5. Duke
DUKE
Violet forgot the eggs.
She’s four aisles away, and I’m standing in the checkout line with a cart full of groceries and her kid on my hip, and I’m thinking about last night. About telling her I had a cut made for her. About the look on her face when she realized what that meant.
Leo is pulling at my beard. He does this now. Grabs a fistful and tugs, and when I look down at him, he laughs like it’s the funniest goddamn thing in the world. The kid is strong. Two years old and already built like a brawler.
“Quit it.” I untangle his fingers. He grabs a different fistful.
The woman in front of me turns around. Mid-fifties, reading glasses on a chain, cart full of canned goods. She looks at Leo. Looks at me. Does that ping-pong thing people do when they’re about to say what you didn’t ask for.
“Oh my goodness.” She presses her hand to her chest. “He is your spitting image. Same eyes and everything.”
Ice. Straight down my spine.
“Those blue eyes.” She’s smiling, oblivious. “And that jaw. He’s going to be trouble when he grows up. Just like his daddy, I bet.”
I don’t answer. She laughs at her own joke and turns back around to face her groceries.
Leo is pulling at my collar now. He’s moved on from the beard, bored with it, fingers exploring the edge of my cut. He twists the leather between his thumb and forefinger. His eyes are wide and fixed on mine.
Same blue. Not Violet’s shade. Hers run darker, almost gray in certain light. This is my blue. The pale, clear, ice-chip blue that stares at me when I shave in the morning.
My hand catches his. The left one. He’s been grabbing with it all morning. Reaching for cereal boxes, slapping the cart handle, and smacking my chest when I wouldn’t let him hold the bread.
A birthmark is on the back of his hand, and I never noticed it until just now. Between the knuckle of his index finger and his thumb. Small, dark, shaped like a thumbprint pressed into wet clay.
I know that birthmark.
I have that birthmark.
Same hand. Same place. Same fucking shape.
And I’m not looking at Violet’s kid anymore. I’m looking at mine.
Leo grins and pats my cheek. “Daddy,” he says.
He’s been calling me that for a few days.
Violet corrects him every time. “That’s Duke, Leo. Say Duke.”
And every time, Leo looks at her, looks at me, and says Daddy again, because kids don’t give a fuck about what you want them to say. They say what’s true.
The checkout line moves. I put the groceries on the belt one-handed, Leo balanced on my hip, and my brain is doing math it should have done when I first saw Violet with a kid.
Violet left three years and one month ago. I know the exact date.
Leo is exactly two years and five months old. Violet told me his birthday over dinner last week.
Nine months of pregnancy. Plus twenty-nine months of life. Thirty-eight months since conception. She got pregnant three years and two months ago.
Found out six weeks later. And ran.
She was carrying my kid when she disappeared without a fucking word.
Every night I spent staring at the ceiling. Every morning I rode past her empty building. Every woman I fucked, trying to forget her. My son was out there, growing up without me. Learning to walk without me. Learning to talk without me.
She knew. She knew the whole time. And she let me believe Leo is some other man’s kid.
Violet comes up the aisle with a carton of eggs. She’s half-jogging, that little rushed walk she does when she thinks she’s kept me waiting. Her hair is falling out of whatever she tied it up with this morning.
My emotions are all over the fucking place.
She’s beautiful. She’s a liar. And she stole years of my son’s life from me.
“Got them.” She drops the carton on the belt. “They were all the way in the back corner. Who designed this store?”
I don’t answer. The cashier rings us up.
I pay. Violet bags.
“Duke?” She’s looking at my face. “What’s wrong?”
Violet has always read me better than anyone, and right now I’m giving her nothing.
“Let’s go.”
The walk to the truck is thirty feet. The longest thirty feet of my life.
I buckle Leo into his car seat. He grabs my finger when I pull the strap across his chest, and I let him hold it. His left hand. The birthmark. My birthmark on my son’s hand.
I pull my finger free. Close the door. Get behind the wheel.
Violet is in the passenger seat, organizing the grocery bags at her feet. “Leo needs new shoes. He’s growing out of everything. The pediatrician says toddlers need good arch support. The shoes I found were thirty dollars, but I think?—”
“I’ll get them.”
“No.” She pauses. “I wasn’t asking you for money. I was just telling you about shoes.”
Did she fucking leave because she didn’t think I could provide for my son? I would have given him everything.
I would have given her everything.
I put the truck in reverse and pull out of the lot. “I’m buying the shoes, Violet.”
The drive to my house is twelve minutes. I make it in nine. The road is straight, the desert is flat, and I keep both hands on the wheel. If I let go, they’ll shake.
Leo is singing in the rear seat. Not language. Sounds. A melody he’s made up, a few notes repeated, and his feet kick my seat in rhythm.
My son. My kid. He’s had so many milestones I’ve missed, because I just fucking met him.
Violet is quiet. One hand resting on the door, bottom lip caught between her teeth. She’s trying to figure out what happened in the store. She can’t. She wasn’t there when it happened.
Good.
She wants to keep a secret? Fine. Now I’ve got one too.
My phone buzzes in the cupholder. I glance at the screen.
