Chapter 4 Valentina #2
The Raiders’ dining hall is a rough hybrid of ranch kitchen and hunting lodge: long scarred tables, mismatched chairs, metal trays steaming with eggs and bacon, the air thick with grease, coffee, and leftover beer.
It’s crowded—leather cuts, denim, tattoos, women passing plates—though no kids. Not today.
Conversation falters the moment we appear. Heads turn. Eyes follow. Recognition flickers in a few faces, curiosity in others, judgment in all of them.
At the far end sits an empty high-backed chair, unmistakably Xavier’s—leather worn at the arm, floor scuffed where his boots always rested.
My stomach twists. My steps don’t slow.
Every eye tracks me as I move through the room, tension buzzing like a live wire.
Raiders patches stare back—skulls, gears, wings—promising consequences.
Beside me, Asher stays stone-still except for the way his gaze sweeps the room, marking threats.
He never touches me, but his presence says enough.
We reach the head of the table, but before I can sit down, I feel it.
The impact hits my shoulder and side at the same time—wet, cold, and sticky. Something explodes against my upper arm, splattering across my Raiders shirt and up my cheek. Yellow and clear ooze drips down, trailing toward my jaw. The smell hits me a second later: sulfur and grease. Egg.
Someone threw a fucking egg at me.
A laugh bubbles up from somewhere down the table, quickly choked off.
My cheek throbs where the shell must have caught skin.
For half a heartbeat I just sit there and feel it slide down, viscous and disgusting, tickling my neck.
A wash of humiliation flashes hot up my spine.
Humiliation, followed immediately by white, clean rage.
Asher moves before I do.
His palm slams down on the table beside my plate with a crack that makes a few people jump. The sound cuts through the mutters like a gunshot. His gray eyes sweep the hall with a cold, even fury I haven’t seen on his face yet.
“Who threw that?” His voice isn’t loud, but it doesn’t have to be. The entire room is quiet enough to hear the way the words grind against each other.
No one answers. A prospect at the far end looks away too quickly, shoulders hunching. Someone coughs. Chair legs scrape. The egg continues its slow slide down my shirt, sticky and humiliating and irrelevant.
“I asked a question,” Asher says, straighter now, hands curling slightly. “Who threw it?”
I can feel the violence building in him like a pressure change before a storm. I imagine him stalking down the table, hauling men up by their collars, breaking noses until someone squeals.
It would be satisfying. It would also make me look like I needed him to do what I can do myself, and if I am supposed to be the leader of the Raiders I have to act like it.
“Someone was pussy enough to throw it,” I bark. “The least you can do is be brazen enough to fucking own it.”
The egg drips onto the floor in a viscous ribbon. I don’t wipe it off. I want whoever threw it to get the full show.
“Who threw the fucking egg?” I snarl, letting the question roll out of my mouth lazy and dangerous.
My gaze travels down the right side of the table first, then the left, meeting eyes where I can, letting people see exactly how little I’m in the mood for games.
“I did,” a deep voice says, followed by the scrap of a metal chair.
The man from before—the one who called me cartel whore—pushes to his feet.
He doesn’t slink or shrink. He stands up with the smug righteousness of a man who thinks he’s untouchable.
He’s taller than I realized sitting down, broad through the shoulders, a thick neck rising out of his cut.
His patch reads JOHNSON. Council. That tracks.
“Yeah,” he says, lifting his chin. “That was me.”
A few of the other council members shift uncomfortably, but none of them tell him to sit. Cassandra goes very still, eyes darting between him and me, something like apprehension lurking under the practiced pout of her mouth.
I study him for a beat. “Johnson, right?”
He smirks. “So you do listen when we talk about you.”
“That what you call that?” I ask. My voice stays calm. “Talking? Because I call this a dick move.”
He gestures to the egg streaking my shirt. “That’s me showing the club what a joke this is. A bottom bitch being head of the Raiders, might as well pull my drawers down and let the Vipers fuck us.”
A low swell of whispers rolls through the room, catching on my name, on Xavier’s empty chair, on the fact that I’m still standing here instead of running.
Heat crawls up the back of my neck, nerves tightening in a slow, suffocating coil as every murmur sharpens into judgment.
My pulse kicks hard enough to bruise, but I lift my chin anyway, refusing to let them see me flinch.
