Chapter 8
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Cage
I entered Church at six the next morning. Every patched brother at the table before I sat down.
Thanks to a favor owed, Ledger stood at the head of the conference table with a file that smelled like mildew and old ink, pulled from the county clerk’s basement at five a.m. Addie had told him where to look.
Gran kept records, she'd said after finding her journal.
Her grandmother and my old man settled the lane access themselves, wrote it down and dropped it with the clerk all those years ago.
He found it shoved in a box on the top shelve. Handwritten easement agreement, my father's name next to her grandmother's. Signed, witnessed, never filed proper with the county. The code violation Hutchens had written up had no legs, and the man either knew it or didn't bother looking.
Ledger laid the rest out. County records. The fee trail. Reap's surveillance timestamps on Hutchens's after-hours visits to Addie's building. The man wasn't dirty. I'd have known. But he'd let a grudge steer his badge, and somebody above him had made it easy.
Reap spoke from the far end. "Toller's still running product up from the interstate. Cross Bone hasn't pulled back."
"That stays on the board." I didn't look up. "Nobody moves until we know who's clearing the route for them."
Quiet. We all knew somebody local was helping Cross Bone operate. Nobody had a name yet.
"Full patch to the courthouse. Not a vote. My call." I looked down the table. "We ride in, we let her handle it. Nobody touches Hutchens."
Chairs scraped back. Nobody argued.
Fourteen bikes rolled down Main Street in a single column, and the town heard us before they saw us.
We cut engines in unison at the courthouse steps.
Same steps where Addie had stood less than two weeks into this town arguing with a man in a pressed uniform over a piece of paper designed to break her.
Same steps where I watched her from across the square and knew I was done.
Wanted her before I'd said a word to her, and every day since had only pulled the knot tighter.
I could still see her up there, paper crushed in her fist, giving that pressed-uniform prick hell.
Half the town was already gathering. Word travels faster than a Harley in this county, and the bikes had given them a head start. Louetta stood on the diner steps with her arms crossed and a look on her face that said she'd been waiting for this exact morning her whole damn life.
Addie's truck pulled in behind the column.
She climbed out in jeans, boots, a flannel she'd stolen from my closet.
Dark auburn hair loose, chin up. Every goddamn thought I'd had left my skull.
The bruise on her arm from last night was turning purple under her sleeve.
My knuckles ached in sympathy, the split skin from the bastard's teeth pulling tight.
Hutchens came out of the courthouse convinced this was a stunt he could spin.
Pressed khaki, badge catching the light, and the walk of a man who believed his own reasons.
He made it three steps before Ledger handed the file to Judge Ware, who'd driven out before dawn because Ledger asked, and Ledger didn't ask for things.
Addie walked up those steps and I stayed at the bottom. This part wasn't mine.
"You let a grudge do your job for you." Her voice carried clean across the square.
No shake in it. "You wrote the code violation yourself and hand-delivered it.
After-hours visits to a building you had no business being in.
The one property in this county tied to a name you've had a problem with for twenty years, and you couldn't wait to shut it down.
" She held up the paper trail Ledger had assembled.
"Maybe you told yourself you were ridding this town of trouble by pushing me to file against the club.
Maybe somebody made it easy to believe that needed doing.
But the paper says otherwise, and so does every timestamp on this page. "
Hutchens swallowed. His eyes cut to me, looking for the puppet strings, and I gave him nothing. Because this was her.
Judge Ware closed the file. Looked at Hutchens over his glasses. "Mr. Locke and Ms. Merritt are well within their rights to file a formal complaint with your office. If they're inclined to waive that right, I'd suggest you take the win, young man, and let this go."
Hutchens turned for the door.
"You knew, didn't you?" Addie. Quiet enough to stop him cold.
He kept his back to her. "Lockes don't always keep their arrangements, Miss Merritt."
Then he walked inside. Spine straight, shoulders locked, fists balled at his sides.
Mercy leaned against his bike, arms folded across his chest, watching the courthouse door close. Something crossed his face. Quick, gone before anyone else would've caught it.
"Last time I saw somebody take a man apart that clean in this town," he said, just to me, "it was Teagan Winthrop telling three college boys to go fuck themselves outside the diner."
