Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Doom
I’m on gate duty on a random afternoon.
Folding chair, guard booth, the compound entrance, and four hours of sun.
The overhang covers about half the chair if I angle it right, but by midafternoon the heat doesn't care about shade.
It just sits on you like a hand pressing down.
I don't mind it. Never have.
Gate duty means I can see everyone who comes and goes.
I clock Python leaving in Astra's car to pick up Lyra, Boulder riding out with Razor and coming back two hours later, the mail carrier at his usual time, the water delivery truck running late.
I know the sound of every bike in this compound—Compass' Dyna, Rooster's Sportster, the specific rattle of Brick's exhaust that he keeps saying he'll fix and never does.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I pull it out and squint at the screen against the glare.
Nova:
The kids are trying to paint Mei's face. She's losing badly.
A photo follows. Mei sitting cross-legged on the common room floor, looking murderous while Xiomara applies bright blue paint to her left cheek with the focus of a surgeon.
Rex is in the background doing something destructive to a cardboard box.
I type back:
She's going to kill you for sending me this.
Nova replies:
She'll never know. Unless you snitch.
I crack a smile:
I don't snitch.
The three dots come immediately, and then a message:
Debatable. You told Ruby I was the one who used her good pan for eggs.
Still? Good god. She should know it wasn’t me.
That was Compass.
Like rapid fire, I have a response back from her:
WHO TOLD COMPASS IT WAS OKAY TO USE THE PAN, EMILIANO?
I almost smile. My thumb hovers over the keyboard for a second before I type:
Bring me some water when you get a chance?
She responds back quickly:
Already made you a plate. Give me ten minutes.
I set the phone on the ledge of the guard booth and lean back.
The metal chair creaks under my weight.
My bandana is soaked through with sweat and the chain around my neck is warm against my chest.
The compound road stretches south into brown nothing—scrub brush and dust and the distant shimmer of heat rising off asphalt.
Nova's in my bed four nights out of seven now.
She keeps a toothbrush in my room and a bottle of that coconut shampoo in my shower.
Last week she left a sweatshirt on my chair that I haven't moved because it smells like her.
The club respects me.
The Diego rescue shifted something — Python asks my opinion on tactical calls now and actually listens.
Zorro defers to me on approach planning.
Even Amara nodded at me across the courtyard yesterday, and Amara doesn't give any of us prospects extra attention.
We’ve all heard that Lashes is going to name the baby Hope.
I lean my head back against the guard booth wall and close my eyes for a second.
The sun is warm on my face.
The compound is quiet behind me—kids' voices carrying faintly from inside, the clang of Compass in the garage, Ruby's radio playing something angry through the kitchen window.
My phone buzzes again.
Nova:
Mei says if you tell anyone about the face paint she's going to key your bike.
I smirk as I reply:
Tell her I said try it.
Nova types back quickly:
She says she's not scared of you.
Nova might think I’m joking, but I’m being honest when I say this:
She should be.
Nova’s quiet for a minute before a new message pops up:
Nobody's scared of a man who makes pancakes, Emiliano.
I'm typing a response when I hear the engine.
It's not one I recognize.
My thumb stops on the screen. I sit up straight, eyes on the road. The sound is coming from the south—a V-twin, heavy, the deep growl of something with displacement.
Not a Dyna, not a Sportster, not any of the Japanese bikes the local riders favor. This is American iron. Big and loud and getting louder.
I stand up. My hand drops to the Sig on my hip.
The bike comes around the last curve in the road and I see it.
A Harley Road King. Black and chrome, well-maintained.
The rider is big—not tall, but built, thick through the chest and arms with the dense muscle of a man who's used his body as a tool for decades.
Dark skin. Gray threaded through his beard. Sunglasses and a cut.
Not our cut.
The patches are wrong. Different colors, different rockers.
I can read the top rocker from forty feet as he slows down.
Kodiak MC.
My father pulls up to the gate and kills the engine.
The silence after is worse than the sound.
Just the tick of cooling metal and the rush of blood in my ears and Curtis "Hatchet" Brown sitting on his Road King ten feet from me, pulling off his sunglasses and hooking them on the collar of his shirt like he's dropping by for a visit.
He looks like me.
That's the thing nobody tells you about absent fathers—they don't disappear completely.
They leave pieces of themselves in your face, your build, your hands.
I look at Curtis and I see my own jaw, my own shoulders, my own dark eyes staring back at me from a face that's twenty-five years older and set in an expression I've never worn.
Smug. Entitled. The face of a man who thinks the world owes him something.
"Emiliano." He says my name like he has a right to it. "Damn, boy. You got big."
"You need to leave," I tell him. My voice comes out flat. Dead level.
He swings a leg off the bike and stands, rolling his shoulders like the ride stiffened him up.
He's shorter than me by a couple of inches but wider, his arms thick under the Kodiak cut, his knuckles scarred and calcified from years of doing exactly what his road name suggests.
"That's how you greet your old man?" he asks, spreading his hands. "I rode a long way to see my son."
"You're not my father." The words burn coming up. "You're a nobody that isn't even on my birth certificate. Get back on the bike."
"Now that's cold, Emiliano." He takes a step toward the gate, thumbs hooked in his belt. "I know I wasn't around. I know that. But people grow. I've been doing a lot of thinking about what matters, and family—"
"Don't." I cut him off. My hand is still on the Sig. "Don't stand there in a Kodiak cut outside a Reapers Rejects clubhouse and talk to me about family."
His expression flickers.
The wounded-father mask holds for another second, then slides off like oil.
What's underneath is harder. Flatter. The real Curtis Brown.
"All right," he says, crossing his arms over the Kodiak patches. "Fair enough. You want to skip the sentimental shit, we'll skip it. You're prospecting for a club that's got enemies, Emiliano. Enemies who know you exist. Enemies who know whose blood is running through your veins."
