Chapter 2
LUCIEN: WEEKS EARLIER
New Orleans had a pulse you could feel in the soles of your feet before you even got off the bike. Maybe the only city in America that felt alive instead of just noisy.
I had been here for three weeks, since my father decided that distance was the same thing as fixing the problem. Go stay in your mama's house. Cool off. Let this blow over. Like I was the one who needed cooling. Like I was the storm and not the thing the storm hit.
Mama's house. The too-big, too-white mansion on St. Charles Avenue she refused to live in. It wasn't a gift. It was an apology my father bought to keep her close enough to visit and far enough away to forget when company came.
She lived across town in a shotgun on Frenchmen Street with her sister and a cat named Bishop and more spiritual protection on her walls than most churches had in their stained glass.
That's where I stayed too. On the couch, because she was right…
the big house wasn't a home, it was an excuse for her and for me.
Go stay in your mama's house. Not go live with your mama. He said it the way he said everything. Like she was a location, not a person.
I had his name, Baptiste, but it was just a label for something else he owned. Not someone he gave his time or presence to. And certainly not public acknowledgment that I was his son. I was nothing more than the unfortunate product of his "indiscretion."
I was done with other people's definitions of what I was. I was whoever the fuck I wanted to be.
Only one person had ever made it his mission to prove otherwise.
Casey Landry. Five-ten in his boots and small everywhere it counted.
A man so threatened by my existence that he had to invent a crime to get rid of me.
Daddy's truck, gone from the driveway. "Found" on the back road with my ID under the seat.
Like I was stupid enough to leave identification at the scene. But in Terrebonne Parish, logic didn't need to show up when a Landry pointed a finger.
My father pulled whatever strings rich men pull when their mistakes start showing. And that meant making me go away. So here I was in NOLA, trying to build something from the pieces other people kept scattering.
I needed something that was mine. Not given, inherited or owed. Something I chose and earned.
Maybe becoming a prospect for the Jokers MC was the answer. If they'd have me.
Mama had talked to her people. The spiritual kind. The community that gathered in the back room on Sunday nights with candles and drums and something far older than anything the churches between here and Terrebonne would recognize.
"They say you're where you're supposed to be," she told me.
"Jobless on your couch?" I said.
She swatted me with a dish towel. "You've got your father's smart mouth."
"That's about all I got from him."
"That's a lie and you know it." She tapped her temple the way she always did. "You got his mind. His stubbornness. And his face, which is why that boy hates you so much."
"Why do people hate me for being Black?"
"Some people need someone to hate, love. Color's just the excuse." She sat across from me at the little table by the window, hands wrapped around her coffee mug, the morning light golden against her skin. "But listen. The spirits said something else."
I waited.
"They said there's someone coming."
"Who?"
"Someone tied to your path. They didn't say when. Just that you'll know her when your eyes meet and neither one of you looks away."
Mama and her spirits. I didn't dismiss it the way my father would have. You couldn't grow up in her world and not feel the truth in it, even when the truth sounded like poetry rather than fact.
"Her?" I said.
Mama smiled over her coffee. "Her."
I killed the engine in the Jokers' compound and sat for a moment.
A wild-looking man, maybe in his early fifties, strode toward me. Tall, wide, arms like dock ropes and tattoos on all visible skin below his neck.
"Lucien Baptiste," he said.
"Yes sir."
He stared at me, then his face split into a grin that didn't match a single thing about the rest of him.
"I've been expecting you." He turned and started walking toward the clubhouse.
I was off my bike and striding fast to catch up.
Once inside, I scanned the room. Men and women were scattered everywhere.
Along the bar, at a pool table, on couches that had seen better decades.
Heads turned. A few nods. One guy raised a bottle in my direction like I'd been coming through that door for years.
The big man led me to a table in the back corner and dropped into a chair that groaned under him.
"Blackheart," he said, tapping his chest. "President of this rolling disaster. Sit."
I sat.
He leaned back, crossed his arms, studying me for a beat before saying, "Your daddy called me."
I felt my jaw tighten. "He did."
"Philippe Baptiste," he said. "Known him since you were a boy. We came up together in ways I won't bore you with." He scratched his beard. "He said his son might come looking for work. Said you were smart, stubborn, and pissed off. That about right?"
"Depends on the day."
Blackheart laughed.
"What kind of father sends his son to an outlaw motorcycle club for employment?" He shook his head, still grinning. "I asked him that. You know what he said?"
I waited.
"He said, 'The kind who knows his son won't survive a desk.'" Blackheart pointed at me. "He's not wrong, is he?"
"No sir."
"Stop calling me sir. Makes me feel like somebody's grandfather." He leaned forward, elbows on the table. "You ride?"
"Since I was fifteen."
"You fight?"
"When I have to."
"You follow orders even when you think the man giving them is wrong?"
That one I had to sit with for a second. "If I respect him."
Blackheart nodded slowly like that was the answer he wanted. "Good. A man who says yes to that without thinking is either a liar or a dog. I don't need either."
He stood.
"You're a prospect. Starting now. You don't patch in because your daddy knows me. You don't patch in because I like your face. You earn it or you don't. Clear?"
"Clear."
"Good." He turned toward the bar. "Rooster! Get this kid a beer before he thinks we're civilized."
A skinny man with a red beard and a laugh like a hiccup slid a bottle down the bar top. It stopped right on the edge, perfectly placed.
As I walked toward it Rooster said, "Don't look so serious, prospect. Worst thing that happens here is Blackheart's cooking."
"That's a goddamn lie," Blackheart called from across the room. "My gumbo is sacred."
"Sacred the way a burial ground is sacred," someone muttered from the pool table. "You eat it and something in you dies."
Laughter rolled through the room.
I took a pull from the bottle and let the tension in my shoulders ease. Nobody was performing. Nobody was measuring me against something I hadn't agreed to be. They were just men in a room, giving me shit the way you give shit to someone you've already decided belongs.
Maybe Mama's people were right. Maybe I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
They gave me a room at the clubhouse. Nothing fancy. A bed, a lock, a window that didn't open all the way. But it was mine. First thing I'd had in a long time that wasn't my father's solution to a problem.
I met some of the brothers that first week. Morrow was a spitting image of a younger Blackheart — same build, same eyes, turned out to be his half brother. Maddox. Chance. Razor. River. Fucking cool road names, every one of them.
When they asked what I liked to be called, I said Luke.
"Fuck, bro, that's ordinary," River said. Youngest in the room, didn't look older than his early twenties.
"Yeah, you're more like a…” Maddox was thinking, squinting at me, and I was bracing myself. Because when someone labeled me it was always some kind of slur.
"Lucy," said a guy with Chains stitched across his vest.
"What the fuck," I said before my brain could stop my tongue.
"Bro." Chains held up a hand. "Ever hear Johnny Cash's A Boy Named Sue?"
"Yeah, but?—"
"Made the boy a mean sonofabitch. Gave him something to fight against every time someone said his name."
I looked at him for a second. "If I need to be mean, I'll be Lucifer. If I need to be me, Luke will do."
Silence. Then someone in the back said, "Luke it is."
And that was that. No argument. No pushing. A man said what he wanted to be called and they called him that.
I could get used to this.