Chapter 15
CLUTCH - I STOPPED
The cold hits me the second I step out of the clubhouse, the night colder than usual for mid-September. Not enough to bite through leather, or the heat radiating off me from my rage. Just enough to feel sharp in my lungs, enough to remind me I’m still breathing when it feels like I shouldn’t be.
Gravel shifts under my boots as I head for my bike. Engines are already turning over in the lot. Men moving fast. Weapons checked. Orders barked short and clipped through the dark.
Everything around me is in motion. Urgent and focused. The kind of movement I’ve spent most of my life understanding without needing it explained. But tonight it all feels far away.
Muted.
Like I’m moving through it with cotton packed in my ears and blood where my thoughts should be.
My gloves are in my back pocket. I don’t remember putting them there, it must have been when I got back from the run Angel had us on. I do remember picking her cut up off the floor, I can still feel the weight of it bearing down on me.
The leather, the emblem I wear proudly stained with blood. Her blood.
I stop beside my bike and stare down at my hands, my knuckles are split.
I don’t remember exactly where it happened, the whole fucking day has been a shit show.
Somewhere earlier. Somewhere between the hospital and that old bastard at the Vultures’ place deciding he wanted proof we were serious before he opened his mouth.
Torch got the worst of it and one of the prospects caught an elbow to the face.
We went looking for answers and came back with half a fucking rumour and blood under our nails. And then I walked into the clubhouse looking for my wife and let the room swallow her whole.
A bike revs too hard to my left pulling my attention. My head snaps up to see Axel.
Torch is already mounted up. Helmet hanging off his handlebar.
Burn scar on his wrist pale against his skin where he grips the throttle.
One of the prospects is tightening his gloves with his teeth, before climbing onto Four’s bike.
The other keeps looking back toward the clubhouse like he wants to ask a question and is smart enough not to.
I watch him as he gets into the truck with a sigh.
No one says anything to me.
Good.
Because I’m one wrong word away from breaking someone’s jaw.
I swing my leg over the bike and the motion is muscle memory. The machine settles under me like it always does. Usually that steadies me.
Usually the bike makes sense when nothing else does. Tonight it doesn’t.
Tonight all I can hear is the sound of Razor’s hand cracking across Bex’s face.
I close my eyes for half a second and it’s right there again, the sharp, sickening sound. The way her head snapped and then the white-hot flash in my vision right after, like my body knew what happened before my brain could catch up.
I wanted to kill him.
Not hit him or drag him outside for a beating. No… if I got my hands on Razor I would have killed him. I can still feel that impulse tearing through me. That instant, violent certainty. The need to put a bullet through his skull and let the whole room watch.
But just as my body started to move a hand grabbed me from behind, because Angel’s hand had already gone up. Palm out.
A command.
And I stopped.
I fucking stopped.
My jaw locks so hard it hurts.
Axel rides up beside me. “We need to move, brother.”
I nod once, that’s all I’ve got in me right now.
We roll out of the gates in a tight line, the feeling of something tearing lights up my chest.
I need to focus., I need to get Four and get back here as fast as I can.
The night air tears past my face as the road opens up ahead of us, black and empty under a washed-out moon. The compound drops behind us fast. Fencing. gravel. rusted signage. The illusion of control disappearing in the mirrors.
The bike should clear my head, but it doesn’t, because all I can see is Bex.
Not just tonight, but everything that got us here.
My fucking sadistic brain chooses this moment to show me everything I missed.
Like my wife telling me she treated someone from a club party and wasn’t in the mood while I stood there smelling like whiskey and entitlement.
The way she looked at me when I said I had options.
She fucking flinched when I told her if she didn’t want to fuck me I could go somewhere else…
Like I had just proven something ugly she already feared was true.
How the look on her face has slowly shifted from love, trust and even lust to the look on her face tonight when she told me she didn’t trust me.
Fuck.
The wind is cool against my skin. But I still feel like I am burning up. I don’t know if it's the sheer exhaustion from barely sleeping over the past weeks or if it’s simply the way my brain is trying to sort through information.
I see the hospital parking lot when I went to drag information out of a staff that didn’t owe me a goddamn thing.
The old club we stopped at after that. The Crimson Vultures, in a half rotten building, mean old men still living like it was the eighties and women were bartering chips with long hair and bruised knees.
They remembered the trafficking ring, or said they did, but not enough to help. Just enough to make us prove ourselves first.
Punch for punch, that was their price. Torch called it primitive and then took the longest to knock his fucker out.
I called it necessary because at the time all I could think was that if there was even a chance any of this led back to Bex, I wanted to be the one hearing it first. So I knocked the asshole who stepped up to me out in one punch.
It had to be me to get the information.
Me.
Because I know my wife… or I thought I did. That’s the part sitting like broken glass behind my ribs right now.
I know she would never hurt anyone.
I know she would never sell people out.
I know she would never work with men like Preacher.
But when Angel stood there in front of the whole club, peeling apart the holes in her past, all I had was instinct and faith in him and a fistful of rage.
