Chapter 11 #3
Turnpike clapped my shoulder. “Try not to let the ladies bully you too much,” he said. “You’re fragile.”
“Eat me,” I said.
“Buy me dinner first,” he replied automatically.
Something moved at the edge of my vision. India crossing the yard, book in one hand, steaming mug in the other. She had changed into leggings and an oversized shirt with some band logo on it. Hair up in a messy knot. Glasses perched on her nose.
Turnpike went quiet mid-breath.
India glanced up, caught him staring. One brow arched.
“Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”
He stared for half a second too long.
“Right,” he said awkwardly, his voice nearly cracking.
She smirked, shook her head, and kept walking.
I watched him watch her go.
Oh yeah. He was doomed.
“Smooth,” I muttered.
“Shut up,” he said, ears a little red.
Liberty stepped up to 8-Ball. “Get home,” she said. “Watch your own streets. We’ll watch ours.”
He nodded. “You keep my idiot breathing,” he said, jerking his chin toward me.
“Depends on his behavior,” she said.
Their eyes met. There was history there. Whole books’ worth I didn’t have time to flip through right now.
Then the engines turned over. 8-Ball and Turnpike rolled toward the gate. Indigo and Medusa pulled it open just enough for them to slip through, then dragged it shut again with the same metallic groan that always made this place feel like a creature closing its mouth.
I stood there with Valkyrie and Liberty and watched my family ride away.
No bitterness chewed at me. There was no feeling of being abandoned.
I was where I was supposed to be.
In the end, there’s no place like home though.
Inside, the clubhouse shifted back into its version of normal.
California was behind the bar, hair up, eyeliner sharp, sorting bottles.
Raven leaned on the counter, talking shit about someone’s playlist. Medusa had her boots up on a table, smoking, arguing with Cobra again over what counted as punk.
Arizona drifted in and out, camera around her neck, collecting moments like ammo.
I took a stool. California slid a drink in front of me before I asked.
“You look less like a kicked dog today,” she said. “Good news?”
I knew she meant Blackjack.
“He’s alive,” I said. “For now.”
“Then we drink to ‘for now,’” she said, tapping her knuckles on the bar once.
I took a swallow. It burned right, settling everything into sharper lines.
My phone buzzed. This time, it was a text from Blackjack.
I glanced across the room.
Valkyrie was at a table with Rosé and Indigo, heads bent over something—maps, probably, or rotation lists. Her posture was sharp and tired at the same time. Like she’d been holding this place up on her shoulders for a long time and only just got someone else’s hands under the weight.
I slid the phone away.
Hours wore on. The sky outside went from washed-out gray to darker steel. Fence lights clicked on one by one, bathing the perimeter in yellowed halos.
Liberty eventually sent most of the girls to their routines. Some stayed on watch. Some claimed bunks. Some disappeared into corners with bottles and bunnies.
By the time I made it back to Valkyrie’s room, my body was more tired than my brain.
The door was open, like before. Same dark walls. Same posters. Same knives in a row.
The big difference was the absence.
No backpack leaning against the air mattress. No strap digging into my fingers.
It should’ve felt like freedom.
It didn’t.
Valkyrie came in behind me, flicked the light on low, then kicked the door shut with her boot.
“You look like shit,” she said conversationally.
“You say the sweetest things,” I replied.
She dropped onto the edge of her bed instead of taking the chair this time. The toes of her boots touched the floor. Fingers laced loosely in her lap. The key Liberty had given her dangled around her neck, a small, bright lie in all that ink and black fabric.
I sat on the edge of the air mattress and kicked my boots off. The plastic creaked under me.
For a minute we just breathed, the hum of the building loud in the quiet.
“Blackjack wants me to get him some pages,” I said eventually. “Photos. Stuff he can send to Roman so he can start sniffing his own walls more.”
Her eyes lifted to mine. “He can’t let him have the whole thing,” she said.
“Not a chance,” I agreed. “Just enough to prove we’re not bullshitting him. I told him I’d do it when Liberty’s cool. So, that means when you’re cool.”
She snorted. “I’m never cool,” she said. “I run hot or not at all.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said.
Her gaze flicked to the key on her chest, then back to me. “When it’s time,” she said, “we go down together. My key, your eyes. No one else.”
“Works for me,” I said.
She shifted, turning a little so she was more facing me than the door.
“So,” she said. “You said Miami gave you your road name?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He did.”
“How’d you two meet?” she asked.