He hadn't said her name out loud in years. He looked away. I didn't ask.
Preach was at my shoulder before he made a sound. Thirty years of sneaking cigarettes behind the clubhouse had made the man a goddamn ghost.
"She handled herself," he said.
"She did."
He was quiet for a beat. Then: "My problem was never with her. You know that."
"I know."
"My problem was watching you stake everything on a woman the club didn't owe, and thinking about what happens to these boys if you burn yourself down doing it." His eyes found mine. Steady. The oldest conscience in the room. "I was wrong about the math. I wasn't wrong to check it."
I nodded. That was Preach. He never apologized for the question. He just told you when the answer came back different.
Addie came down the steps and I caught her arm—gentle, always gentle, fingers light on her elbow—and pulled her against me. Her forehead dropped against my collarbone and she let out a breath she'd been holding for days.
"Courthouse steps," she said into my shirt. "Full circle."
"The town should fear you, not me."
She laughed, throaty and sweet. I pressed my mouth to her hair and breathed her in. Sawdust, fresh dye, something underneath that was just her. Just Addie. My chest ached right there in front of God and half the county. Fucked beyond any reasonable definition of the word.
The clubhouse that night was the loudest it had been in months.
Every brother present, prospects working the bar, somebody had plugged in the jukebox.
For once the music wasn't thirty years out of date.
The drum stove threw heat into the corners.
The whole room smelled like spilled beer and scorched metal.
Addie sat on the arm of the couch talking to Louetta, who'd driven out with a casserole and an opinion about everything. One of the prospects nodded at her from the bar. Small thing. Mattered.
I'd ordered the cut the morning after our night at Locke Garage, paid whatever it took to get it here fast, and buried it in the bottom drawer of my dresser where I wouldn't have to look at it.
It was already there when she walked out of the clubhouse and told me not to follow her.
The leather was stiff and unworn. The patch across the back read PROPERTY OF CAGE in block letters, the Timber Run MC rocker smaller underneath.
Checked the stitching until my eyes blurred.
Real productive use of my time, standing in the hallway inspecting thread counts like a man with his shit together.
Preach stepped in front of Addie before I could cross the room. The brothers shut up. Even the jukebox seemed to drop a notch.
"You need to hear this from somebody who isn't him," Preach said, his voice filling the room without trying.
"Being his means you stay out of Church.
No asking about club business. You keep yourself steady when brothers are present.
There are doors in this building that stay closed to you, questions that won't get answers.
That's not punishment. That's the life."
Addie looked at him with the same steady fire she'd turned on Hutchens on those steps. Straight on. No flinch.
"I know what I'm choosing."
Preach studied her long enough that the room forgot to breathe. Then stepped aside.
I took it to her with the leather over my arm. Every brother in the building watching. Mercy with his beer halfway to his mouth, frozen. Wrench with his back against the bar, eyes wide. Preach, jaw unclenched for the first time since I'd known the man.
Addie stood. Hands still at her sides, eyes locked on mine. My own fucking blood in my ears. I'd stared down worse than a room full of brothers. My hands had never shaken. They were shaking now, and I let them.
"This doesn't go on until you say it," I told her. "Not because I'm asking and not because the club expects it. Because you want to. Your call, firecracker. It's been your call since the day you told Hutchens to go to hell on those steps."
She looked at the cut. At the patch with my name on it. At the room full of brothers who'd ridden through town that morning like a single body.
"I love you." Just her voice in a room full of people who'd warned her away from me. "I love you, and I choose this. All of it."
Christ. My lungs just stopped. Then I stepped forward and slid the cut over her shoulders, settling the leather against her back, and she reached up and gripped the lapels and pulled me down and kissed me in front of every man I had ever bled with.
The Main Room cleared out in stages. Brothers heading upstairs or pulling sweetbutts toward the back hall, Wrench collecting empties behind the bar.
Mercy clapped my shoulder on his way past and said nothing, which from Mercy was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
By midnight it was just us. The drum stove, the low orange light, the leather still on her shoulders.
"How long has that been in your drawer?" she said.
"Was in that drawer the morning of our fight."