Chapter 4 #2
I thought about the U.S. Marshals. About James Roberts and his endless calls and those thinly veiled threats he liked to dress up as concern.
About the intel I’d been feeding them about the club, and the careful balancing act I’d been walking for years to keep Abigail safe.
If this turned into a war—if the Federation came down on the Diamondbacks, if other clubs piled in, if bodies started stacking up—the Marshals would swarm all over it.
They’d start pulling threads. And if they pulled hard enough, sooner or later they’d get to me.
My jaw clenched.
I couldn’t let that happen.
I sure as hell wasn’t going to.
“Kill him.”
Every head in the room turned toward the back wall.
Whisper.
The big, stoic enforcer who rarely spoke unless he had something worth saying. He stood with his arms crossed, his expression carved from stone, his dark eyes fixed on Kansas.
“This club has a dark past,” Whisper said, his voice low and steady. “A stain we can’t get rid of. It will only get worse if we let Pence live. We need to draw a line in the sand, let the biker world know we mean business.”
Kansas flinched as if he’d been struck.
“Whisper’s right, Prez,” Trigger said, his voice rough with emotion.
He was sitting a few seats down from me, his hands clenched into fists on the table.
“You know my history. Lost my own sister to leukemia. There was nothing I could do to save her, but this.” He gestured sharply.
“This is something I can do. What if it were Hellraiser?”
Kansas’ face went white.
Hellraiser. Kali’s daughter. The little girl Kansas had taken as his own when he married her mother.
“You know damn well I love that little girl,” Trigger continued, his voice breaking. “I would tear apart the motherfucker with my own hands. I hate this as much as you, but Pence is a hill I refuse to die on. He needs to die.”
I felt the words build in my chest before I could choke them back.
“My sister’s not much older than Alice is now,” I said, my voice flat and cold.
Every eye turned to me.
I met Kansas’ gaze and didn’t blink.
“If it were her,” I continued, each word deliberate, “the fucker would already be dead.”
Kansas’ expression crumpled.
I didn’t look away. Didn’t soften. Didn’t give him an inch. Because this wasn’t about loyalty. It wasn’t about brotherhood or the bonds we’d forged through blood and fire.
This was about a line in the sand.
This was about the kind of men we were, and the kind of monsters we refused to become.
“I hunted down and killed a man’s family before I killed him, just because he was responsible for my wife’s death and my unborn son’s,” Blackjack added, his voice quiet but steady. “I’d do no less for any child.”
“We all would, Prez,” Widow said, his tone firm. “The question is, would you?”
The challenge hung in the air like a noose.
Kansas stood frozen, his back to us, staring out the window at the dry Oklahoma landscape. His shoulders were rigid, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
I could see the war raging inside him.
To kill Pence was to become the very thing he had spent years trying to distance the club from. To spare him was to invite chaos. To paint a target on the back of every Diamondback brother and watch as the biker world tore us apart.
There was no good choice. Only bad ones. And worse ones.
The silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
I watched Kansas’ reflection in the window—the way his jaw worked, the way his chest rose and fell with each hard breath. He looked like a man standing at the lip of something black and bottomless, knowing whatever he chose was going to swallow part of him whole.
He was about to speak.
I could see it in the set of his shoulders, the way his hands unclenched slightly.
The door to church opened.
Then Pence walked in, grinning like he didn’t have a care in the world.
Like he hadn’t just made bail on charges that would’ve gotten him cut to pieces in any prison yard in the country.
Like he couldn’t see the fury in every brother’s face, or the way Montana’s hand had already drifted to the gun at his hip.
“Hey, boys,” Pence said, his voice light, almost cheerful. “Miss me?”
Everything happened at once.
Montana’s hand came up, the gun already drawn, already aimed.
Kansas turned, his mouth opening in a shout that never came, and I sat frozen, my mind screaming at me to move, to stop this, to do something.
The gunshot detonated in the enclosed room. Pence’s head snapped back, and a neat red hole opened in the center of his forehead. For a split second, he just stood there, frozen in that stupid, oblivious grin.
Then he crumpled. His body hit the floor with a wet, heavy thud that echoed in the sudden, terrible silence.
I stared at the corpse.
At the blood pooling beneath Pence’s head, spreading across the scarred wooden floor in a dark, slow tide. At the way his eyes stayed open, fixed on nothing.
Montana lowered the gun slowly, his expression carved from stone. “It’s done,” he said, his voice flat.
Kansas stood frozen, his face ashen, his eyes locked on Pence’s body.
No one moved.
No one spoke.
The weight of what had just happened pressed down on the room like a physical thing, crushing the air from my lungs.
I thought about the U.S. Marshals and the investigation that would come crawling after this. About the questions they’d ask, the records they’d pull, the scrutiny they’d bring down on every patched man in the club.
About Abigail, safe at home and clueless that her brother had just watched a man die.
About the life I’d built out of lies, secrets, and the desperate hope that I could keep her untouched by any of it.
And I realized, with a cold certainty that settled deep in my bones, that everything was about to come apart.
Justice had been served.
But I had a feeling the price was going to be higher than any of us could pay.