Chapter 3 #2
“I haven’t heard that name in years,” 8-Ball said. “Figured they’d died out. Or got absorbed. But those bikes tonight moved like they had drill instructors in their mirrors. Formation like a unit. No color pride. All business. Patches looked right, though it was too dark to be certain.”
“A merc crew on our roads,” Snake Eyes said. “Yeah. That fits the feeling.”
“You think Vincinos sent them?” Ace asked.
8-Ball lifted a shoulder. “Vincinos shipped the bike. They knew the route. They knew the time. If the deal changed and nobody told the Giorlandos, somebody’s lying. Mercs don’t ride for free.”
Spade’s hands clenched on his forearms. “Feels like a setup,” he said. “Giorlandos give us a bad drop, Philly mercs show up, we take fire guarding this mystery bike. That’s a long way from ‘simple escort job.”
“That’s how it feels,” I said. “Out there, it felt like we were hung out.”
“Feelings ain’t facts though,” Blackjack snapped.
Spade’s eyes flashed. “Feels like betrayal.”
“And if it is?” Blackjack said. “You want to kick the board over right now? Tell Roman Giorlando and his pretty sons we’re done? That our muscle pulls off every casino, every dock, every strip joint we guard? You ready to lock the doors and wait for what happens next?”
The anger under his words was hot enough to glow. Not at us. At the position we’d been put in.
Spade looked away first. His jaw worked. “Just saying we deserve better than this,” he muttered.
“Yeah,” Blackjack said. “We do. But we don’t start a war off a damn guess. That bike could be anyone’s. Vincino, third party, anonymous. We won’t know until we retrieve it from Redline.”
Mirage leaned forward, elbows on the table, accountant brain already running numbers only he could see.
“If we cut the Giorlandos loose,” he said slowly, “we lose fifty, maybe sixty percent of our revenue overnight. High profile casino security jobs. Dock contracts. Bodyguard work. Money from the chop shops they funnel through our garages. Our cut of the clubs. That freezes up, we’re not just hurting. We’re bleeding out.”
Roadkill nodded. “That’s parts we stop buying. Bikes we stop building. Food the kids stop eating.”
In my head I saw Eve and Vicky, Roadkill’s little girls, racing their tricycles through the lot, hair tangled, faces sticky with Popsicle juice. Saw 8-Ball’s old lady Tanya leaning over the bar, laughing with Quinn. Saw Rebecca’s steady hands patching up bloody knuckles after the gauntlet.
We weren’t just bikes and bullets. We were families. Rent. Groceries. Hospital bills. School clothes.
Mirage kept going. “We got side hustles, sure. But without their money lanes, our cushion shrinks fast. We’d have to take on way more risk for way less pay, and do it without the political cover Vlad gives the family. We’d feel every badge in this city breathing down our necks twice as hard.”
“Which is why we don’t pull the trigger on that option,” Blackjack said. “Not yet.”
“But you said yourself,” Spade pushed, voice low. “If they knew that drop was hot and sent us in blind—”
“I said we don’t know what they knew,” Blackjack cut in. “For all we can prove right now, Vincinos maybe made a move out of Philly that never made it to Roman’s ears. Steel Serpents showed up for their masters. Giorlandos got blindsided same as us.”
“You really believe that?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” he replied. “What I believe doesn’t change the map. Facts do. And we don’t have enough of those yet.”
Spade’s lip curled. He leaned closer to me, just enough that only I could hear. “The wars already started,” he said under his breath.
I didn’t answer. But the words sat there between us, a little too true.
Ace scribbled notes like his life depended on it.
Snake Eyes rolled his toothpick again, then flicked it away.
“I’m just going to say it one more time,” he said.
“I have a bad feeling about this. Those mercs don’t show up for no reason.
Nobody leaves a drop that messy by accident.
We’re standing in the doorway of something bigger and the frame’s creaking. ”
Priest snorted. “Poetic,” he said. “Maybe we should put that on the wall.”
“We start a war now, we die slow and ugly,” Mirage said. “We walk away; we die broke. So, what’s left?”
The room looked back to Blackjack. That’s how this worked. We could argue until we were hoarse, but the final call always came from the head of the table.
He sat there for a long moment, weight settled on his shoulders, gaze distant. You could hear the old bike clock ticking on the wall behind him, second hand dragging.
When he spoke, his voice was quiet and lethal.
“They wanted us cheap,” he said. “Easy muscle. Disposable hands on their dirty work. They sent us in blind and pointed guns at our backs. That means they forgot something important.”
