Chapter 2 #2
He swung at me with his free hand, a slow, wide haymaker.
It probably worked for him in every parking lot from here to Knoxville, but I’d seen it coming before he had.
I leaned back, felt the wind of it on my face, and then drove my palm into his nose.
Bone crunched, blood gushed out, and he went down to one knee, howling.
He came up wild, both fists ready, but I kicked his leg out from under him, and he dropped hard, teeth clacking together like dominoes.
He tried to scramble up, but I stomped him once in the ribs, not enough to break anything but enough to let him know the ride was over.
He lay there, gasping, blood soaking into the floor.
I stepped around him and poured Red a shot from the nearest bottle.
She downed it without a word, hands only shaking a little.
Vin’s two goons hauled Donny up by his armpits and frog-marched him out the front door. Nobody said a thing. The silence was thick, not with fear but with respect. Even the guys who’d been ready to rumble earlier now watched me with something like appreciation.
Vin stood and crossed the bar in three heavy steps.
He stopped right in front of me and looked down.
I could smell the smoke on his breath, feel the heat of him.
But there was something different about him from every other biker I’d met along the way.
Something old. Something dark. Something fucked up.
“You handle yourself well,” he said.
I wiped a fleck of Donny’s blood from my knuckles and nodded. “Comes from practice.”
He grinned, and it was all teeth. “Got a name, tough guy?”
“Axel.”
He rolled it around in his mouth, seeing how it fit. “You got a job yet, Axel?”
“Not unless you’re hiring.”
Vin laughed, loud and long. “Maybe I am.”
He clapped me on the shoulder, nearly sending me into the bar. “You finish your drink, then we’ll talk.”
I finished it in one. Red poured another, eyes flicking to me and away, like she was trying to decide if I was the cure or the disease.
Vin didn’t waste any more time with the barroom show. He jerked his chin at me, and I followed him through a swinging door marked "Employees Only" in black tape. The hallway behind was barely wide enough for two men to pass, and smelled of bleach, rot, and death.
He led me into a room that looked like it doubled as both office and war room.
The table in the center had been sanded down so many times that it was more splinter than wood.
Three chairs, none of them matching, ringed the table.
The walls were papered with maps of Kentucky and Tennessee, pushpins marking God-knows-what, and a few sun-faded photos of men with faces like sledgehammers.
At the far end was a battered safe, combination lock gleaming.
Vin pulled a chair out and gestured for me to sit. He sat opposite, arms folded across his chest, tattoos climbing over one another like snakes fighting for the last patch of sunlight.
He started without preamble. “You ever prospect before?”
“Nope,” I said. “But I’ve done my share of shit work.”
He nodded, not impressed, just moving to the next item on the list. “You got any family? Anyone gonna come looking if you wind up in the river?”
“Not anymore.” I didn’t want to get into my mother’s death while I was out fucking around two states away. It was a memory full of regret and not something I wanted to share. It needed to stay locked away in the corner of my heart where it belonged.
He eyed me, then grunted. “You’ll fit right in.”
He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “This club? It’s everything.
You fuck us, you’re done. You even think about crossing me or the patch, you’re fertilizer.
” He let that hang. “But you show up, do your job, bleed when we say bleed—you’ll find the club’s better family than anything you left behind. ”
I met his stare. “That what happened to you?”
He cracked a smile, but there was no warmth in it. “I don’t ask, you don’t ask. That’s the rule.”
He rattled off the prospect gospel of no colors till you earn ‘em. You run the errands, collect the debts, back up the muscle. You clean the blood off the floor if you’re lucky.
If not, you’re making it. Weekends are mandatory; you don’t answer the call, you don’t come back.
Zero tolerance for snitches, posers, or anyone dumb enough to pull heat on another member without clearance.
“We ain’t a charity,” Vin said. “You fuck up, you answer to me. That clear?”
“Crystal.”
He waited, like he expected me to twitch or break. I just stared at the knicks in the table and wondered how many heads had bounced off it before.
He took a breath, slower this time. “So why Lexington?”
I shrugged. “Needed a place to land.”
He wasn’t having it. “Nobody just lands here. Not unless they’re running, or chasing something.”
