25. Hawk
Hawk
I’ve walked into gunfights without blinking. I’ve sat across from federal agents and said nothing for six straight hours while they laid everything they had on the table.
But thirty years of this life gave me nothing for the way my son looks at me right now.
Tyler’s standing twelve feet away in the center of the safe house living room, gun still in his hand, chest heaving with each breath.
I watched it happen in real time. The rage was already there when he came through that door—had been building for weeks, maybe years—but when his eyes landed on me, it curdled into something older and far more poisonous than rage.
Betrayal. The kind that doesn’t heal. The kind that just keeps bleeding.
“You.” His voice is barely a sound at first. A breath, not a word. Then he finds his volume: “You.”
Jade is behind me and to my left. I don’t look at her because I can’t afford to. If Tyler sees my eyes move to her, he’ll know exactly where to aim and exactly what it’ll cost me, and we will lose every inch of ground we just gained.
“Tyler.” I keep my voice flat and even, the same voice I use to defuse situations at the club when things are about to go sideways. “Put the gun down.”
He laughs. “Put the gun down. Yeah, okay, sure, Hawk. Whatever you say. Whatever the VP says. That’s how it always worked, right? That’s always been the rule. Whatever you say goes.”
He says my name the way he used to say it when he was sixteen and furious with me, like the word itself was something he wanted to spit out.
“I’m not here as VP.”
“No.” His eyes cut to Jade for half a second before snapping back to me. “You’re here with her. My girl. My woman. Standing here like you’ve got any right.”
I could defend myself. God knows I’ve had the arguments ready, rehearsed them on bad nights when I couldn’t sleep, and the guilt got loud enough to press on my chest like a boot.
I could explain the club, the choices I made when he was small, how I told myself he was tough and resilient and would be fine without me being present, the way fathers are supposed to be present. I’ve got a dozen justifications ready to go.
But he didn’t come here for justifications. He’s past that point. And most of what he believes isn’t wrong anyway.
“I failed you,” I say instead. No preamble. No softening around the edges. “I know it. I’m not standing here trying to tell you otherwise.”
He blinks. Fast. But I’ve been reading his face since he was two years old, and I catch it because I know exactly what to look for.
He didn’t expect me to say it. He came in here braced for excuses, for deflection, for the same wall of silence I gave him every time he tried to have this conversation over the last ten years.
“The club came first,” I continue, my voice as even as I can keep it.
“When it should have been you. When you needed a father in the room, I gave you a prospect to babysit you and a bedroom in the clubhouse while I handled business. I told myself it was fine. That you were tough. That kids raised around the MC figure it out.”
The gun in his hand wavers maybe an inch. But I clock it.
“I made you into this,” I say. “I know that too.”
Tyler’s jaw tightens until the muscle jumps under his skin.
His eyes are glassy and too bright, pupils contracted down to nothing, and I can’t tell if it’s whatever he’s been taking to keep himself moving these last few days or if it’s just the kind of madness that sets in when a man has genuinely nothing left to lose.
Either way, he’s unpredictable. Either way, the next sixty seconds could go anywhere.
“So what?” he says. His voice is softer now, which is worse than the shouting. Quiet Tyler is always more dangerous than loud Tyler. “You feel bad about it? You’re sorry? That’s supposed to mean something to me now?”
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t mean a damn thing at this point. Too late for it to matter.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because you’re about to do something you can’t come back from,” I say. “And I’m asking you not to. Not for me, but for yourself. Because you’re still my son, and that still means something to me, even if it stopped meaning anything to you.”
Tyler’s free hand comes up, and he drags the back of his wrist across his mouth, slow and distracted, and the gesture hits me like a fist to the sternum because he’s done that exact thing since he was six years old.
Six years old, caught doing something he shouldn’t have, trying not to show how scared he was.
He never knew I noticed. I never told him.
Too late for that too.
“The Ruthless Saints have a price on your head,” I say, pressing forward while he’s still listening.
“Your own club wants you dead. The Feds have everything they need from your laptop to put you away for at least the next thirty years. There is no clean exit from tonight. There is no version of this where you walk away and go back to what you had.”
“There was never anything to go back to,” he says, and the flatness in it is worse than anything else he’s said.
“There’s still a choice,” I say. “You surrender. You cooperate with the Feds, you hand them what they need on the Ruthless Saints’ full operation, and you buy yourself protective custody.
Maybe a reduced sentence. Maybe something that isn’t a hole in the ground somewhere off a county road that nobody ever finds.
” I let that settle for a second. “That’s still a life, Tyler. ”
He stares at me for a long moment, then the corner of his mouth pulls up in something that isn’t quite a smile.
“You think I’m scared?” he asks. “Of the Saints? Of the Feds? Of any of this?”
“No,” I say honestly. “I don’t think you’re scared of any of that.”
“So what do you think I’m scared of?”
“Being forgotten,” I say. “Not mattering. Dying the way you lived, with nobody giving a damn in either direction.”
