Chapter 19
Spade
The phone rang at the precise minute he’d promised, but it didn’t vibrate with the cop-call energy I’d come to expect from Shaw. It just lit up, a blue-lit slab on the counter, the name I shouldn’t have saved in my contacts burning through the lock screen. I didn’t bother with hello.
He was driving, wind noise over his speaker, the road unspooling beneath him at eighty. “You pack already?” he said, no prelude.
My jacket was still on, keys clipped to my belt. I hadn’t decided if I was leaving or just waiting for the decision to happen to me. “I said I’d call you when I did.”
A sigh. He let it hang, just the road for a second. “Spade, don’t.”
I braced my left hand on the counter’s edge, fingers splayed, tension in the tendons. “Don’t what?”
He hesitated, then cut straight through it. “Don’t quit the club.”
That wasn’t what I’d expected. The whole lead-up, the slow game of extraction and exchange, the implicit logic: I give up the Harlots, he gives up the case. This wasn’t that.
“You changed your mind?” I asked.
“No,” he said, voice roughened by engine drone, “but you think you’re walking away for my sake.
I’m not a martyr, Spade. I’ve been watching you for months.
You go cold on everything except that place.
The club is the only thing I’ve seen you attach to that you haven’t figured out how to walk away from. I won’t be the reason you lose that.”
I pressed the phone harder to my ear. The hallway outside was silent, no neighbor drama to fill the space. “We had a deal, Shaw.”
“It was a bad deal. One you only agreed to because you thought it was the only way to keep me from—” He stopped himself. “I’m telling you I can live with it. All of it. You stay with the Harlots, I keep the rest buried.”
There was a truth to it. I could hear it in the way he kept going, kept clarifying instead of letting silence dominate. It was him at his most honest, which is to say: not his most convincing, but his most dangerous.
“You sound different,” I said.
“I’m not running an angle. I just… I want you to have something after this. Even if it’s just that.” Another sigh, this one weighted down. “You think you’re protecting me from making a bad call, but you’re the one burning down your only family to do it.”
“You said it yourself,” I said. “I’m good at walking away.”
“Not from them.”
He was right, but I didn’t let it land. Instead, I asked, “What if Selene doesn’t want me after this?”
“She will. That woman would burn the state down before she let anyone else have you.”
I flexed my fingers against the countertop, every nerve alive, cold and sharp and wanting. “You get sentimental on long drives?” I asked.
He let out the closest thing to a laugh I’d ever heard from him. “I get clarity.”
We let the line go dead for a handful of seconds. I didn’t fill it. He was still driving, probably hand on the wheel, phone cradled at his chin.
“Will you call me when it’s done?” he asked, voice softer.
“Yeah,” I said. “If I make it.”
“If you don’t, I’ll know.”
He hung up before I could say anything back.
I left my hand on the counter for another minute, the phone still hot from my grip. I stared at the tile. I didn’t feel relief. I didn’t feel much of anything, except the click of the next move slotting into place.
When I picked up the phone again, Selene answered on the first ring.
“What,” she said, not a question.
“I’m not quitting,” I said.
Dead air. Long enough to count. I thought about how she paced calls, how she calibrated silence as a weapon. This was not that. This was something rawer.
“You sure?” she said.
“Yeah.”
Another beat, then: “Good. Because we’re running.”
My pulse leaped. “When?”
“Now.” I heard the background noise—engines, boots, a woman’s voice raised in command. “Queens of Chaos are on the move tonight. We’re going to choke them at the North Vegas spot. Twenty minutes. You in?”
“I’m already dressed,” I said, and hung up.
By the time I hit the lobby, I had gloves in my hand, a helmet strapped to my thigh, and hair cinched back.
The elevator would have cost me seconds, so I took the stairs in twos.
There was no time for prep, no time for self-doubt, not even time for a last look at the world I might not see again.
All muscle memory, all kill-switch certainty.
I hit the street at a run. The bike was where I left it, blacked out and ready, a bullet for a bullet.
The engine turned over on the first try, and the street’s quiet snapped in half.
I pulled out without signaling, lane-splitting through the yellowed sodium glow of the city, breath even, eyes locked on the freeway access like it was the only artery left in my body.
By the time the city’s north end bled into dead-zone warehouse blocks, every other part of my life had already fallen away. The war was on, and I was exactly where I’d always be: first in, last out, hands steady on the bars, every nerve already crackling for the next fight.