I leaned back on my hands, staring at the ceiling for a second. Old water stains made shapes up there. Faces if you looked too long.
“Juvenile detention,” I said. “Classy, I know.”
Her lips quirked. “Go on.”
“I was sixteen,” I said. “Got picked up boosting cars off a lot in Newark. Stupid shit. Small-time. Judge decided I needed ‘structure.’ Dumped me into this teenage cage with a bunch of other idiots who thought they were invincible.”
“Miami was one of them?” she guessed.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling despite myself. “Except back then he wasn’t Miami.
He was just this loud-mouthed kid from Florida who’d moved north with his mom.
Wrong place, wrong friends, wrong everything.
He’d gotten into it with some local crew.
Cut one of them in a fight. Nothing fatal, but enough to make a statement. ”
“Sounds about right,” she said.
“He was scrawny,” I said. “Big mouth. Bad haircut. First week he was there, he picked a fight with a kid twice his size over a deck of cards.”
“And lost?” she asked.
“Got his ass handed to him,” I said. “But he never shut up. Bled all over the floor, split lip, still talking shit. Nobody knew why. Nobody wanted to stand near him because trouble clung to him like smell.”
“But you did,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I did.”
I breathed out slow.
“He stole a pack of cigarettes off me,” I went on. “Didn’t even do it well. I caught him, put him up against a wall. He grinned at me with two busted teeth and said, ‘Knew you had that Jersey blood in you. You got that look like you think this place is beneath you.’”
“Was he wrong?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “That was the annoying part.”
She chuckled quietly.
“We ended up in the same bullshit anger management group. Same work detail. Same everything. We fought each other more than we fought anyone else. The staff hated us. But, the other kids stayed out of our way. We never made any kind of official pact, but by the time we got out, everyone knew that you didn’t go after one of us without dealing with both. ”
“When’d he start calling you Jersey?” she asked.
“First night we talked about getting the hell out,” I said.
“Really getting out. Not just going home to the same shit and pretending we’d changed.
He said he wanted to go back to Miami someday.
Own a bar. Sit on a beach. Be one of those guys who wears linen and pretends he’s classy while he’s drinking rotgut out of crystal. ”
“Classy,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I told him he’d just get bored and end up starting fights with tourists. He laughed and said, ‘Fine. You be Jersey, I’ll be Miami. When I get my bar, you come visit. We’ll ruin it together.’”
My chest hurt.
“We never got to the bar part,” I said. “We got as far as Atlantic City. Cheaper lights, same kind of bullshit.”
“How’d you end up with the Aces?” she asked.
“Odd jobs,” I said. “We aged out of juvenile, went back to our respective ‘homes’ for all of five minutes before we realized those were just open-air cells, and bounced. Met up again in the city. Started doing security for off-book games. Running small packages. He knew a guy who knew a guy who occasionally needed muscle at a dock. Sometimes that guy was 8-Ball. Sometimes it was Blackjack.”
Her brows lifted. “So, you’d crossed paths with them before?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A few times. Simple shit. No colors. Just cash in hand and rules we were expected to follow.”
“And you did?” she asked.
“Most of them,” I said. “We impressed them enough not to get shot. That counted for something.”
I rubbed a hand over my face.
“One night,” I went on, “we got hired to watch the back room of a bar. High-stakes poker game. A couple of the guys at the table thought they were smarter than they were. Tried to rob the pot instead of playing it out. Pulled guns. Miami moved first. I moved with him. We disarmed two, knocked one out, kept one from shooting his own foot off.”
“And Blackjack saw,” she said.
“And Blackjack saw,” I confirmed. “He was at the table. Not playing. Just watching. Afterward, when the mess was cleaned up, he pulled us aside. Asked if we liked doing one-off jobs forever or if we wanted something with more… structure.”
“The same word the judge used,” she noted.
“Yeah,” I said. “Funny how that keeps coming up.”
“What’d you say?” she asked.
“We said we’d think about it,” I said. “We didn’t. We showed up at the clubhouse three days later.”
“And?”
“And they made us prospects,” I said. “Put us through hell. Broke us down. Tested us. Tried to make us walk away. We didn’t.
We earned our cuts. Our rockers. Our patches.
Our places at the table. Miami was always the loud one.
The mouth. The joker. I was the one who made sure he didn’t drown himself in his own bullshit. ”
“You love him,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
The words felt like stones dropping into water. True all the way down.
She sat with that for a moment.
“I get it,” she said quietly. “Having one person like that. The one who makes the stupid stuff feel less heavy.”