Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Rookie
Coffee doesn't make itself in the clubhouse, and nobody here is going to do it except me.
Barely five in the morning with my boots on.
In my usual everyday getup: jeans, black tee, cut over everything.
The leather is broken in now, three years of wear softening what used to feel stiff and borrowed.
Prospect patch on the back. No bottom rocker. No road name stitched across the chest.
Not yet.
The kitchen is empty. I fill the industrial pot, measure the grounds, and flip the switch.
While it brews, I wipe down the bar from last night, empty ashtrays, sweep the common room floor.
Line up the chairs Maddox knocked sideways at two in the morning when he decided arm wrestling Daemon on a table was a good idea.
There's a system to mornings as a prospect. Coffee first. Clean second.
Don't speak unless spoken to.
Don't sit down before a patched member sits down.
Don't eat until the officers have plates.
Don't complain, don't sigh, don't let your face do anything your mouth wouldn't say out loud.
Three years of this.
A thousand mornings wiping the same bar, brewing the same pot, and absorbing the same casual dismissals from men who earned the right to deliver them.
I pour the first mug and carry it to the chapel hallway, where Ruger's door is already cracked open.
Light spills through the gap.
He's been up for an hour at least, probably longer.
The man runs on four hours of sleep and an engine fueled by stubbornness and Tildie's cooking.
I knock once with my knuckle and hold the mug out without stepping inside.
Ruger takes it without a word.
"Kid." Ruger's voice carries down the hall without effort. "Church at noon. Make sure everyone knows."
I turn back. "Got it, Prez."
He looks at me for half a second. Not long enough to mean anything. Not short enough to mean nothing.
Then the door closes.
Kid.
Three years, and the word still sits between my ribs like a splinter I can't reach.
Every brother uses it.
Maddox, who claps me on the shoulder and means it with affection.
Ounce, who drops it with a half-smirk like he knows something I don't.
Bracken, who forgets I exist until he needs something carried.
Bloodhound, who says it like a rank instead of an insult.
I don't correct them. Correcting a patched member is a fast way to stay a prospect forever.
So I swallow it and keep moving. Not much else a prospect can do.
The coffee pot's full by the time I make it back to the kitchen. Brothers filter in over the next hour.
Maddox first, filling a mug the size of a soup bowl.
Coin next, dark hair still damp, blue-gray eyes already alert.
He nods at me. A real nod.
Not the chin-lift the other brothers throw at me on their way past. Coin stops, looks at me, nods once. Like I'm a person in the room and not part of the furniture.
Porter and Bracken come in together, mid-conversation about a parts shipment.
Daemon grabs coffee without looking at me, which I've learned is his version of friendliness.
By a quarter past seven, every officer who sleeps on-site has been caffeinated and the kitchen is clean.
Eggs at the counter. Standing, because I made the mistake of sitting down once during my first week and Daemon looked at me like I'd shit on the table.
My phone alarm buzzes in my pocket. 7:20. Twenty minutes to get to campus for my 8 a.m.
This is the part of my day nobody here talks about.
The brothers know I'm at WVU.
Ruger approved it when I transferred from Chicago a few years ago, with the understanding my class schedule would never interfere with club business.
Some of them think it's a waste of time. Daemon told me once, flat out, the only education a brother needs is the one he gets at the table.
Maddox asked what cybersecurity even means and then forgot the answer before I finished explaining.
Coin didn't say anything when he found out. He looked at me for a long second, then went back to his ledger. Coming from Coin, silence is a form of approval.
I ride to campus because a Morgantown February doesn't scare a kid who learned to ride in Chicago.
This isn't cold. This is a mild inconvenience.
I don't mind the looks. On campus, a motorcycle is interesting. At the compound, a motorcycle is everyday life.
Dr. Hasan's cybersecurity lecture starts at eight sharp. I take the same seat every class, fourth row, left side, close enough to hear without being in the professor's direct line of sight.
The material today is network intrusion detection. Access logs, anomaly identification, packet analysis.
Dr. Hasan pulls up a case study on the projector. A corporate data breach from last year. Forty thousand employee records exposed because someone left a default password on an admin portal.
I take notes. Real notes, not the scribbling I do in statistics.
In this room, my handwriting is legible and my brain works the way it's supposed to.
