Chapter 12 #2
We slipped back out into the sunlight, guns already in our hands.
“Talk to me,” I called out to the others.
“Movement between the stacks,” Indigo answered from somewhere to the left. “Multiple. Hands, cuts, guns. They were already here.”
“Steel Serpents I presume,” Medusa growled from the right. “Nice of them to show up.”
We stepped into a narrow aisle between car rows.
That’s where we saw them.
Four—no, six—bodies moving in the shadow of stacked frames. Serpents on their shoulders. Guns loose at their sides, but not low enough to bring comfort.
One stepped out more than the others. Slightly nicer boots. Slightly cleaner cut. Mask up over his nose, eyes sharp and amused.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” he called. His gaze flicked to Jersey. “And whatever you are.”
“Fashion consultant,” Jersey answered automatically. “You’re failing.”
The Serpent chuckled behind his covering.
“We’re not here for jokes,” he said. “We’re here for property.”
“Yard’s closed,” I said. “Owner’s dead. Looks like your people got here first. You want to file a complaint, call the cops.”
He laughed once, low.
“We’re not here for scrap metal,” he said. He jerked his chin slightly past us. “We’re here for what was inside the bike. Our client paid Vinc-heavy money for that package. Real cash. He wants it back.”
Vincino money he meant to say but caught himself. Had to be.
Jersey inhaled sharply beside me. I didn’t look at him. Didn’t have to. The ledger had said enough about the Steel Serpents doing side work in other people’s shadows.
“That so?” Liberty asked quietly. She stepped forward, into the lane, like she was just out for a stroll.
“Yeah,” the Serpent said. “That so. You got it, you give it back, we don’t have to decorate this place with your insides. Everyone goes home. Our client doesn’t like thieves.”
Liberty tilted her head.
“All I see here,” she said, “Are a bunch of boys playing dress up. If your client lost something, that sounds like his problem. Not ours.”
“We know it rode in on the bike,” he said, patience thinning. “We know your boy took it when things went sideways. We know he crashed not far from here, and we know the cops dragged what was left to this lovely slice of heaven. Don’t play stupid with me bitch; you’re bad at it.”
“Funny,” Liberty said. “You must think I’m bad at breathing too, with the way you’re talking.”
His eyes hardened.
“Give it back, or we can start putting bullets through your people, and he still gets what he wants. Only difference is how messy it gets on the way there.”
Liberty smiled then. That small, vicious curl of her mouth that had made more than one man rethink his choices at a bar.
“You came into my state,” she said softly.
“Onto my roads. Into a yard in my territory. You strangled a man with his own phone, then waited in his shadow for us to arrive. And you think you get to threaten me? I’m not fucking stupid.
The second anyone hands you anything, you’ll kill us all and clean up any trace of it. ”
He opened his mouth to respond.
“Right side,” Medusa barked.
I didn’t think. I moved.
A Serpent had slipped further around the car stacks to our right, gun already coming up. Indigo’s shot rang out first, sending him scrambling behind a door-less sedan body instead of getting what he wanted.
Everything bled into motion.
Gunfire cracked and screamed, ricocheting off metal. Windows exploded into fragments. Tires coughed dust. The lane turned into chaos in under two seconds.
I dropped behind the closest hood, steel biting my palms, and popped up to send two rounds downrange. One Serpent ducked. Another cursed as a bullet kissed his shoulder.
I then heard one of our own yell. I turned and spotted Diamondback clutching her arm. She brought her hand up and I saw red.
“Diamondback, status!” I yelled.
“Grazed,” she shouted back through gritted teeth. “Arm. Still working.”
“Indigo, pull her back!” I ordered.
Indigo moved from cover, low and fast, but shots stitched the ground around her boots and forced her to hunker behind a crumpled minivan shell instead. She was pinned.
“Fuck,” she hissed.
Jersey moved then.
He broke from his sliver of cover, sprinting across open ground that felt too bright. Bullets spat around him, kicking up sparks and flakes of paint. He didn’t stop. Didn’t flinch.
He got to Diamondback and Indigo both, grabbed fabric—vest, cut, whatever he could clamp his hands on—and hauled them behind a heavier truck stacked low with another crushed frame, where the metal thickness actually meant something.
It wasn’t graceful. But it was efficient.
He came back to my side in a half-crouch, eyes hot.
“Cut me loose,” he snapped over the gunfire.
“You are loose,” I said, firing again.