Because he’s right, I don’t know where she came from.
I don’t know who she was before nursing school or what put the scar on her leg, the marks that litter her body or the look in her eyes when certain things get said in passing.
I don’t know why she sleeps lightly some nights, twitching at every sound or reaches for the knife in the drawer before she reaches for me.
And hearing Angel say it out loud in front of everyone, hearing the holes listed one by one, hearing the room take that silence and make it into suspicion…
Fuck.
I grip the handlebars harder.
It should have been a private conversation… It should of…
The bike vibrates under me as we hit a long stretch of highway. Desert-dark on both sides. Cold air coming off the low ridges. I need the road to stay clear tonight or I’m going to put us into a guardrail.
“You alright?” Axel’s voice crackles through the helmet comms.
No. Not even close.
“Fine.”
It comes out flat, a lie no one believes. But no one calls me on it.
For a few miles there’s nothing but road noise and engine hum and the sound of my own thoughts trying to tear me apart.
Her voice keeps surfacing in pieces, like shards.
“This culture lets you treat women like possessions.”
Then her blue eyes that used to hold so much love and adoration turned cold when she looked at me and said, “You weaponize their presence to keep your ol’ ladies in line.”
I was angry when she said it… at first. Angry because it felt like she was throwing everything I’ve ever bled for back in my face.
The club.
The patch.
The life.
Me.
But anger doesn’t survive very long when it’s sitting on top of truth and fuck, what she said was true.
That’s the part I can’t outrun. I did weaponize those girls that night, maybe not with intent.
Maybe not because I wanted them. But I said it.
I stood there in our room after she came off a shift treating a woman who’d been assaulted, and I told her I had fucking options.
Like some stupid, pride-drunk asshole trying to get the upper hand with the only woman who ever mattered.
I never touched anyone else, I never would. But that doesn’t change what I handed her in that moment. A reminder of a piece of the culture she hates.
Bex has always been brutally clear about her lines, from the start, if I cheated, if I stepped out, if I betrayed her in that way… She was gone.
I would not get a second chance, she wouldn’t look past it… She’d leave without looking back.
She told me that years ago, sitting on the back of my bike with her arms around me, voice calm like she was just explaining something mundane. I’d laughed then, not because I didn’t believe her. But, because I thought I’d never be stupid enough to test it.
Now all I can think is maybe betrayal doesn’t always have to look like another woman. Maybe sometimes it looks like standing in a room full of men and saying act like it while your wife is being cornered.
Maybe sometimes it looks like silence.
A long stretch of dark highway disappears under us.
“You shouldn’t need permission to protect your wife.”
She’d had her blood dripping down her chin when she delivered that one.
I shifted in the seat, jaw clenched.
Torch cuts in through the comms. “She looked at you like you were dead to her.”
I go cold. The words don’t even settle all at once, they keep echoing, along with hers.
I don’t respond and Axel mutters, “Not helping, Torch.”
“I’m not trying to help, Axel.”
No one says anything after that and it’s good because if Torch says one more thing right now, I’ll put him into the ditch and leave him there. But the truth of it sticks, because he’s right.
That look on her face…
It wasn’t anger, not even heartbreak by the end. It was something worse, recognition. Like she saw exactly what I was, where she ranked in that room. Exactly what I would and would not do. And once she saw it, something in her shut off for good.
The way she held the cut out toward me is burned into my brain. Steady hand, blood on her chin, voice calm.
Take it.
I should have stepped forward. I should have told Angel to go to hell and thrown Razor through the fucking bar. I should have…
“Station’s up ahead,” Axel says.
One of the sheriff’s substations comes into view with two floodlights that bleach everything the colour of old bone. Several bikes are already posted outside.
Fuck.
I can make out Devil’s Ride cuts near the far curb. Maybe one or two men are just there to watch the show because bikers gathering outside a sheriff’s station after midnight means there’s blood in the water somewhere.
Four’s release was never going to be clean, nothing is tonight.
I slow, pulling into line with the others, killing the engine. The sudden quiet is jarring. For a second no one moves.
I stare at the station doors and think about Bex upstairs at the clubhouse. Fuck, I don’t even know where she is. Is she in our room, like the rest of the Ol’ Ladies?
Not anymore asshole.
Is she angry? Packing? Crying? Or maybe not crying at all, maybe she’s just done.
That thought hits different, because Bex was never dramatic. If she was finished, she’d just be done with it. Like life taught her to cut her losses and move on.
Like she was never taught that attachment could be a good thing.
What if… Fuck…
What if she really is… was one of those girls… And I just let Angel drag her through that brutal past with an audience. But what if she had been with the enemy her whole childhood, teens and she’s some kind of sleeper cell shit…
NO… No.
That is not Bex.
Axel gets off his bike first and Torch follows.
I stay where I am for one extra beat, hand still on the throttle, staring at the sheriff’s station doors and trying not to imagine the room I left behind.
I try to push away the idea of her walking away from me for real and what my life will look like without her.
I swing off the bike, with the absolute knowledge that I fucked up, I should have chosen her.