Prologue #2
I look at my hands. The blood has dried completely now, dark and flaking in the creases of my knuckles.
I go to the sink in the kitchenette and scrub with dish soap until the water runs clear, my skin is raw, and the cut across my left palm that I don't remember getting starts bleeding again.
Eleven men. I scrub harder. My sister on a mattress with no sheets. I scrub until the soap stings. The chain bolted to the wall, four feet long, just long enough.
When she comes out of the bathroom, she gets into the far bed without looking at me.
She pulls the covers over her head.
The room goes dark except for the orange glow of the parking lot lights seeping through the curtain.
I sit in the dark and listen to her breathe until the sun comes up.
Two weeks later, she's gone.
My mother helps arrange it—a friend of a friend in British Columbia who can take her in, help her disappear.
New documents. New city. New phone number. A therapist who specializes in the kind of damage that doesn't have a clean name.
She leaves while I'm getting gas. No note.
My mother tells me later that she asked for it that way. She doesn't want a goodbye. She doesn't want to ever see my face again.
The last thing she tells my mother is that she's going to pick a new name. Something small. Something nobody will remember.
I never hear from her again.
I stay in Vegas for another year. Work construction. Come home to my mother's apartment smelling like drywall dust and eat whatever she's left in the fridge.
I don't drink, fight, or do much of anything except exist in the space between who I've been and whoever I'm supposed to become.
Some nights I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and think about a four-foot chain and a padlock and a mattress on the floor, and my whole body goes rigid, locked up with a rage that has nowhere to go because the men I need to kill are already dead.
My mother watches me like she's waiting for me to detonate.
I can't blame her. Deep down, I think I'm waiting for the same thing.
Then I hear about the Reapers Rejects through a guy I work with on a framing crew.
He prospected years ago, washed out, but he talks about the club the way people talk about the military—with the specific nostalgia of someone who's been part of something bigger than himself and lost it.
I listen more than I usually do.
Ask a question or two, which for me is practically an interrogation.
He makes a call. Two weeks later, I'm riding up to Montana on my used Dyna with a duffel bag and nothing else worth bringing.
* * *
Montana is cold in a way Nevada never prepares me for.
Wet cold, the kind that crawls into your clothes and sets up camp.
The Reapers Rejects compound sits in a valley outside Billings, ringed by pine and scrub brush and the kind of quiet that makes your ears ring if you're not used to it.
I've been prospecting for two months. Grunt work. Cleaning the garage bay, hauling kegs for the bar, keeping my mouth shut and my eyes open.
The brothers test me the way they test everyone—not with fists but with mundane indignity. Scrubbing toilets. Washing bikes in the rain. Taking orders from men I could fold in half without trying, because they've earned something I haven't yet.
I don't mind. The structure makes sense.
You earn your place or you don't get one. Nobody hands you a cut because of who your father is. Nobody claims you because you share their blood. That suits me just fine.
"Cardenas." A patched member named Booger tosses me a beer across the courtyard one Saturday afternoon. Late sun, the shadows of the bikes stretching long across the gravel. "Where'd you come from before this?"
I catch the can one-handed. "Vegas area."
"Family out there?" He settles into an Adirondack chair, stretching his legs.
"My mother." I crack the beer and drink instead of elaborating.
Booger watches me for a moment, then lets it go. Most people do.
I've said more words in the last ten seconds than I usually burn through in an hour, and he's been around long enough to read the economy of it.
"Quiet type," he says, grinning. "Good. We got enough loud assholes around here. I may happen to be one of them."
He goes to join the others gathering around the barbecue pit.
The compound is filling up for one of those weekend cookouts the Montana charter does—families, ol' ladies and their kids, music coming from a JBL speaker someone's balanced on the railing of the clubhouse porch.
Burgers, charcoal, and the sharp green smell of cut grass carry on the breeze, mixing with diesel from the garage.
I stay where I am. Leaning against the garage wall with my beer, watching the way the compound breathes.
Front gate: one road in, chain-link topped with razor wire. Back exit through the tree line, fifty yards to a service road. Side door off the kitchen leading to a fenced yard.
The Sergeant at Arms—a thick-necked man everyone calls Grim—has a knife on his belt and a .45 under his cut. Booger is carrying too, left hip, barely concealed.
I survey all of it without trying. It's what I do.
It's what I've always done—map the room, mark the exits, clock the weapons, know who's where. Some people make conversation at parties. I build evacuation plans.
The women cluster near the long table, setting out covered dishes and foil trays and arguing about who's overcooked what.
Kids chase each other between the parked bikes while their mothers yell at them to be careful around the chrome.
I watch a little girl, maybe six, climb onto a patched member's lap and tug on his beard until he laughs and wraps both arms around her.
He kisses the top of her head without interrupting his conversation, like holding her is as natural as breathing.
I look away and take a long pull from my beer.
A man I'll later learn is called Dracus stands near the smoker with two other guys, all of them laughing with the easy comfort of men who've been brothers for decades.
The woman beside them—Roxy, someone tells me, wife to all three of them in some arrangement I don't pretend to understand—has a laugh that carries clean across the compound.
That's when I notice her.
She comes through the clubhouse door carrying a casserole dish, her dark brown hair falling well past her shoulders, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt she's cuffed at the elbows.
She says something to Roxy I can't catch and Roxy throws her head back laughing, and when the girl smiles her whole face changes—warm and completely unguarded.
It's the kind of smile that belongs to someone who's never had a reason to hide it.
She sets the dish on the table and a kid—maybe four, five years old—grabs at her hand and pulls her down to his level.
She crouches without hesitation, listening to whatever earth-shattering crisis he's presenting with the kind of patience that doesn't get faked.
One of the men near the smoker—Dracus, I think—glances over at her with an expression I can't read.
Pride, maybe. Or just the certainty of a man who knows his kid turned out right.
One of Roxy's daughters. Has to be.
Same face, same coloring, same way of moving through space like the world owes them nothing and they're fine with that.
She's young, though. Nineteen, maybe twenty. Old enough to carry herself with confidence but young enough that the confidence hasn't been tested yet.
I watch for exactly two seconds longer than I should.
Then I look at my beer and drink.
It would be too messy.
Too connected to people who matter in this club, carrying too much warmth for a man who's burned everything he's ever touched.
A man with blood still living under his fingernails, no matter how many times he scrubs.
I finish my beer, crush the can against my thigh, and go back into the garage to clean engine parts until the party's over.
But I remember her face.