His chin drops a fraction, and his gaze goes somewhere past me for just a moment.
“Prove me wrong,” I say quietly. “Do one decent thing tonight. Walk away. Let her go. Let this end without anyone else bleeding on this floor.”
The safe house sits completely silent around us.
Tyler’s men are down or gone. Razor is somewhere above us, invisible and steady, the scope of his rifle finding Tyler’s center mass and holding there.
Shadow’s at the back of the house, covering the exit.
It’s just the three of us in this room, and every broken thing between a father and a son that was never fixed, never addressed, never given the time it needed.
Tyler looks at Jade.
She stands there with her feet apart and her chin level, and those green eyes watching him.
“Did you ever love me?” he asks her.
His voice is completely different. Not the screaming he came through the door with, not the venom he aimed at me. Stripped of all of it, down to something bare and unprotected that sounds younger than thirty-one has any right to sound.
The room holds its breath.
Jade is quiet for two full seconds. I keep my eyes on Tyler’s gun hand, on his trigger finger, on the tendons in his forearm, watching for the first sign that anything is about to move.
“I wanted to,” she says. “I tried to. For a long time. I wanted it to work, Tyler. I really did.”
He goes very still.
“But you never let me love you,” she says. “You only ever let me fear you. You needed the fear more than you needed anything else. And there’s no love in fear. There’s nothing in fear except the next time you have to survive it.”
Whatever was left holding him together after my words, that finishes it. The thing that passes across his face isn’t grief. It’s something harder and more final than grief. The grief was gone long before tonight, and no amount of tonight changes any of it.
Then it closes off completely.
His jaw sets. His eyes go flat, cold, and very calm.
Tyler raises his gun.
Not at Jade.
At me.
“If I can’t have her,” he says, almost conversational, almost quiet, “you don’t get her either.”
Everything happens inside the space of a single compressed second.
The gunshot is enormous in the closed room, a concussive pressure wave that swallows every other sound.
The round catches me center-mass and the vest stops it, but the force is absolute, a full stop, like being hit with something that weighs more than a person should be able to throw.
My feet leave the floor, and I go backwards, shoulder hitting the wall first, then the floor, and the impact drives every cubic inch of air out of my lungs.
I hear the second shot from above at almost the same moment.
Razor.
Tyler drops. No stagger, no reach for anything, no dramatic fall. He just stops being upright. One moment standing, the next on the floor, like someone cut every wire at once.
The sound of him hitting the boards reaches me a half second later.
Then Jade makes a sound that I will not carry out of this room with me, a sound I will not think about or name, and she’s crossing the floor toward me before I’ve even worked out that I’m conscious and the vest held and nothing went through.
She drops to her knees beside me, hands going to my chest, pressing down hard, and the pressure across the bruised ribs is a white-hot wire of pain, but I still don’t have the breath to say anything about it.
My lungs are working on coming back from wherever they went. It takes several seconds longer than I’d like.
“Hawk.” Her voice shakes in a way I have never heard from her in all the days I’ve known her. “Hawk, look at me right now.”
I look at her.
“Are you hit? Are you actually hit? Tell me right now.”
“Vest caught it,” I manage. The words scrape out rough and incomplete. “I’m not out.”
Her hands don’t move from my chest, and behind her, I can see Tyler on the floor eight feet away. He’s on his back. His chest is still moving. Shallow and slow and getting slower.
Shadow comes through the back of the house, weapon up, clears the corners in four seconds flat, then drops to check Tyler’s men against the far wall. “Clear,” he says without looking at me.
Razor comes down the stairs with his rifle still up, sweeps the room, and stops when he takes in the full picture of the floor. He looks at Tyler, then at me, then at Jade, still pressed over me with her hands on my chest.
His face says nothing and everything.
I get myself up to sitting, which costs more than it should.
Then to standing, one hand braced against the wall while the ribs negotiate with the rest of my body about whether this is actually happening. They’re going to be a problem for the next several weeks. They’re not going to kill me tonight.
I straighten up, and I look at my son on the floor. He’s on his back, eyes open, looking at the ceiling. His breathing is slower now with each cycle, softer, the pauses between each one stretching a little longer than the one before.
I cross the room and lower myself to one knee beside him. He doesn’t move when I get close. Just keeps looking at the ceiling.
Then his eyes track sideways and find me. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything either. There is nothing left that fits inside a sentence, nothing that reaches what this moment actually is.
I stay there with my hand on the floor beside his until the pauses between his breaths stop resolving.
Then I stand up.
The room is quiet. Jade is standing a few feet behind me. Razor is at the window, checking the street. Shadow is watching me with an expression that isn’t pity but is something adjacent to it.
My chest is one solid bruise under the vest, and my ears are still ringing from the shot, and my son is dead on the floor, and the night air coming through the gaps in the boarded windows is cold and smells like rain that hasn’t arrived yet.
“We need to move,” I say. “Twenty minutes before someone comes looking.”
My voice comes out steady, and I don’t know how.