“What’s that?” Voodoo asked.
Blackjack’s eyes came alive. “We’re not their fucking casino employees,” he said. “We’re the Devil’s Aces.”
The line hit like a punch. It straightened spines. Lit something up behind everyone’s eyes.
“They want that bike delivered, or back?” Blackjack went on. “Fine. They can have it. But not on their terms. Not on their timetable. From this moment on, the price just changed.”
“How much?” Mirage asked. No hesitation. Just business.
Blackjack bared his teeth. It wasn’t a smile. “Enough that when we name it, Roman stops talking and starts listening,” he said. “Enough that he has to look his own blood in the eye and explain why the bill’s that high.”
“And if he balks?” Priest asked.
“Then he can explain to his Russian and his sons why the only people dumb enough to run their errands just walked off the board,” Blackjack said. “They put us in the line of fire for a ghost contact and a cursed bike. They want it back, they pay. In full. Up front.”
“And until then?” I asked.
“Until then, that bike stays exactly where it is,” Blackjack said.
“Our hands. Our house. Our secret. Nobody sees it, nobody touches it, nobody rides it except Miami when I say so. That bike isn’t just leverage.
It’s proof. Whatever the Vincinos and their pets or whomever this mystery buyer are hauling through those docks, I want eyes on it before we hand it back. ”
It was a good call. A hard one. The kind that made enemies, but the kind that kept us alive.
“We going to tell the family that?” Spade asked.
Blackjack met his gaze. “I’ll tell Roman,” he said. “Man to man. If he’s as smart as I think he is, he’ll recognize the favor I’m doing him by not dragging this straight into the light.”
Mirage nodded, satisfied at the math. “We’ll need to run numbers on a new rate,” he said. “Hazard pay. Premium for discretion. Retroactive, considering tonight.”
“Already on it,” Blackjack said. “You just make sure the books can hold the weight when it hits.”
Mirage smiled faintly. “Books can hold anything you throw at them. It’s people who crack.”
Before anybody could answer, Blackjack’s phone buzzed on the table. The sound was jarring in the quiet. We all looked at it like it was a grenade.
He picked it up as the screen lit up with an unsaved number that still looked familiar. One of the network maybe. One of the many nameless voices who fed us information when something in the city broke in the wrong direction.
He answered. “Yeah.”
We couldn’t hear the other side, just the hum of static and a voice too faint to make out. But we could see Blackjack’s face.
At first nothing changed. Then his eyes narrowed. His free hand flattened on the table. His jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped.
“Where?” he asked.
The voice answered. The word that floated over the table was unmistakable. Hospital.
“Condition?” Blackjack said.
Longer response this time. Mirage’s knuckles whitened around his mug. Spade’s fists tightened. My heart forgot how to beat steadily.
Blackjack closed his eyes for a second, the gray in his beard seeming to go whiter. “Got it,” he said. “Keep me updated.”
He hung up. For a breath he didn’t look at us. Just stared at the scarred wood like he could burn a hole through it by will alone.
“Prez?” I said. My voice sounded rough, foreign.
He lifted his head.
“Miami’s been in a wreck,” he said.
The words dropped like a body.
The air went out of the room. Chairs scraped. Priest swore under his breath. Roadkill made a noise low in his chest, half growl, half prayer.
“What kind of wreck?” I asked. “How bad?”
“Bad,” Blackjack said. “Truck driver coming off the highway found him laid out on the side of the road with that fucking bike in pieces. EMTs were already on scene by the time our guy heard it on the scanner. They’re rushing him into surgery.”
My throat felt tight. “Is he—”
“Alive,” Blackjack said. “For now. They said critical. Internal bleeding. Broken bones. He’s a mess.”
Quinn’s face flashed in my head. Her laugh. Her hand on the back of Miami’s neck, possessive and soft. The idea of her getting that call made my stomach flip.
“What hospital?” Mirage asked.
Blackjack’s mouth pressed into a hard line. “Shoreline General,” he said.
The name punched through the fear and hit a different nerve.
“That’s up north,” Snake Eyes said slowly.
“North and more inland,” Ace said. “Out past our line.”
I already knew the answer before I asked. “Whose turf is that?”
Blackjack’s eyes met mine, steady and dark.
“Shore Vipers,” he said. “Miami just crashed in Lady Liberty’s back fucking yard.”
The room went dead quiet.
And just like that, every road we’d been riding cracked open under our wheels.