Patterns make sense here. The logic of systems, the way networks are built, the way information moves through channels and leaves traces, whether you want it to or not.
Information always leaves traces.
My pen stops moving. The slide on the projector shows a diagram of a compromised network, arrows indicating where the breach originated and how data flowed outward through unauthorized access points.
Arrows pointing outward. Information flowing from a secure location through a human vulnerability to an outside threat.
For about two seconds, I'm not in a lecture hall. I'm in a hallway at the compound with plaster dust in my hair and Ruger's eyes burning a hole through my skull.
The human vulnerability. The prospect who couldn't tell the difference between pillow talk and an interrogation.
Dr. Hasan advances the slide and the moment passes.
I write the next line of notes and keep my face neutral, because neutral is what I've been practicing for years and I'm better at it than anyone in this room would guess.
Class ends at 9:15 sharp.
Statistics is at 9:30 in Armstrong Hall, which gives me fifteen minutes to cross campus and switch from the version of myself who understands packet analysis to the version who can't parse a regression equation without divine intervention.
The walk takes eight minutes. I stop at the vending machine on the first floor of Armstrong because the Starbucks line is always too long and I don't need a five-dollar coffee to survive a class I'm going to fail anyway.
Dr. Petrov's room is half-full when I get there.
Back row, mostly empty. The usual suspects.
She's already in her seat.
End of the row, closest to the door. Laptop open, notes on screen, head slightly down.
Brown hair pulled back. Flannel over a tank top.
No jewelry, no makeup beyond something on her lips.
She dresses like someone who decided a long time ago to stop being looked at.
I've been watching her since the beginning of the semester if I’m being honest.
Not watching. Noticing.
There's a line between those two verbs and I'm very aware of where it sits, because the last time I didn't respect the distance between observation and obsession, people got hurt.
But noticing her is different. Or I tell myself it is.
She sits the same way every class. Same seat, same posture, same invisible perimeter around her space.
Nobody sits directly next to her and she doesn't invite them to.
She's good at the material.
I've seen her screen once or twice during partner work, and her notes are cleaner and more organized than the textbook.
She almost never speaks. When she does, her voice is low, measured, like every word gets weighed before it leaves her mouth.
She doesn't laugh. She doesn't chat with the students around her. She arrives, she works, she leaves.
I recognize the behavior because I've been running a version of it at the compound for years.
Making yourself small so the world gives you less to deal with. Staying inside the lines so nobody looks too close.
Whatever she's carrying, it taught her the same lesson mine taught me: visibility is a liability.
I drop my bag onto the desk one seat over from hers.
She glances up. Quick, assessing, gone. Not unfriendly. Measuring.
My notebook comes out, then the pen.
Pink, feather on the end, borrowed from Shayla at the clubhouse because I left mine in my other jacket and she thought it was hilarious to hand me this one in front of Maddox.
He laughed for five solid minutes. I kept the pen out of spite.
Dr. Petrov launches into regression analysis, and for forty-five minutes, my brain does its best impression of a car engine running on fumes.
The numbers blur. The variables swim. I write what I can and hope the rest reveals itself later through some combination of prayer and YouTube tutorials.
Then Petrov puts a problem on the screen and tells us to work with someone nearby.
I don't think about it. My chair's already angling toward her before the sentence is finished, notebook sliding across the gap between our desks.
We did this last week.
She walked me through regression like she was translating a foreign language into English, and I understood it for the first time all semester.
Going back to her isn't a decision. It's gravity.
"Round two?" I click the pink pen and hold it up like a white flag.
She glances at the pen. The corner of her mouth twitches. "You're still using that?"
"It's my lucky pen now. I passed the last assignment."
She turns her laptop toward me without being asked, and the fact that she does it automatically —no hesitation, no weighing whether I'm worth the effort—does something to my chest I'm not going to examine right now.
"Okay." She scrolls to a clean section of her notes. "This one's probability distributions. You good with those?"
I stare at the screen. "I'm going to pretend you didn't ask me that."
The almost-laugh. There it is. Quick, caught between her teeth before it gets out, but I saw where it was headed.
She walks me through it the same way she did last time. Patient without being patronizing.
Her eyes lift from the screen. Brown, lighter than mine, steady.