Chapter 10
Colt
The emergency protocol spreadsheet has fourteen columns and I've checked each one twice since eleven o'clock. Fuel reserves, medical supplies, ammunition count, food stores, the cash in the floor safe. And tonight I need the discipline of columns more than I need sleep.
The clubhouse hums low around me at midnight.
Rex on the camera bank in Bruiser's office, scrolling feeds.
Finn checking the perimeter every forty minutes, his boots on the gravel.
Knox at the head of the table, reading Bruiser's latest intel brief, not speaking.
Bruiser at his laptop, headset on, monitoring the scanner frequencies he tapped into two weeks ago.
Upstairs, Ellie and Lily.
I close the spreadsheet and open it again.
Ellie came by at seven with a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea she'd promised Lily, the paperback still tagged with a library hold slip.
She planned to drop it off and drive home.
Knox took one look at Bruiser's report and told everyone in the building to stay put.
Bruiser's intel put the Bloodstone scouts moving tonight, a shift in their pattern.
Knox trusted Bruiser's gut because Bruiser's gut had earned that.
So Ellie stayed. She put Lily to bed in the reinforced room upstairs, sat on the cot beside her and read to her until Lily fell asleep. I stood in the doorway watching the two of them and said nothing.
I can track her through the building. The cedar-vanilla of her scent cuts through the clubhouse air, through the leather and motor oil and the collective musk of orc and minotaur that fills every surface of this place.
I pick her up the way I've picked her up for months now, at distances that shouldn't make sense.
She's still upstairs. Her scent reads settled and warm, the softness she carries near Lily.
Knox looks up from Bruiser's report. "The records at your house."
"Home office. Filing cabinet, the backup drives, hardcopies of every financial document this club has generated since I took the patch. Tax filings, bank records, the real books." I push my glasses up. "If someone wanted to know how this club operates, my house is the place to start."
"We move them tomorrow."
"Should have moved them a month ago."
Knox holds my eyes. He doesn't argue because I'm right and we both know it.
I stare at the table, and think about Ellie's heartbeat upstairs, the way her pulse sits calm enough that I know she's close to sleep, curled on the cot beside my daughter in a building full of armed orcs.
At one-thirty, Bruiser pulls his headset off.
"Movement."
Knox stands. Every brother in the room orients toward Bruiser's station.
"Not here." Bruiser turns the laptop. The motion-triggered camera feed from my property fills the screen. Two figures, dark clothing, moving through the backyard. "They're at your house."
The security system triggers on my phone.
Fifteen seconds of silence and then the kitchen window alarm, the back door sensor, the hallway motion detector firing in sequence.
They're inside. They're in my house, walking through the rooms where I cook my daughter's meals and help her with homework and fall asleep in the reading chair.
Bruiser tracks them on the cameras. Two scouts. They go through the home office first. Drawers pulled open, files scattered, the backup drives ripped from the desk. Then the hallway. Then Lily's room.
I watch a stranger open my daughter's bedroom door on a grainy feed and my vision narrows to a point.
On the hallway camera, one of them shakes a spray can. Black paint across the wall in long strokes. The letters come clear even on the grainy feed: YOU CANNOT HIDE FOREVER. WE WILL COME IN FORCE.
Inside Lily's room, the second scout strips her bed.
Pulls books off the shelves. Opens every drawer and dumps it.
Her stuffed rabbit, the one Maren made before Lily arrived, lands facedown on the carpet.
Then he tapes a print to her bedroom door.
The resolution is too low to see it but I know what a surveillance photograph looks like.
They know where my daughter goes to school and they know what she looks like.
Then they move to my bedroom. The bed I shared with Maren. The nightstand where her photograph sits in a frame Lily picked out three years ago. The drawer where the wedding ring has sat since the day I took it off and couldn't put it back on.
On the feed, a scout picks up the frame. He looks at it. Then he smashes it against the wall. The frame shatters across the carpet.
I'm on my feet. The chair hits the floor behind me. Knox says my name and I don't really hear it because the only sound in my head is glass breaking on a four-inch screen.
