Chapter 2 #2
They flew and hit the side of the bike. They padded the wrench from damaging the bike, but the force of it caused something to happen.
There was a sound. Tiny. Sickening. A click, sharp and wrong, like a tooth breaking.
I froze.
The bike shifted on its stand a fraction of an inch and something inside the frame knocked dully.
I stared at it. Every hair on my arms stood up.
“Don’t,” I whispered. To myself, not the machine. Blackjack’s text echoed in my head. Stay put. Don’t move. Make sure nobody’s tracking you.
I took one step closer anyway.
There it was. Near the base of the tank on the right side, a hairline break in the paint I hadn’t seen before. A seam. You wouldn’t notice it unless you hit it just right. The wrench must have dislodged whatever was bracing it from the inside.
“Roadkill is going to murder me,” I said.
I set my fingers along the seam and pushed. Nothing. I tugged. The surface didn’t budge.
My pulse hammered. Curiosity and dread wrestled it out in my chest. The smart thing to do was back off. Wait for backup. Let Blackjack decide. Let the Giorlandos own their own secrets or whoever this bike—this secret—belonged to. Let it be anyone else’s problem but ours.
Yet here I was about to make it more of my own.
I planted my thumb against the spot where the click had come from and pressed. Harder. Nothing. I then pressed even harder.
Something then shifted with a soft, reluctant sigh. A panel no wider than my hand slid inward, then eased up, revealing a dark gap under the paint. The smell that came out wasn’t gas. It was cold metal and fresh plastic.
“Ah, hell,” I breathed as if disappointed my nosiness resulted in an actual discovery.
I wedged my fingers under the edge and lifted. The lid came off smoothly. No scraping. Someone had engineered this. Spent real money making sure it was invisible.
Inside the tank, where fuel should have been, sat a tight nest of wrapped packages. No slosh. No liquid. Just bricks. Not coke. Too square. Each one the size of a smuggled burner phone, except these were matte black casings, lined up like they were posing for a photograph.
Two stacks of black rectangles. Between them, a leather-bound book wrapped in waterproof plastic. Smaller than a Bible. Heavier than it looked.
I swallowed. My mouth was dry.
“Not good,” I said softly. “Stop while you’re ahead Miami.”
I studied the objects and thought back to the unknown bikers. A quote I lived by from Miami Vice then entered my mind. “You just got to learn to go with the heat, Rico. It’s just like life.”
I knew I shouldn’t. But, I felt the tug of defiance. The allure of the bike’s secrets being known to me first before anyone else. “I usually take the Ferrari,” I quoted my favorite show to myself again.
Without any further hesitation, I took the book first and peeled the plastic. The leather was smooth and warm from being in that compartment. No title on the front. Just an embossed symbol on the cover. A stylized V with a serpent wrapped around it.
I’d seen that mark once before. On a ring at a card table in a back room in Philly, attached to a hand that had never shaken. A Vincino.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I whispered.
My hands weren’t shaking anymore. They’d gone very still.
I opened the book.
No printed text. Handwritten entries in tight, cramped Italian and English.
Columns of names. Dates. Locations. Numbers so big they barely made sense.
Here and there the same surnames jumped off the page.
Vincino. Bolivar. Japanese names I couldn’t even try to pronounce, but I recognized the context.
Yakuza. Cartel. Arrows and symbols linking them. Routes. Drops. Account numbers.
Between pages, photocopies of passports. Grainy surveillance photos of politicians shaking hands in back rooms. Judges. Cops. Men in suits walking out of brothels that Dante Giorlando owned. Annotations in the margins. Insurance. Blackmail.
This wasn’t just a ledger. It was the spine of an entire criminal empire. All the pieces tied to each other in ink.
You couldn’t see this and pretend you didn’t.
My throat tightened. I flipped ahead. Found docks listed under Salvatores’ control.
Found Atlantic City casino pipelines that fed Bolivar cash through Dante’s club registers.
Offshore accounts flagged with Russian bank codes that had to be Vladimir’s domain.
The other names were of front companies I’d guarded without knowing they belonged to more than just the Giorlandos.
On three separate pages, something else circled in red. SS. Not a Nazi thing. A key at the bottom of the page spelled it out.
Steel Serpents. Motor transport. High risk. Disposable.
The room felt smaller. The sounds from outside dimmed. I heard my own heartbeat and the faint ticking of cooling metal from the bike.
I forced myself to stop reading before the book swallowed me whole. I set it gently on the workbench and turned back to the compartment.
One of the black blocks came out heavy in my hand.
Not metal. Plastic casing, sealed at the edges, no branding.
There was a small recessed port on one side.
Data. Drives. Some kind of encrypted memory.
I’d hauled enough tech for the Giorlandos to recognize the shape.
Off-the-grid servers lived in boxes like this.
So, they’d hidden the physical record and the digital storage all in one package. Moving the entire confession booth all at once.
And now it was in my hands. In our safehouse. And on our turf.
I put the drive down next to the book and leaned both palms on the bench. Concrete dust gritted under my fingertips. A slow, cold anger crept in under the adrenaline. They’d sent us into this blind. Family or not, we’d been used as the front line in a war we didn’t even know existed yet.
My first instinct was to laugh. Of course the drop had been hot. Of course mercenary bikers had tailed us. This wasn’t about a bike. It was about what was inside of it. Every big player on the East Coast would burn cities to get this back or keep it out of the wrong hands.
And we were the wrong hands now.
