Chapter 17 #2
Rebecca slowed as she passed again, one hip bumping the bar. “You don’t get to keep all of them,” she said. “As much as we want to. You two,” she nodded at me and Valkyrie, “don’t be heroes every time. Leave some stupid brave shit to the rest of them.”
“Noted,” Valkyrie said.
Rebecca smirked and moved on.
Valkyrie turned her attention to Jackal fully. “So,” she said, nodding at him. “Turnpike got his patch. That leaves you and Badger holding up the prospect end of things.”
Jackal shrugged one shoulder. “Guess so.”
“Any feelings about that?” she asked. “Jealous? Bitter? Planning his murder?”
He snorted, for real this time. “Nah,” he said. “Turnpike earned that shit. He’s been here longer than me. You watch him on a run, you know he was already wearing the patch in his head.”
“And you?” Valkyrie pressed.
Jackal wiped an imaginary smudge off the counter, more to give his hands something to do than anything else.
“I do what they ask me to,” he said. “Pour drinks. Run errands. Watch doors. Keep my ears open. I’ll get my turn when the club needs me for something bigger.
I’m not in a rush.” He glanced up, eyes more serious than his tone.
“This place needs someone sober behind the bar who knows which bottle to grab when Blackjack lifts his hand without looking. That’s a job too. ”
It was. More important than most people outside the life ever realized.
Valkyrie watched him for a long moment, the corners of her mouth softening. “You remind me of someone,” she said. “Girl in our club. Cali. Takes care of people and acts like it’s not a big deal. She thinks being in the background is safer. It isn’t, even if she’d like it to be.”
Jackal smiled a little. “Cali, huh?” he said. “Wouldn’t mind meeting her one day. Sounds like my kind of trouble.”
“When this is done,” Valkyrie said, and it landed with more weight than the words deserved. “When Tesauro’s either in the ground or too scared to say the word shore without flinching, Or, if some other opportunity arises. I’ll introduce you.”
“That sounds like a plan,” he said. “I’ll be here. Still pouring.”
“Hell,” I cut in. “When this is over, Blackjack and Liberty are probably going to throw some unholy joint party anyway. You’ll get your wishes all at once. Devils, Vipers, Giorlandos, half the shore, all drunk and yelling over the same song.”
Tanya laughed. “I want to see Liberty drunk in this room,” she said. “Just once. I think the walls might melt. I heard she’s a complete badass. The female version of Blackjack.”
“Babies will be named after that night,” Jackal added in as a joke.
“Don’t give them ideas,” Quinn murmured.
Valkyrie shifted, turning toward Quinn. “You hear anything new on Miami?” she asked. “Mink sent Liberty some scans of the hospital chatter, but that’s the last I’ve heard.”
Quinn’s fingers worried at the rim of her glass. “He’s… stable,” she said. “That’s what the nurses said when I called. Stable. Talking. Bitching. Which is very him. But every time I call, I think they’re going to say something else. Sometimes I just want them to say he’s good enough to come home.”
Her jaw set. “He hates it there,” she added. “Hospitals. Needles. Machines. Memories of Anchor, and ghosts.”
I felt that one in my chest.
Anchor’s name still hung in this clubhouse like a smell. Last man we’d had go down hard and not get back up. You could see it every time someone looked at Miami’s empty chair in Church.
Before I could say anything, movement across the room snagged my attention.
Blackjack walked into the room with 8-Ball, Snake Eyes, and Spade at his side. His phone then lit up. Normally when that happened and it was anything remotely club-related, he’d hit speaker and let the room carry the weight with him.
This time he picked it up and put it to his ear.
Something in my spine went cold.
He said nothing at first. Just listened, eyes going flint-hard in that way they did when bad news flowed through the line like static.
“When?” he asked.
That was it. One word. Short. Sharp.
There was a pause. 8-Ball watched him, eyebrows drawing in.
“Okay,” Blackjack said finally. “Thank you for letting me know.”
He hung up. Didn’t move. Then his gaze lifted, cut through the room, and landed on me.
My stomach dropped.
“Be right back,” I told Valkyrie and Quinn, the coffee suddenly sour in my mouth.
I crossed the room, everything in it going weirdly distant. The laughter. The clink of a glass. The sharp tang of gun oil and cleaner. A cue ball being struck. All of it blurred around the space between me and my President’s face.
“What’s going on?” 8-Ball asked just as I got there. “Who was it?”
Blackjack looked at him, then at me.
“That was the hospital calling about Miami,” he said.
The floor tilted. For a heartbeat, all I could smell was antiseptic and that too-bright corridor from the last time we’d walked out of a hospital without one of our own.
“Is he—” I started.
The front doors suddenly slammed open.
“Look who just fucking showed up with his ass hanging out!” Priest’s voice boomed across the room.
Everybody’s heads snapped that way.