My keys are in my hand. I'm through the front door of the clubhouse before anyone moves.
"Colt!" Knox's voice carries across the lot. "COLT!"
I'm on my bike with the engine running.
Behind me, Knox is already giving orders. I can hear him through the door I left open: "Finn, Bruiser—stay with the women and children. Nobody in or out. Rex, Garrett—move."
The gravel sprays behind me and I pull onto the access road doing sixty in the dark.
I make the drive in nine minutes. Should take fifteen. My hands are steady on the handlebars and my teeth are locked together and I don't think about what I'm going to do when I get there.
The back door hangs open. Glass from the kitchen window crunches under my boots. I can smell them—two orcs, clan markers in their scent, the sharp tang of adrenaline and the acrid burn of spray paint.
They're still inside.
The first one comes out of the master bedroom carrying my nightstand drawer. He sees me and drops it. The ring hits the hardwood floor and rolls. I hear it.
I put him through the hallway wall.
The drywall cracks from baseboard to ceiling. He goes limp for a second, then swings. Catching me above the eye—a hard hit. My vision whites out on the left side and comes back red. I grab his jacket and slam him back a second time and he stays down.
The second one comes out of Lily's room.
He's bigger than the first. He gets his hands up and lands two hits to my ribs before I close the distance.
I don't think about what I'm doing. Years of spreadsheets, patience, keeping my voice level, reading bedtime stories, being the gentle one—all of it breaks at once.
I hit him until he stops hitting me back but he's still standing.
Headlights sweep through the kitchen window. Trucks. The scouts come to and hear the engines, the one still standing shoves past me, staggers down the hallway, and bolts through the back door into the dark. The one on the floor crawls after him.
I let them go and stand in the wreckage of my home with the spray paint behind me and Lily's tossed room in front of me. My knuckles are split open. Blood runs from the cut above my eye. My ribs ache where he connected and my hands are shaking so hard I can't close them.
Knox comes through the front door. Rex and Garrett behind him. They see the damage. They see me.
Knox doesn't say anything. He walks to me, puts his hand on my shoulder, and steers me toward the door. I let him. Garrett picks up my ring from the floor and closes it in his palm without a word.
Knox pulls his phone. "Diesel, get Chain and Hunter. I need you at Colt's house. Board the doors, clean shit up, and get back to the clubhouse. Church in forty minutes." He pockets the phone and looks at Rex. "You're driving Colt's truck."
The ride back is silent. I sit in Knox's passenger seat with my head back and blood drying on my face and nothing in my chest but the shaking
Jess is waiting at the clubhouse with her med kit on the kitchen table. She takes one look at my face and points at the chair.
"Sit."
I sit. She cleans the cut above my eye with steady hands and pulls two butterfly strips across it. Presses a cold pack against my knuckles. Wraps my ribs where the bruising is already spreading.
"You went alone," she says.
"Yeah."
"You're an idiot."
"Yeah, I guess I am."
She finishes the wrap and squeezes my shoulder once.
Church is called at shortly after. Every brother at the table.
The room smells like coffee, sweat and the flat edge of collective fear that none of them will name out loud.
I sit at the far end with butterfly strips over my eye, my knuckles wrapped and every brother looking at the damage before they look at Knox.
Knox stands. "This was a test. They targeted our Secretary's home to prove they can reach our families. Not the clubhouse, not the compound. Colt's house. Where his daughter sleeps."
Bruiser pulls up the camera footage on the wall screen. The two scouts, their entry route, the twelve minutes they spent inside. "They're pressuring Knox. The message is clear. Come home, rejoin the clan, or we go after your brothers' families one by one."
"They photographed my daughter at the library." My voice comes out level. The shaking has stopped and what replaced it sits deeper. "Surveillance photograph. They've been watching her. Watching me pick her up. They left it on her bedroom door."
The silence in the room presses down. Garrett's hands go flat on the table.
Finn leans forward with his elbows on his knees and stares at the floor.
Rex sits motionless, but I can see the cords in his neck tight against the skin.