I thought about lying. I really did. But something in his face made me try the truth instead, or at least a version of it.
“I’ve been running a long time,” I said. “Looking to stop.”
Vin grunted, a sound halfway between approval and suspicion. “You got a record?”
“Sealed juvenile shit. Some other stuff in the wind.”
“Ever kill a man?”
I thought about that one, then nodded. “Once. Self-defense.”
He didn’t blink. “Could you do it again?”
I shrugged. “If I had to.”
He smiled, and this time it was real, a big wolfy grin that showed every tooth. “I like you, Axel. You don’t waste my time.” He stood up and extended a hand. His palm was calloused, fingers thick and scarred.
“Welcome to the Royal Bastards, prospect,” he said. “Don’t fuck it up.”
I took the handshake. It was a small war in itself.
Vin held my gaze a beat longer, then dropped my hand and pointed at the safe. “First job’s tomorrow. Be here at seven sharp. Red’ll show you the ropes.”
He started to leave, but paused in the doorway. “One more thing. Whatever you’re running from? Don’t bring it here.”
I nodded. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He disappeared down the hall, boots thudding like distant thunder.
I sat there alone, staring at the table, the maps, the photos of dead-eyed men who’d made the same bargain.
Red found me in the hall, one hand clutching a cigarette, the other perched on her hip like she owned the place. She jerked her head toward the stairs. “Up. Vin says you bunk above the bar. Follow me.”
We climbed a narrow, sagging staircase. The carpet was threadbare, flecked with cigarette burns and something stickier. She walked two steps ahead, not looking back but never out of earshot. At the top, she shouldered open a door with peeling paint and flicked on the light.
The room was exactly what you’d expect, a single bed with springs that screamed at a sideways glance, sheets so thin you could read a newspaper through them, a dresser that had seen more violence than I had, and a window with a view of the parking lot and nothing else.
The place reeked of old cigarettes, but it was cleaner than most flophouses I’d called home.
“Bathroom’s down the hall,” Red said. She didn’t step inside. “Don’t get ideas about locking your door. Vin likes to check up on prospects.”
I dropped my duffel on the mattress, which sagged in the middle. “Duly noted.”
She hovered in the doorway, arms folded. “Don’t make me regret vouching for you.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You vouched for me?”
She grinned, sharp and crooked. “Nobody breaks Donny’s nose and stays inside unless I say so. Consider this a trial run, sugar.”
I liked the way she said sugar. It had more poison than honey.
I unzipped my bag and started unpacking. Three t-shirts, two pairs of jeans, a toothbrush, and a K-bar in a leather sheath. The last thing was a dog-eared photo, the face so faded it was almost gone. I tucked it under the mattress, out of sight.
She watched, silent, eyes narrowing a little at the knife.
“What’s your story, anyway?” she asked, softer now.
“No story,” I said. “Just tired of running.”
She snorted. “Everyone’s got a story. Especially guys who fight like you.”
I looked up, met her stare. “Maybe I just don’t like assholes who grab women.”
That made her pause, just for a second. She flicked ash into the hallway and said, “You’re a shitty liar, Axel. But you got decent manners.”
She turned to go, then stopped in the doorframe. “Vin wants you on the floor at seven. Wear a shirt.”
I saluted. “Yes, ma’am.”
She grinned again, then let the door swing shut behind her.
I lay back on the bed, boots still on, arms folded behind my head. The springs whined but didn’t break. I stared at the ceiling, tracing water stains that looked like Rorschach tests for the criminally insane.
For the first time in a long time, I felt something close to peace. Or at least, the edge of it.
A few minutes later, Red’s voice drifted in through the thin wall. “Axel?” she called.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
I rolled over, facing the window, and let the silence fill the cracks.
Night crept in slow, drowning out the last blue sliver of daylight in a haze of nicotine.
I sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on my knees, listening to the low hum of voices from the bar below.
Every so often, a laugh spiked through the floorboards or a chair scraped hard enough to shake the dust from the lampshade.
I heard the rumble of a bike kicking over in the parking lot, followed by the staccato bark of Red cursing someone out back.
It was almost… comforting.