I looked at the dead phone. Thumbed the power button out of habit. No response. No little glowing apple. Nothing.
“Fantastic timing,” I said.
Blackjack thought I was sitting here with an anonymous bike in the dark, waiting for his call. He had no idea I’d cracked the shell and found the heart that had been beating inside.
I picked the book up again. Felt its weight. What it meant. Evidence linking our partners to the Vincinos, the Bolivar Cartel, and other international syndicates. Proof the Russians and Yakuza were tied in deeper than anyone admitted out loud.
If the Feds ever got this, they wouldn’t just grab the Philly family. They’d peel back the whole net. Giorlandos included. Anyone standing too close would be dragged under too.
That meant us. The Devil’s Aces. Every brother. Every old lady. Every kid who slept with a stuffed animal and a leather cut for a blanket.
I closed the book carefully. The leather creaked like a sigh. My reflection in the small chrome wrench hanging on the pegboard looked different. Eyes harder. Face older.
“We are so fucked,” I said.
Saying it out loud didn’t make it less true.
Sure, we could just destroy the evidence, but someone was expecting this drop, and the Giorlando’s handed it off to us. If we didn’t deliver… they’d be out for our blood. They wouldn’t take the fall for this, whether they even knew what it was or not.
The hum in my bones came back a third time.
Not from the bike now. From outside. From the future.
If the Steel Serpents had followed my trail and been smart enough to hang back, they could be watching Redline right now.
Waiting to see if anyone else came to back me up.
Reporting. Every minute I sat in one spot with this much leverage sitting in my hands, the more likely someone else was getting into position to snatch it.
Blackjack had told me to stay put. Let the heat simmer. But he’d given that order when he thought I was babysitting a fancy courier job, not sitting on the black book of the East Coast underworld.
I had two choices.
Sit tight, hope nobody had eyes on the building, pray the mercs hadn’t tagged the bike with a tracker. Trust that the Giorlandos would handle this cleanly. That Roman and Vlad and their pretty sons wouldn’t decide we knew too much.
Or move it. Take the risk. Get the bike deeper off the grid, closer to a second safehouse we maintained just beyond our usual radius near Shore Vipers territory. A little garage with a trapdoor and an escape route that didn’t show up on any city plan.
I could hear Blackjack’s voice telling me I was an idiot already.
I set the book back in the tank compartment and put the drive on top of it. Both together. Closed the panel. The seam disappeared. From three feet away it looked like nothing had ever opened.
I walked to the small side window and edged the curtain back with my knuckles. The yard looked empty. Street beyond it empty too. No glow of a cigarette. No idle engine. No gleam of gray and steel patch leather.
It didn’t mean they weren’t out there though.
Redline had one thing going for it. Nobody who wasn’t ours was supposed to know it existed.
But that bike had come off a Vincino shipment with or without Giorlando knowledge.
And the Vincinos had sent Steel Serpents after it like they’d done this before.
If they’d learned what yards the Giorlandos used, what trucks, what drivers, they might have started to figure out which shadows the Aces preferred when we needed to disappear.
I let the curtain drop and went back to the bike.
“Okay,” I said. “New plan.”
I talked more when I was nervous. Quinn always teased me about it. When she was here, she’d have been sprawled on the couch, legs crossed, watching me with that lazy smile, asking if the mysterious death machine turned me on as much as she did. Then she’d tell me to stop pacing and handle it.
She wasn’t here. Good. She didn’t need this.
I grabbed the bars and rocked the bike off the stand. It rolled smoothly. No metallic rattle. No telltale ping of loose parts. Whoever engineered that compartment had thought about weight distribution. Handling. Hiding in plain sight. Even hid the actual tank itself lower on the bike.
“You’re coming with me,” I told it.
No phone. No way to update Blackjack. The smart move would be to wait until someone noticed the silence and sent a brother. But time was the enemy now. Every second felt like it could be the one where a door blew open and bullets came in.
Redline was a good hide. The other place was better.
Out past the edge of our official territory, there was a forgotten little strip of workshops and old houses that the city pretended weren’t its problem.
The Shore Vipers had a soft claim on that area.
Women and strippers and strays they collected when the world tried to chew them up passed through there.
We kept to our side. They kept to theirs. Respect.
We had one quiet spot out there. A contingency. Nothing fancy. Not many people even knew it existed. Fewer still had keys.
If I could get the bike there without picking up a tail, we’d be twice as ghosted as we were now.
If.
I swung a leg over the bike and settled into the seat. The leather molded under me like a hand. My thumb hovered over the ignition. I hesitated long enough for Blackjack’s disappointment to land on my shoulders like a physical weight.
“Sorry, Prez,” I said softly. “You can yell at me later. Better to ask for forgiveness later then for permission.”
I twisted the key.
The engine rolled over once, then caught. The hum hit again, right down my spine. The overhead lights vibrated as if the frequency shook the bulbs. I squeezed the clutch, dropped it into gear, and eased toward the door.
Outside, the night was waiting. Quiet. Cold. Empty.
I opened the side door just enough to slip through and rolled out into the yard. Gravel crunched under the tires. The air smelled of exhaust and something metallic I couldn’t name.
Behind me, Redline’s door closed with a soft, final sound.
I hit the throttle.
The black bike leaped forward like it was hungry. The hum rose, wrapped around my ribs, and we shot out into the dark, aiming for a safehouse closer to a line we weren’t supposed to cross.
Closer to the Shore Vipers turf.
Closer to the part where I knew that everything was soon about to change.