“You know what I mean,” he shot back. “Stop treating me like a guest. I know how to move in this. Let me do my fucking job. Give me a gun.”
I hesitated. Just a breath.
He met my eyes. No fear there, just readiness and that same stubborn core that had kept him alive in that hospital hallway.
“Fight like you would for your own,” I said finally. “Don’t get my people killed doing it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said.
I handed him the spare gun from my waistband and then he was gone, peeling off to take an angle I wouldn’t have risked if I’d been babysitting him.
He moved like someone who’d been under live fire before and lived to file it away.
Low when he needed to be low, quick when a slow step would’ve gotten him ventilated.
He called a position out—“Two o’clock, blue sedan, low”—and Medusa adjusted her aim.
The Serpent who’d been ducking there yelped from his new wound and dropped his gun.
We were biting them back, inch by inch. The leader knew it; he kept yelling for better angles, for flanks, for somebody to do something smart for once in their lives.
I traded fire down the lane, ducked under a spray, popped back up. Heart thudding slow and hard. The world narrowed to muzzle flashes and metal.
It almost cost me.
I didn’t see the one threading left. He climbed a stack two rows over, boots careful on the frames, using height and glass holes to move silently. He dropped down through a gap maybe ten yards behind me.
I felt the prickle on the back of my neck a half-second too late.
“Val—” someone shouted.
I pivoted, swinging my gun up, but his was already leveled. The barrel pointed center-mass at me. For a frozen heartbeat the only thing I saw was the black hole of it and the stitching on his cut.
Then his head exploded sideways.
He’d barely started squeezing the trigger when his face opened in a spray of bone and gristle. The shot that had been meant for me buried itself uselessly in the dirt a foot away as he fell limp to the side, already a corpse.
Behind him, Jersey lowered his pistol.
We locked eyes over the crumpled body.
Something passed between us that had nothing to do with clubs or ledgers or orders.
“You good?” he called.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded steadier than I felt. “Keep ‘em running.”
The rest of the Serpents must’ve felt the tilt.
One screamed something about “pulling out.” Another cursed bikers and bad intel. They started falling back the way they’d come, dragging the worst of their wounded, while leaving blood and shell casings in their wake.
None of us chased. We weren’t here to take trophies. We were here to secure a ghost and live.
Silence rolled in eventually, heavy and buzzing.
“Check,” I called.
“Breathing,” Diamondback replied, hand pressed over the graze on her arm. Blood smeared her fingers but the wound looked clean. “Stings like a mother fucker.”
“Indigo?” I asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Ego bruised. That’s it.”
“Medusa?”
“Disappointed,” she answered. “Thought I was going to get to cave someone’s skull in. Shooting works, I guess.”
I holstered for a second and crossed to the Serpent who’d almost put me down. The one Jersey had shot.
He lay half-on, half-off a rusted hood. The hole in his face was impossible to mistake. Up close, he was young. Most of them are. Tattooed throat, pale eyes already glazing.
“Strip him,” Liberty said behind me. “We’re not leaving anything that ties back to us, and we’re not wasting a perfectly good cut. We can use it for evidence.”
Vipers moved with that grim, practiced ease that comes from too many years of cleaning up other people’s messes. Medusa sliced the patches free. Indigo peeled the leather off his shoulders. We even found a burner phone in one of his pockets.
“Wait,” Liberty said. “Pictures first.”
She stepped in with her phone out.
I grabbed the corpse by the hair and tilted his head enough that his face pointed toward her. His skin flopped. Liberty snapped a photo. Then another with his cut draped over his chest so the emblem was clear. Then one wide, catching the body, the car stacks, and the wreckage for context.
She lowered the phone, checked the shots, nodded once.
“Now you can undress him,” she said.
I followed Jersey who went to the bike.
Even twisted and scraped, I knew why Miami’s chest had cracked when it went down. The frame was bent in like a punched lung. The tank was caved; the bars were at wrong angles.
“That’s it,” Jersey said quietly. His voice had gone strange around the edges. “That’s the bike.”
Diamondback joined us.
“Let me look,” she said.
She crawled around the wreck like a spider. Checked under the tank, around the frame. Felt for hollow sounds where there shouldn’t be any. Ran her fingers along welds that might have been newer than the rest.
Nothing.
“If there was more in here, it’s gone now,” Diamondback said finally. “Either he pulled every piece that mattered, or someone else beat us to it. This is just scrap.”
“Then it dies,” Liberty said. “On our watch.”