"I carry my mother's name," I tell him.
"You carry my face." He jabs a finger at me.
"Look in the goddamn mirror. You think these people won't figure it out?
You've got Kodiak and Bear blood, whether you like it or not, and when they find out—and they will find out—you're done here.
Come prospect with us. I'm offering you something real.
Father and son, same club, same patch. We could have the relationship you always wanted. "
The lie is so massive it almost takes my breath.
The relationship I always wanted.
Like he knows anything about what I wanted.
Like he was around for any of it—the birthdays that came and went without a card, the nights I sat at the kitchen table waiting for a phone call that never came.
Like he didn't leave my mother pregnant and alone and never look back until right now, when it suits him.
"I'd rather die a prospect here than patch in with you," I tell him, and I mean every word.
His eyes go narrow. The fake warmth is gone. What's left is cold and calculating, an Enforcer sizing up an obstacle.
"That's a shame," he says. He pulls a cigarette from his cut pocket and lights it with a Zippo, takes a long drag, exhales smoke between us. "I was hoping the easy way would work."
"There's no way to do this. You're leaving."
"She's doing good, you know." He says it casually. Offhand. Like he's commenting on the weather.
I stop breathing.
"Your sister," he continues, and now his voice has an edge to it, a cruelty that's precise and practiced. He taps ash off the cigarette. "Up in Canada. BC, right? Nice little town. Cold, but she seems happy enough. Got herself a therapist. Little apartment. Goes by a different name these days."
He found her.
He found Wren.
The new name. The new city. The apartment my mother's friend arranged.
The identity she built piece by piece to get away from everything that happened to her.
Curtis tracked it all down and walked right into the middle of it.
"Talks to me now, too," he adds. He watches my face while he says it, reading every crack. "Funny how that works, isn't it? She won't pick up the phone for the brother who bled for her, but she'll sit down and have coffee with me."
My hand is shaking on the Sig.
Not rage. Something worse than rage.
Something that lives in the sealed-off place where my sister used to be—the place I closed the day she left without a note, the day my mother told me she doesn't want to see my face again.
Wren talks to him.
Wren, who can't look at me without seeing a mattress on the floor and a chain bolted to the wall, has let Curtis into her life.
The man who abandoned us both.
The man who wasn't there when she was taken, wasn't there when I burned down two buildings and killed eleven men to get her back, wasn't there for any of it.
She chose him, and he's standing at my gate using her as a chip.
"Here's how this goes," he says. He drops the cigarette and grinds it under his boot.
"You come prospect for the Kodiak MC. You feed us what you know about this charter—the compound layout, the personnel, the cartel connections, whatever Alejandro Ramirez is running through here.
You do that, and I leave your sister alone.
She keeps her apartment, her therapist, her new life. Nobody bothers her."
"And if I don't?" My voice doesn't sound like mine.
It sounds like the voice I had in a hallway in Pahrump a decade ago.
"Then I keep visiting her." He smiles, and it's the ugliest thing I've ever seen on a human face.
"I keep showing up at her door. Keep taking her for coffee.
Keep reminding her where she comes from, who her people are.
Every time she starts feeling safe, every time she thinks she's past it—there I am. "
He doesn't have to spell out what that means.
I know what his presence would do to Wren.
I know because I'm the person she can't stand to be around, the person whose face sends her back to that room.
If he keeps showing up, keeps inserting himself into the fragile life she's rebuilt, it'll unravel her.
Not with violence. Just with proximity.
"Get the fuck off my gate," I tell him.
"Think about it." He picks up his sunglasses and puts them back on. "I'm patient, Emiliano. But not forever. This offer has an expiration date."
He throws a leg over the Road King.
The engine catches and roars to life, rumbling through the ground under my boots.
He looks at me one more time over his shoulder. "Good seeing you, son," he says, and pulls away.
The bike growls south down the compound road, getting smaller, the sound fading until there's nothing left but dust hanging in the air and the tick of the afternoon heat.
I stand at the gate.
My hand is still on the Sig.
My lungs aren't working right.
The sweat on my bandana has gone cold against my forehead and my jaw aches from how hard I've been clenching it and my father's words are sitting inside me like broken glass, cutting everything they touch.
Wren has coffee with him. She sits across from Curtis and talks to him.
My sister, who I carried out of a house with blood on my hands and eleven bodies behind me, won't say my name. But she'll say his.
And he'll keep showing up in her life, keep pulling at the threads of her recovery, until I give him what he wants or she comes apart.
I don't know how long I stand there. Long enough for the shadows to move. Long enough for my hand to stop shaking.
When I finally turn around, Nova is standing fifteen feet behind me.
She's got a plate in one hand and a glass of water in the other.
Her face is white. Not worried-white. Not confused-white.
She looks like someone who just watched something break.
Her dark eyes are wide and fixed on me, and I can see it—she heard.
Not every word, maybe, but enough.
Enough to know that an Enforcer from Kodiak MC rode up to the gate and called me son.
Enough to hear the recruitment pitch. Enough to hear about Wren.
Enough to know I've been keeping secrets from the club I'm trying to join.
The water trembles in her hand.
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.
There's nothing I can say that will put this back together, no combination of words in English or Spanish that will undo what she just heard.
She sets the plate and the glass down on the ground.
Carefully, like she's afraid of what her hands will do if she isn't deliberate about it.
She straightens up, looks at me one more time, then she turns and walks back toward the clubhouse without a word.
I watch her go.
The plate sits in the dirt at my feet.
The glass of water catches the late sun.
The food she made me is getting cold, and my father's taillights are long gone, and the woman I'm falling for just heard enough to end everything.
I stand at the gate alone.