeth. “I’m saving us! She’s a curse, man. Look at what she did to you! Look at Dante!”
“You sold her to the Sombra?” I hit him again.
“They’re coming regardless!” he screams, his voice cracking with terror.
“They were always coming! The cartel promised... they said if I gave them the sniper, they’d let the club walk.
She’s the target, Gideon! If she stays, we all die.
I just wanted to be on the winning side before the blood starts flowing! ”
The word target hits like a hollow-point to the gut.
The air in my lungs turns to liquid fire. Everything Savannah has bled for, every nightmare she’s fought through to stand beside us, and this pathetic, shaking coward thinks she’s the liability. He thinks he’s the hero of a story where he sells her back to the butchers.
I stop thinking. There is only the rhythmic thud of my boots against his ribs and the wet, slapping sound of my "FEAR" and "GOD" knuckles meeting his face. I’m not Judge anymore. I’m just the Beast. I’m the foster kid who had to bite and claw to keep a scrap of bread, and Rook is the world trying to take the only light I’ve ever known.
Each strike carries the weight of every night I spent watching her sleep, marveling at how a woman so broken could still be so brave. He called her a target.
"She is the only thing that makes us damn well human!" I roar, the sound tearing out of my throat like a dying animal.
I don't hear the bikes. I don't hear the heavy boots crunching through the brush or the sharp command of Dante’s voice. My world is narrowed down to the crimson mask of Rook’s face and the way his breath whistles through a shattered nose.
I pull him up, my fingers buried in his hair, my arm cocked back for the blow that will finally silence him for good.
A hand, cold and steady as a grave, wraps around my bicep.
"Gideon. Look at me."
The rage is a physical wall, but her voice cuts through it.
I whip around, my teeth bared, ready to tear into whatever is stopping me.
Savannah stands inches from my chest. Behind her, Dante’s hand is on his holster, his eyes hard and clinical, while Malachi watches the blood staining my hands with a sickeningly neutral expression.
I’m shaking. I want to push her aside. I want to finish the job.
"He sold you, Sav," I choke out, my voice thick with the iron taste of Rook's blood. "He was going to give you to El Espectro."
Savannah doesn't look at me. She looks down at the broken man in the dirt. Her eyes aren't filled with the fury I’m feeling. There’s no vengeance there. Just a terrible, haunting recognition. She kneels in the mud, her fingers grazing the Scorpion brand on her wrist.
"He isn't a traitor, Gideon," she says quietly, her voice echoing the same hollowness I heard when she spoke of her family. "He’s just a man who thinks he can negotiate with a tidal wave. I know that face. I lived in it for eight years."
She looks at Rook, not with pity, but with the crushing weight of someone who sees their own history. "You think if you give them what they want, the fear stops. It never stops, Rook. It just eats you from the inside."
The fire in my limbs turns to ice. She isn't shouting. She’s mourning him. And seeing her find humanity in the person who tried to kill her makes me feel more like a monster than the blood on my hands ever could.
The clubhouse air is thick with the scent of cheap tobacco and the ozone of an incoming storm.
It’s too small for the fury vibrating through my chest. The mahogany table in the room looks like a funeral pyre, the light from the overhead lamps glinting off the polished chrome of leather jackets and the sweat on the men’s brows.
“A hole in the head,” Axel snarls, slamming his fist onto the wood. “That’s the price for a rat. We let the kid walk, and it tells every other prospect that treason is a suggestion, not a death sentence.”
I don’t speak. I just lean against the back wall, my knuckles still throbbing, the dried blood of the boy who tried to sell us out cracking on my skin. My eyes are locked on Dante. He sits at one end of the table, his face a carved mask of military precision.
“Killing him creates a martyr for the scared ones,” Savannah says.
Her voice is a low, steady blade cutting through the room’s adrenaline.
She stands by the window, her silhouette lean and lethal.
“The cartel thrives on the idea that there is no mercy anywhere else. If you act like El Espectro, you prove him right. You push the wavering ones into his arms because they think death is the only inevitable ending here too.”
The room erupts. Men who I’ve bled with, men who call me brother, are screaming for blood. I want it too. My hands are itching to finish what I started in that shed.
Dante stands. The silence is immediate, heavy as a lead curtain. He looks at me, then at Savannah, his jaw set in a line of iron.
“Rook is dead to the club,” Dante says. The authority in his tone leaves no room for debate.
