Chapter 8
Eight
Valkyrie
Riding back with a Devil’s Ace on my ass felt wrong.
The road from Shoreline General to our compound isn’t long, but today it felt stretched. Like someone had grabbed the edges of town and pulled until every second thinned both brittle and sharp.
I kept my eyes on the lane ahead, on the shape of traffic, on familiar cracks in the pavement. I didn’t look back. Not once.
I didn’t need to.
I could feel him.
His engine stayed tucked in my wake, not crowding, not lagging.
The kind of disciplined riding that says ex-military or just very well trained.
He matched every shift of weight, every lean.
When I drifted around a pothole, he drifted around a pothole.
When I slid between a minivan and a delivery truck, he slipped into the gap behind me like we’d run this route together a hundred times.
Only we hadn’t.
Before today, Jersey Boy was just a story.
Devil’s Aces enforcer. Pretty, dangerous, loud. Card shark. Fists like bricks. Laughs through chaos. Loves his club like oxygen.
Stories tend to make men bigger than they are. Rumors sharpen their teeth, give them shadows they haven’t earned.
But stories hadn’t mentioned the way he dropped the second time I shouted “Down.” No argument. No hesitation. No wasted heroics. Just instant compliance and a clean move.
Stories hadn’t mentioned the look in his eyes either, the exact second he realized that man in the suit wasn’t there to scare people, wasn’t there by accident. That he was walking straight for Miami’s door.
My gloved fingers tightened on the throttle.
Someone had brought a hit to my hospital. On my turf. Someone thought that Shore Vipers territory was open season.
They were dead wrong.
I kept my speed steady, wind clawing at my clothes. The air still smelled faintly of antiseptic and fear in my head, even though my nose only caught lingering exhaust. Sirens were distant now.
I replayed it while we rode. Not the whole scene; just flashes. The gleam of the gun at the suit’s side. The numbers on the doors as he walked. The moment his eyes flicked up and saw a Devil’s Aces patch standing outside the room of an expected half-dead body.
I’d been coming in from the south side of the parking lot when I first saw him. Black SUV parked crooked near the end row, engine ticking hot, one door still open like someone had exited in a hurry. The driver had stayed behind the wheel, head low, a cap pulled down. Non-descript. Try-hard normal.
I didn’t like try-hard normal.
Then the suit walked in through the sliding doors. No limp yet. No rush. Like the building belonged to him. Like the day already did.
I used the east employee entrance and the side stairwell. Avoided cameras out of habit. By the time the code silver started screaming overhead, we had caused the fourth-floor hall to descend into a corridor of sound and panic.
One man moving like a blade. One biker standing like a shield. One half-ruined patient in a dim room behind them, tied to machines and stitches, and me.
Now here we were.
Two bikes arrowing north. One of us with fresh blood on our boots. The other with a drawn target on his back and a backpack he hadn’t been wearing when he first arrived at Shoreline.
My jaw flexed.
He’d gone into that hospital empty-handed. I was sure of it. I have a good eye for that sort of thing. You don’t survive long in my skin without tracking who’s carrying what and how heavy.
When he came out with me, running for his bike, that pack was on his shoulders like it had grown there. He moved while protecting it. He mounted his machine while simultaneously protecting it.
Whatever he grabbed from that room, he didn’t want to leave it with Miami. He’d strapped it to himself and ran like the world was about to fall on it.
I just didn’t know why. I didn’t know what it was. And I don’t like not knowing things that close to me.
We crossed the invisible border into the Vipers nest. You’d never notice it in a car. On a bike, if you’re paying attention, you feel it. The air tightens. People on porches look longer. Windows hold faces just out of reach. The wall of watchfulness is subtle but solid.
This is our skeleton. Our cage. Our home.
We kept going until the ruined factory ahead rose up like a broken set of teeth.
We’d claimed it years ago and turned it into something sharp.
Razor wire glinted on the tops of fences.
Old “no trespassing” signs hung crooked and pocked with buckshot.
The big gate was a slab of welded metal, scarred and steadfast.
Two of my girls were on gate duty. Indigo, with the shotgun resting lazy in her arms like it weighed nothing, black mohawk stiff in the morning light. Medusa slouched against the post with her spiked bat over her shoulders, eyes slitted, coiled energy under the lazy posture.
They clocked me first. Then him.
Their stares sharpened like knives.
I gave them the signal. All clear, but eyes open.