Chain's fist closes around the chain at his throat.
Steel takes his glasses off and sets them on the table.
Hunter, leaning against the back wall, pushes off it and stands straight.
Knox lets the silence hold. Then: "I'm offering every man at this table the option to walk. No shame. No judgment. If your family is at risk and you want out, you take your cut and you go, and nobody says a word about it."
Finn speaks first. "We didn't patch in for the good times."
Garrett's fist hits the table. One thud, his jaw flexes and that's his vote.
Rex doesn't move. "Not running."
Bruiser closes his laptop. "Rex and I have got six months of intel on these bastards. I'm not wasting it."
Chain leans forward. "Say the word."
Steel nods. "I'm in."
Hunter: "I'm here, aren't I?"
I look at every brother in the room. "My daughter sleeps upstairs. Where else would I be."
Knox nods once. The vote is unanimous.
From the hallway, Diesel's voice carries through the closed door. "For what it's worth, I'm not going anywhere either."
Nobody tells him prospects don't get a vote. Knox smiles.
"Full lockdown," Knox says. "Families to safe houses. We change patrol patterns, move the records to the clubhouse vault, and we prepare."
"For what?"
Knox meets my eyes. "For when they come in force."
Bruiser clears his throat. He pulls up a second feed on the wall screen, a camera angle from the north perimeter of the clubhouse. A truck parked on the access road, lights off, engine running. The timestamp puts it during the scouts' operation.
"Dale Rickman's truck," Bruiser says. "He sat there and watched while we left to go to Colt's." He zooms in on the driver's side. Rickman behind the wheel, phone in his hand, pointed at the compound gate. "He's taking notes."
"Allied with Bloodstone?" Finn asks.
"Not allied." Bruiser shakes his head. "Circling the same target. Humans First and the clan aren't coordinating, but they're both watching us and they're both waiting for the other to make a move." He kills the feed.
Two threats. Rickman doesn't need to be allied with the Bloodstone clan to benefit from what they do to us.
Knox calls the end of the meeting. Brothers scatter to their posts.
Knox catches my arm as I pass him. His voice is low enough that only I hear it. "Don't ever do that again."
"Yes, Prez."
He lets go."
I climb the stairs.
The reinforced room sits at the end of the upstairs hallway, steel door, no exterior windows. I open it.
Lily is supposed to be asleep but she sits up the second the door opens, her hair tangled, her eyes wide in the low light. She sees my face—the butterfly strips, the bruising already darkening around my eye, the bandage on my knuckles—and she goes still.
She doesn't cry or ask what happened.
She gets off the cot, crosses the room, takes my face in both hands, pulls my head down, and presses her lips to my forehead.
My arms close around her. Everything comes back at once—Maren's photograph smashed against the wall, the ring rolling across the hardwood floor, the spray paint behind me where I put a man through the drywall.
I hold my daughter and my arms shake. I press my face against the top of her head so she can't see it.
I sink to the floor with her in my lap. Ellie sits on the cot. She doesn't move or speak, she just gives us the silence we need.
After a while, Lily's breathing slows. She falls asleep against my chest, her fingers still hooked in my shirt. I carry her to the cot and set her down and Ellie pulls the blanket over her shoulders.
I sit back on the floor with my back against the wall. Ellie sits beside me. She reaches for my hand and I let her take it.
But I don't lean in. My grip holds hers and it's tight, she threads her fingers through mine and I let her because I don't know how to stop.
The surveillance photograph was Ellie's silhouette at the circulation desk, visible through the library window, framed right behind Lily and me.
They put her in the picture. She's in the frame because she's in my life, and they know it, last time a woman's life connected to mine I felt her die inside my own chest.
Ellie reaches up and touches my jaw. I turn my head away from her. Just enough that her fingers slide off my skin.
She drops her hand, I can't look at her.
After a while, her head rests against my shoulder and her breathing evens out. I stay awake. I memorize the weight of her against me, the way her hand loosens in mine as she falls asleep, because I've already decided what I have to do, and she won't be this close again.