Chapter Eleven
Rourke
The table reconvened exactly two weeks after the first vote, same room, same faces, though the mood in it had shifted considerably since the break-in attempt at the Boneyard.
Nobody in Death Souls doubted anymore that the Iron Coyotes were serious, and that reality had changed the shape of every conversation leading up to that Thursday evening, including the one I'd had with myself in the mirror that morning, deciding exactly what I was going to say before Deacon ever called the meeting to order.
I stood before he'd finished his opening remarks, which wasn't how these things usually went, and Deacon paused, eyebrow raised, giving me the floor with a small nod.
The room settled into the particular attentive quiet that comes when a man breaks protocol for a reason serious enough to justify it, every eye at that table turning toward me with a mixture of curiosity and, in a few faces, something like cautious respect for the fact that I hadn't waited to be called on.
"I want to save this table some time," I said.
"I've thought about this for two weeks, and I don't think there's a version of this club moving forward with confidence, especially with an active threat sitting on our doorstep, where I keep my VP patch after what happened.
Not because I don't think I could still do the job.
Because a club under threat needs a table that trusts its leadership without hesitation, and I put enough doubt into this room over the last two months that hesitation is exactly what I'd be asking every one of you to work around at the worst possible time.
I'm asking to step down from VP, effective tonight, before this table has to vote on stripping it from me.
I'd rather hand it back than have it taken. "
The room went quiet in a way that felt different than the silence two weeks earlier, less shocked, more considering, men weighing something real instead of just absorbing a confession. Reyes spoke first, slow and measured. "That's not a small thing to offer up on your own, son."
"It's the right thing, though. I've had two weeks to sit with that."
Ford, the younger member who'd questioned me sharply at the last church, leaned forward, arms crossed.
"I want to understand something plain before this table accepts anything.
Are you stepping down because you actually believe it's right, or because you think it makes you look better in front of Marisol, or in front of this table, than waiting to be voted out would? "
It was a fair question, and I made myself answer it as honestly as I could manage.
"Both things can be true at once, if I'm being fully honest. I do think it's right.
I also won't pretend some part of me hopes it counts for something, eventually, with people whose good opinion I'd like to earn back.
But I'd rather offer this up cleanly and let the motives be whatever they are than sit here waiting for the table to strip it from me, because waiting would mean I still hadn't fully understood that this isn't about what I get to keep.
It's about what this club needs from its leadership right now, which is trust without hesitation, and I can't honestly promise that's what I'd be bringing to the VP patch if I kept it. "
Deacon studied me a long moment, something unreadable in his expression, before he finally nodded.
"Table accepts Rourke's resignation from VP, effective immediately.
We'll hold a formal vote on his successor next month, once things with the Coyotes have settled enough to give that decision the attention it deserves.
Rourke remains a full patched member of this club in good standing, and I want that stated plainly, because stepping back from rank isn't the same as being cast out, and I won't have anybody in this room treating it that way. "
Dutch spoke up before the meeting moved on.
"I'll say this for the record, since I imagine some of the younger patches are wondering.
A man who asks to lose something rather than wait to have it taken, that's not weakness.
That's the closest thing to honor most of us ever manage to demonstrate in this life, and I'd rather ride beside a man who understands that than one who's never had to learn it. "
I sat back down feeling the physical weight of the patch I'd have to remove from my cut sitting differently on my shoulders than I expected, lighter in some ways, heavier in others, a strange, contradictory relief mixed with something that felt uncomfortably close to grief, like losing one more piece of the version of myself my father had built.
I thought about the day he'd handed me my first cut, the pride in his face, the particular weight of expectation that came stitched into every patch after that, and understood, sitting in that room with my rank formally gone, that some part of me had been carrying his expectations instead of my own for longer than I'd ever let myself examine.
Deacon asked me to remove the VP rocker myself, there at the table, rather than have somebody else do it for me, and I understood, even before he explained it, that this was its own kind of teaching moment, the same way asking for the review had been.
I took my cut off, laid it flat on the table under the overhead light, and worked the stitching loose with a pocketknife somebody handed me, careful not to damage the leather underneath, the whole room watching in a silence that felt less like judgment now and more like witness.
It took longer than I expected, the thread stubborn after years of wear, and by the time the rocker finally came free, my hands weren't entirely steady.
I held the patch for a moment before setting it down, running my thumb once over the stitching my father had done himself the day he first promoted me, years before he'd have imagined the circumstances under which I'd be the one taking it off.
Then I set it on the table in front of Deacon, put my cut back on with the bare space where it used to sit, and felt, walking back to my seat, both smaller and somehow more solid than I had in months, the particular clarity that comes from finally setting down a weight you'd been carrying dishonestly.
Dutch found me after the meeting broke, out in the lot, and didn't say much, just clapped a hand on my shoulder the way he had two weeks earlier, and said, "That took something, Rourke. I hope you know that."
"Doesn't feel like enough."
"It's not supposed to feel like enough. It's supposed to be right.
Those are different measures, and you'd do well to remember that going forward, because if you keep chasing the feeling instead of just doing the right thing regardless of how it lands in your chest, you're going to burn yourself out trying to earn something that was never available on that kind of timeline to begin with. "
"How do I know when it's enough, then. If not the feeling."
Dutch considered that a moment, leaning back against his bike, arms crossed.
"You don't, not on any schedule you get to set yourself.
That's the part nobody tells you going in.
You just keep doing the right thing, over and over, whether it feels like enough or not, until one day somebody else decides it was, and by then you've usually stopped keeping score anyway, because the doing itself has become the point instead of the reward at the end of it.
" He studied me a moment longer. "Your father figured that out somewhere around year ten, if I remember right.
Took him that long to stop needing the club's approval and start just doing what was right because it was right.
You're ahead of schedule, if that's any comfort. "
"It's something," I said, and meant it, even with the ground still feeling unsteady under everything else.
I was still standing in that lot, turning his words over, when my phone buzzed with a text from a number I didn't recognize. It's Harlow. New phone. I need to see you tonight, somewhere private, I have information about what's coming and I don't have much time to explain it.
I stared at the message a long moment, feeling old instincts war with new ones, the part of me that wanted to handle this alone, quietly, the way I'd handled everything for the last six months, and the newer, harder-won part of me that understood, after everything, exactly where that instinct had already led.
I thought about what Marisol had said about protection versus inclusion, about the difference between managing a situation alone and actually trusting the people around you with it, and made myself do the thing that felt, even now, unnatural.
I called Dutch back over immediately, showed him the message, and we drove out together to the address she'd sent, an abandoned gas station on the edge of town nobody had used in years, the kind of place a scared person picks specifically because nobody would think to look for her there.
She was waiting in the shadow of the old pump canopy when we pulled up, thinner than I remembered, a fading bruise along one cheekbone that made my stomach turn over with a fresh, ugly kind of guilt.
She flinched when she saw Dutch behind me, and I held up a hand, told her he was there for her protection, not to threaten her, and watched some of the tension ease out of her shoulders, though not all of it.
Her clothes looked slept in, the same jacket I remembered from the clubhouse lot weeks ago, and her hands shook slightly around a cheap disposable phone, the kind you buy with cash from a convenience store when you need to disappear from your own life for a while.
"I'm sorry," she said, before I could say anything at all. "For all of it. I need you to know that, even though I know it doesn't fix anything, before I tell you what I came to tell you."
"Harlow, what happened to your face."