The motor groan of the gate dragging aside never stops sounding like a monster waking up. It scraped along its track and we rolled in, engines echoing off metal and concrete.
I cut mine in front of the main building and swung my leg off, boots hitting familiar ground. Jersey Boy killed his and followed suit a few feet back, not crowding me, but not shrinking away either.
Helmet off, I shook my hair back, the blond strands sticking for a second against the inside of the liner before falling to my shoulders. I clipped the helmet to the bars and turned just as he pulled his off.
“Fuck,” I thought.
Stories hadn’t been lying.
Clean jaw. Dark eyes. Tattoos licking up his neck toward a face that should’ve been selling clothes in a mall window somewhere, not dodging bullets in a hospital corridor.
Today, there was a line of tension between his brows that hadn’t been there in whatever polished photographs his features were built for.
That backpack though. High and tight. Both straps secured. Brown canvas. Worn at the seams. It looked wrong on Jersey Boy’s shoulders and wasn’t his style. I could tell it was something grabbed in a hurry.
Yeah. My suspicions didn’t like that.
Before I could say anything, the front door slammed open loud enough to rattle the windows.
Liberty came out hard.
I’ve seen grown men with more than one homicide under their belt step back when she walks like that. She’s not tall. Not bulky. But she carries herself like every bone in her body was filed into a blade and wrapped in snakeskin.
Black hair poured over the bandana tied around her head. Tattoos wrapped her throat. The blackout sleeve on one arm made the other’s riot of ink stand out, every color a story, every line a wound or a weapon. Her eyes took in the scene in one swift sweep.
Me. The Devil’s Ace. His cut. His face. The backpack.
Her lip curled.
“He’s here,” she said, phone tucked to her ear. Her gaze never left Jersey. “Alive. Looks to be in one piece.”
Whoever was on the other line said something sharp. Alice. Blackjack. I knew that tone.
She moved forward like she might bite.
She stopped just shy of him, close enough that I could see the white flecks in her irises. Then she held the phone out. Didn’t offer it. Threw it.
“Here,” she said.
He caught it on reflex, palm smacking against the plastic.
“Your President wants to yell in your ear,” she added.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. He lifted the phone.
“Yeah,” he said.
I shifted a step sideways so I could see his face in profile. His eyes hardened instantly when he heard Blackjack. The relief was there too, quick, ugly, gone.
He talked. Fast. Alive. Miami’s condition. The hospital. Something about not touching the tech, just the book. His gaze cut toward me once, measuring, then away.
Liberty didn’t bother hiding that she was listening to his side. We all were. The whole yard had gone quiet, engine ticks and distant dog barks the only other sounds.
When Blackjack told him he was sending 8-Ball up later, Jersey’s shoulders lowered half an inch. Not much. Enough for someone like me to notice.
He ended the call with a “Yes, Prez,” roughly the same way a soldier salutes out of habit, out of loyalty, and out of love, and with an apology.
Liberty snatched the phone away as soon as it left his ear. She dipped her chin at me. A signal.
Keep him there.
I didn’t move far. Just enough to give the illusion of space, not enough to actually relinquish it.
“Alice,” she said, stalking a few steps away, but not so far we couldn’t hear her side. “You brought a war onto my turf.”
No sugar. No soft preamble. That was Liberty.
I turned away like I wasn’t listening and pulled out my own phone. My thumbs moved on autopilot, fingers hitting saved names without needing to think.
First up was Birdie.
Birdie’s an RN at Shoreline. Small, wiry, looks like a cute art student. Once put a man twice her size in a chokehold when he tried to get past the nurses’ station at three in the morning. One of ours before she ever put on a scrub top.
I typed.
Next up was Mink.
Mink’s badge sits behind a desk at the precinct, but her loyalty belongs here.
She sees things in the station. Files. Footage.
Names. Makes it disappear. It’s convenient to have a snake in a sty of pigs, but in the end she’s a civilian and not an official member of the club to protect her as our source on the inside.
I then tucked my phone away.
By the time I looked up, Liberty had gone from fury to something calmer. Not soft. Never soft. Just tightly controlled. Her mouth was a harsh line.
“I need to know what’s in my house. Or I make my own way to the answer.”
She glanced at Jersey as she said it. He didn’t flinch. He just looked back. Like he understood the math and agreed it was fair.
Blackjack then growled something loud enough that I could hear the rhythm if not the words. Liberty cut him off.