Saber: Church. Emergency. Clubhouse. Now.
I pull it up and read the second message.
Saber: Full lockdown. Diner got hit. Prospect is in the infirmary. Everyone comes in. No exceptions. Bring Violet and the kid.
I put the phone down and face the road.
“Change of plans,” I tell Violet. “We’re going home to grab some things. Then we’re going to the clubhouse.”
“Why?”
I accelerate. “Saber called a lockdown.”
She understands the gravity of my words. She lived in this world. When the president of an MC calls everyone in, you don’t ask questions. You go.
“Is it the Crimson Warriors?”
“Yeah.”
She inhales a shaky breath. “How bad?”
“Bad enough that we’re not sleeping at home tonight.”
She twists in her seat and looks at Leo. He’s mid-song, kicking the seat, oblivious. She faces forward and doesn’t ask another question.
I drive to the house. They will need some things.
We don’t talk. Violet is out of the truck before I kill the engine.
She grabs Leo, and we rush to grab a few things we’ll need.
I have clothes and necessities in my room at the clubhouse.
I grab the pack-and-play, Leo’s blanket, and pull-ups.
Violet packs some clothes. We’re back in the truck in under five minutes.
And then we are off.
The clubhouse is just outside of Ash Valley town limits, on a dirt road off the state highway. I pull through the gate, and Trapper waves me in. The lot is already filling up—bikes, trucks, and a few cars.
Old Ladies and kids are filing through the front door.
I park. Cut the engine. My hands stay on the wheel for ten extra seconds.
In twenty minutes, I’ve gone from a grocery store where a stranger told me my son looks like me, to a lockdown where I’m about to spend the night in a room with the woman who kept that son from me.
One room. One bed. Leo’s pack-and-play crammed in the corner. That’s all the space the clubhouse will have with every member and every family packed into this building.
Her hand touches my arm. “Are we going to be okay?”
I look at her. Those blue eyes. Darker than mine. Darker than Leo’s.
“Yes. Nobody is going to fucking touch you or Leo.” I open my door. “Take him inside. I’ll grab your things.”
She unbuckles her seatbelt and climbs out. She opens Leo’s door and lifts our son out of the car seat, tucks his face against her neck, and holds him with both arms. He wraps his little fingers in her hair.
I grab the pack-and-play and the diaper bag and follow them through the front door of the clubhouse. Down the hallway. Past Joker, who nods. Past Shelby, who’s helping set up extra cots in the common area. She gives Violet a tired smile.
Saber meets me at the end of the hall. He’s coiled tight, and the look on his face is the one he wears before bad orders.
“Church in ten minutes. Duke, leave them in your room.”
I nod.
The room is mine. Has been for years. Clean, because I keep it that way. A bed, a dresser, extra clothes in the bottom drawer, a bottle of whiskey in the top. I set up the pack-and-play against the wall and drop the diaper bag next to the whiskey.
Violet puts Leo down, and he immediately toddles to the bed and tries to climb it. She catches him. Sets him on the mattress. He bounces twice and falls sideways into the pillow.
“One bed,” she says.
I nod.
She looks at me. I look at the door.
“Church,” I say. “I’ll be back.”
I walk out and close the door. I stand in the hallway with my spine against the wall, my hands in fists, and my teeth locked together.
I need time to process that I have a kid. I need time to process what this means for Violet and me.
But not right now.
I push off the wall. Walk into Church. Sit down. Do my job.
Saber lays it out. The diner owner told us what the Crimson Warriors said to him: “Keep your mouth shut about us being here. Don’t cooperate with the Kings.”
The diner owner talked anyway and told us everything. And the Crimson Warriors found out.
Nitro’s guys came through last night. Smashed the windows, destroyed the kitchen, spray-painted a message across the bar: YOU WERE WARNED.
The owner is in the hospital with cracked ribs and a broken jaw.
That’s personal. Shelby worked at that diner before she was Saber’s Old Lady. Nitro picked that target on purpose.
Then the prospect. Jinx has been prospecting for six months. He was running a route on the eastern edge of our territory and stumbled onto a Crimson Warriors gun shipment staged in an old cattle barn. Jinx called it in, but four Warriors found him before he could ride out.
They beat him bloody.
Even though it was four-on-one, Jinx still pulled a knife and stabbed one of the Warriors.
Jinx is in the infirmary now with cracked ribs and one eye swollen shut. He’ll live. The Warrior didn’t.
Saber’s phone buzzes while he’s giving us the rundown. He reads it out loud.
Nitro: A life for a life.
Nitro wants blood for his dead man. Saber isn’t giving it to him.
Joker wants to hit them tonight. Razor is mapping routes.
Saber shuts it down. “Nobody moves tonight. We sit tight, we protect what’s ours, and we figure out how to end this without starting a war.”
We take a vote, and Saber wins.
Church breaks.
The club is on the edge of war. But the only thing on my mind is that I have a son.
I find Shelby before I find Violet.
“I need an hour to talk to Violet,” I tell her. “Can you watch Leo?”
She doesn’t ask why. She nods and heads for my room.
I’m done with these fucking secrets.