“But we don't waste the ammunition. We strip his colors, we take his bike, and we dump him at the county line. If he ever crosses back into Tartarus Pass, he belongs to the earth. Until then, he’s insignificant. This isn't a mercy. It’s an eviction from the only family that would have died for him.”
The resulting silence is a physical blow. Axel looks like he’s going to spit; half the table is staring at the floor in stunned disbelief. Exile is a civilian’s punishment. In our world, it’s a weakness.
I wait until the room clears, until the shadows stretch long across the floorboards. I find Savannah in the armory, her back to me as she cleans the barrel of her rifle. The rhythmic click-slide of the metal is the only sound.
“Why?” I demand, my voice a serrated rasp. “Why let that coward walk away?”
She doesn’t turn around. “Because I’m tired of being surrounded by death, Gideon.”
“Mercy doesn't win wars, Savannah. It leaves doors unlocked for the next rat to crawl through.” I step into her space, the heat from my body radiating against her.
My heart is a frantic drum. “I saw what was on that phone. I heard the coordinates. He was handing you to them on a silver platter while you were sleeping ten feet away from me.”
She finally looks up, her amber eyes burning with a cold, ancient light. “Fear is a virus. If you kill everyone who gets sick, you end up ruling a graveyard. We have to be better than the monsters we're fighting, or what are we even defending?”
“I’m defending you!” I roar, the truth tearing out of me before I can choke it back.
I grab her shoulders, my fingers digging into her skin.
“Do you get it? It’s not about the club rules or the tactical advantage.
Someone in our own house, someone who shared our table, was looking for a way to put a collar back on your neck.
The thought of them touching you again—the thought of one of ours helping them do it—it makes my blood turn to battery acid. ”
I’m breathing too hard, my vision blurring at the edges. I don't know how to tell her that my rage isn't just about betrayal. It’s about the crushing, suffocating terror of a world where I can’t keep her safe from the people standing right next to us.
Savannah’s hands come up, her fingers cool and steady as they wrap around my blood-stained wrists. She doesn't pull away.
“He can’t hurt me anymore, Gideon,” she whispers, searching my face. “But if you let this rage turn you into a butcher, then he’s already taken something from you that I can’t give back.”
The sun hasn't even breached the peaks, but the taste of change is thick in the air.
I stand on the porch of the main clubhouse, my knuckles throbbing in the dawn chill.
Below, the tail lights of a single SUV fade into the gray mountain mist, carrying Rook toward a life where he’ll have to look over his shoulder until his heart finally gives out.
We didn’t kill him. The thought still feels like a stone in my gut—heavy, unnatural, and jagged.
Behind me, the heavy oak doors creak open. A handful of the brothers filter out, their leather cuts creaking. Usually, after a rat is sniffed out, the mood is jubilant, a feral energy fueled by the finality of a shovel hitting dirt. But today, the silence is different.
"Kid was terrified," Dutch mutters, leaning against the railing. He doesn't reach for his flask. He just stares at the empty road. "He was a coward, yeah. But I remember my first winter undercover in Vegas. That kind of cold... it makes you think crazy things."
"He compromised the perimeter," Axel counters, though the usual venom in his voice is replaced by a strange, hollowed-out contemplation. "But Sav is right. If we start executing men for being weak, we’ll be the only ones left standing in this valley."
I watch them. These are men who have broken bones for the patch, men who have bathed in the club’s uncompromising brutality for decades.
Now, they’re standing in the half-light, weighing the difference between a threat and a victim of fear.
They aren't just talking about tactics; they’re talking about the soul of the club.
Savannah leans against the doorframe, her shadow stretching long across the floorboards. She doesn’t say a word, she doesn't have to. Her presence is a quiet gravity that has shifted our entire orbit.
Internalizing her logic is a slow, painful process, like a bone setting wrong.
For years, Hell Court was a fortress built on the absolute certainty of violence.
You cross us, you die. It was simple. It was safe.
But Savannah has introduced a terrifying variable: the idea that we can choose who we become in the aftermath of the blood.
She shifted the Court. She didn't use a gavel or a gun; she used the wreckage of her own survival to show us that mercy can be a harder, more jagged weapon than a blade.
The club isn't just a fortress anymore. Under her influence, under the way Dante and Malachi look at her, it’s becoming something living.
Something that can bleed, and something that might actually be worth saving.
I scan the faces of my brothers. I don’t see predators waiting for an order. I see men wondering if they’re still capable of being human.