Priest stood just inside the doors, grinning like a wolf. Voodoo and Jabs flanked him, both looking exhausted and smug. Between them, leaning on a single crutch like it was a bad joke he hadn’t decided to laugh at yet, was Miami.
He looked like hell. Bruised. Stitched. A little too pale. But he was upright. Awake. Breathing. And grinning like a man who’d just broken out of jail.
For a second, the room just stared.
Then Quinn screamed his name.
“MIAMI!”
She nearly knocked over two chairs in her rush. She skidded to a stop just shy of slamming into him full-force, hands going to his shoulders instead, carefully working around the bandages and sling on his arm.
He winced anyway and laughed through it. “Easy, baby girl,” he rasped. “I just got all my pieces back in the right order. Don’t want to scramble the puzzle again yet.”
Her hands shook as she touched his face, his chest, like she didn’t quite believe he was real.
“You idiot,” she said. “You absolute fucking idiot.”
“Love you too,” he replied.
Blackjack was moving now. So was 8-Ball. So was everybody else.
“You left the hospital against doctor’s orders?” Blackjack demanded as he reached them.
Miami shrugged, which looked like it hurt. “How’d you know?” he said.
“Because I just got a call from them. She said, ‘We can’t stop him. He signed the AMA form and said something about rather dying in leather than being another name on some morgue paper.’ Miami…”
“That’s exactly what I said,” Miami admitted.
“They did what they could. They fixed what they could fix. Now I’m either going to live or I’m not, and if I’m not, I’m not doing it hooked up to a beeping machine while some stranger checks my chart.
I’m doing it here. With you assholes. With my brothers. With my woman.”
8-Ball barked a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a choked-off sob. He clapped Miami on the shoulder carefully. “You dramatic piece of shit,” he said.
“Pot, meet kettle,” Miami shot back.
He shifted his weight on the crutch, scanning the room. His gaze snagged on Turnpike, who stood near the wall, new patch on his cut.
“Look at this,” Miami said. “Motherfucker leaves me on ice for five minutes and comes back patched in.”
Turnpike snorted. “Somebody had to keep your attitude in the air,” he said.
Miami’s eyes kept moving, doing a lazy sweep that landed on the bar.
On Valkyrie.
She’d stood when the doors burst open, done that calculation in one blink—threat or friend—and then settled, watching. Now she stood near the end of the bar, one hand braced on it, expression somewhere between relief and assessment.
Miami’s eyebrows went up.
“Well, shit,” he said. “You going to introduce me, or do I have to assume I died and we got another club in our house?”
Valkyrie started toward him at the same time I did.
“I’m Valkyrie,” she said.
“This is Valkyrie,” I said.
We tripped over each other’s words like idiots. I stopped. She stopped. We both looked at each other, then at Miami.
He stared between us, then started laughing. It turned into a half-cough, half-groan. He pressed a hand to his ribs until it settled.
“What?” I asked.
“What,” Valkyrie echoed.
Miami’s grin went sharp. “What, you fall in love while I was laid up in the hospital or something?” he asked me.
Heat crawled up the back of my neck. I didn’t say anything, which was its own answer. Valkyrie’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t throw a joke out to kill it either. Her eyes flicked to mine for a second, then away.
Blackjack’s gaze sharpened at that. Filed it away. He didn’t comment on it.
“Welcome to the shitshow, Valkyrie,” Miami said, offering a hand that was also currently holding up his body.
She took it cautiously, careful not to cause any further injury and shook it.
Blackjack cleared his throat. The noise quieted more of the room than it should’ve given how full it was.
“Welcome back, brother,” he said. The words carried weight. “We’ve got a lot to catch you up on. Raptor, the Shore Vipers, Vincinos, and Giorlandos. But you might want to take a seat first.”
Miami looked around at all of us before drawing in a deep breath.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “You all look like hell.”
Quinn guided him toward a couch, steps slow, crutch clicking against the floor.
People moved without needing to be told—making space, grabbing chairs, closing in around him not like he was fragile, but like he was one of the pillars that held this place up and they were finally putting him back where he belonged.
And he was.
Valkyrie drifted back to my side. Our shoulders brushed. Nobody commented.
“You okay?” she asked under her breath.
I watched Miami lower himself onto the couch with a wince, watched Blackjack sit opposite him, watched 8-Ball take up position just off to his right.
“For the first time today,” I said, “yeah. Closer.”
Her fingers brushed my hand for half a second, then were gone.
The war was still out there—sitting in glass lined skyscrapers and dock offices and in whatever quiet room Tesauro Vincino was currently poisoning the world from. Raptor was still dead. The Vincinos still owed us blood. Roman was still sharpening his own knife and had us in the dark.
But right now, in this room, we’d gotten something back.
War usually just took. It was almost obscene to watch it lose for once.
I let myself breathe it in.
Miami was home.
The night before had killed a kid.
The next night might kill one of us.
But for this heartbeat in between?
The rest of us were all still standing.