“If you wanted to get fucked Johnson,” I reply. “All you have to do is ask.”
“Bitch!” Johnson jerks like he’s been yanked forward on a wire, as he lunges toward me, rage blotting out the last of his common sense. He makes it half a step before Asher rises beside me, cracking his neck from side to side.
“One more step,” he says, voice low enough to chill bone, “and I will fuck you up.”
A sharp flicker of panic pulses through me as Asher settles next to me. His protectiveness digs between my ribs—steadying and suffocating at the same time. I can feel every watchful eye in the room waiting for him to snap, waiting for me to hide behind him. I won’t.
I touch his arm, not gently. “Asher,” I murmur under my breath, forcing steel into my voice even as my pulse stutters. “Calm down.”
His jaw flexes, but he holds.
Johnson smirks like he’s just won something. “Asher, this is between me and the leader of the club,” he snarls, licking his lips like a hungry animal. “You can’t get involved. Club rules.”
A cold clarity settles over me, slicing through the nerves and the noise.
“Fine, then you come up to my face and you challenge the leader of this club with fucking respect,” I say, meeting his gaze without blinking, “you do it to their face. Not with eggs from halfway down the room.”
A few laughs crackle at the edges of the hall, quick and startled. Johnson’s eyes narrow.
“You want me gone, you want to prove I don’t belong here?” I continue. “Stand up—good. Now walk your ass down here and try to make me move.”
“Valentina,” Asher says under his breath, a warning or maybe a question.
I don’t look at him. “He threw first.”
Johnson takes a step out from in front of his chair.
The men sitting near him lean back to give him space, eyes bright with the promise of a spectacle.
He rolls his shoulders like he’s loosening up for a bar fight.
His gaze flicks once to Asher, then up to the empty balcony rail where some patched members lean to watch.
“You sure you want this, girl?” he calls. “Because once we start, I’m not going to pull punches because you’ve got a pussy between those thighs, but I will kiss it better when I’m done with you.”
I walk around the end of the table, into the open space between it and the wall. The floor here is scarred from old fights, the wood darker where blood has soaked in over the years. My heart is beating steady, my hands light. The egg on my shoulder has cooled to a tacky smear.
“Stop talking,” I say. “Come find out.”
He laughs and moves faster, closing the distance with big, confident strides. Someone whistles. Someone mutters a bet. My peripheral vision catches Isaiah materializing at the far doorway, hair a mess, eyes almost black as he realizes what he’s walked into.
Johnson comes in hot, like they always do. He swings wide, a meat-hook punch aimed at my face, meant to end things early and dramatically. The kind of hit that works in bar brawls, where everyone’s drunk and sloppy and the goal is more about sound than contact.
I’ve never fought for sound.
I duck under his arm, pivoting on the ball of my foot.
The air rushes past my cheek where his fist would have been.
My body slides into the pocket of his open side, and my elbow drives up into the soft spot under his ribs.
He grunts, surprised, folding reflexively.
Before he can regain his balance, I hook my boot around his ankle and sweep, yanking his leg out from under him.
He hits the ground on one knee, one hand slamming down to catch himself.
The room erupts in a rough cheer, then quiets just as fast to see what happens next.
Johnson recovers quicker than an average barfly; I’ll give him that.
He snarls, pushing up, and catches my thigh with a clumsy grab, fingers digging in.
Pain shoots up my leg. I ride it, exploiting the contact—spin with the grip instead of against it, my hand threading through his hair and yanking his head down as my knee drives up hard into his face.
Cartilage crunches. The sound is wet and final.
He howls, hand flying to his nose, blood already pouring between his fingers.
He staggers back, bumping into a chair. Someone’s plate crashes to the floor.
I don’t give him time to think. I follow, a predator on a wounded animal, fist slamming into his exposed kidney.
He doubles over again with a strangled noise.
“Get up, councilman,” I say, breathing only slightly harder than before. “You wanted everyone to see what a joke I am, right? Don’t go quiet on me now.”
He swings blind in my direction, a backhand fueled by pain and humiliation.
It clips my cheek hard enough to snap my head to the side.
The taste of copper floods my mouth as my teeth cut my inner lip.
The room gives a collective “ooh,” like a schoolyard.
Fine. He wanted to make it messy. We can do messy.