Chapter 9
TINY
The road heading south hums beneath us, a steady growl that sinks into your bones if you let it. The sun is high enough to bake the asphalt, and the sky is too clear to trust.
Los Angeles’s skyscrapers fade away in the mirrors, replaced by open highway and dust. It should feel like freedom, but it doesn’t. The silence between us sits heavy on my chest.
I lead the formation, Dagger rides on my six, his dark hair whipping out from the back of his helmet.
Torch and Trigger flank wide, and Bones covers the van driven by our prospect, Knight, while Red’s voice crackles through the comms from the base.
Capone’s orders were simple. Eyes only. Confirm movement. No heroics.
But fifteen miles out, something shifts. Not a sound. Not a sight. Just a wrongness in my gut that makes my shoulders tense and my grip tightens on the throttle.
“You feel that?” Dagger’s voice is raspy in my ear.
“Yeah,” I reply. “Wind’s changed.” It’s a lie. The wind hasn’t changed, but something has.
“And it’s quiet. Quiet is where the monsters hide.” He says it like a joke, but he’s not wrong.
Torch laughs over the comm. “Monsters don’t hide, man. They wear cuts and drink our whiskey.”
“Speak for yourself,” Trigger cuts in. “I sleep just fine.”
“Yeah, because you don’t have a soul,” Bones fires back.
Their low, rough, brotherly banter echoes in my ears. It’s the kind of noise that keeps you human when the world smells like gunpowder and ghosts.
The landscape starts to look familiar in a way it shouldn't. Old highway markers. A tilted fence post leaning to the left like a drunk. A service road that curves just so, the kind of curve you lean into without thinking because your body remembers the angle.
These aren't roads I've ridden for the Royal Bastards.
These are roads I rode as a Hellhound.
My pulse kicks up. I tell myself it's a coincidence. Lattimer's crew could be anywhere. This stretch of desert sees traffic from a dozen clubs. Iron Disciples, Los Demons, and smaller independents running guns or powder.
But my hands remember steering this route. My body remembers the weight of a different cut on my shoulders. My lungs remember the taste of desert air mixed with spray paint and gasoline and the specific kind of adrenaline that comes from marking territory that isn't yours yet.
The scar on my right palm starts to throb. It shouldn't hurt anymore, but it does.
We ride hard until scrub and wire fences appear. Desert wind hits like dry fire against my face. A rusted sign flashes by reading: 214 South – Last Gas 20 Miles.
Dagger’s voice is steady. “Trigger’s two clicks behind. Red’s watching the feed. You think we’ll actually find something?”
“Don’t jinx it,” Torch mutters. “Every time you say that, something explodes.”
“Only if you’re driving,” Dagger fires back.
“Bite me.”
“Later. Candlelight dinner first.” Laughter filters through the comms, grounding us. It’s stupid. It’s perfect. It’s life.
Capone called it a simple recon. Confirm movement, mark it, ghost out. But the way my stomach’s been knotting since dawn tells me this isn’t gonna be simple.
“Feed’s glitching,” Red says. “You’ve got dead zones on my end. Be quick.”
“Roger that,” I answer.
Torch crackles through the comm. “We picking up anything else, Red?”
“Negative,” Red answers. “Drone feed’s fuzzy. Might be interference.”
“Interference or somebody jamming us?” Trigger cuts in.
“Both,” Red says, tone grim.
Dagger laughs under his breath. “Good to know optimism’s dead.”
“Wasn’t aware it ever lived,” I mutter.
The laughter fades as the road narrows into a valley of scrub and gravel. A low warehouse crouches at the edge of an empty field, sunburnt and half-collapsed. Windows are boarded up, the roof is sagging, and a chain stretches across the doors.
"Tiny." Trigger's voice cuts through. "You good?"
"Yeah," I lie. "Eyes up. Warehouse at two o'clock."
It shouldn’t feel familiar, but it does. The shape of the walls, the way the wind moves through the gaps. It hits me like a heartbeat I buried years ago. Deja vu with a pulse.
We kill the engines fifty yards out, and gravel crunches under tires.
The air here smells like old rain and fresh blood.
We roll in with guns visible but lowered.
Dagger kills his engine beside me. Torch and Bones fan out wide.
Trigger has the prospect stop the van for overwatch, Red’s voice crackling faintly through the speaker.
"Split up," I order quietly. "Dagger, east perimeter. Trigger, north. Bones, south fence line. Torch, you're with me on the west entry. Anything moves, call it."
"Copy," they murmur, fanning out like smoke.
Torch and I approach the main bay door of rusted metal hanging crooked on broken hinges. Paint peels off in strips, revealing older colors beneath. Blue. Then red. Then primer gray. Layers of history, each one trying to bury what came before.
I know this door. I've walked through it before. The realization hits like a fist to the gut. My feet stop moving before my brain catches up.
"Tiny?" Torch glances back. "What is it?"
"Nothing." I force my legs to work. "Just checking the hinges." Another lie. They're stacking up like bodies.
I ease the door open six inches. Enough to slip through, not enough to scream. The metal groans a low, pained sound that echoes in the emptiness beyond.
Inside, the warehouse is gutted. Empty pallets stacked against the far wall.
Scattered tools, wrenches, bolt cutters, a tire iron, arranged in a pattern that might be random or might be deliberate.
Oil stains on concrete that could be motor fluid or blood.
Hard to tell in the half-light filtering through broken skylights.
The smell hits next. Motor oil, yes. But underneath it, something sharper. Chemical. Paint thinner. Spray paint.
My stomach drops.
Torch moves toward a back wall, his light sweeping over rusted metal. “Looks abandoned,” he says.
“Abandoned doesn’t mean empty,” I counter.
Torch moves left, scanning for threats. I move right, following the scent like a bloodhound on a trail I don't want to find.
That's when I see it.
My feet stop. Just... stop. Like someone cut the strings holding me upright.
For a second, I'm not breathing. Not thinking.
Just frozen, staring at the far wall like it's a door to hell and someone just kicked it open.
It's spray-painted maybe eight feet high.
Black outline. Red fill. Perfect symmetry.
A wolf's skull. Split down the center line. Jaw hinged open in a snarl. The left eye socket is slightly larger than the right. Deliberate imperfection that makes it look alive.
The Hellhounds insignia.
My lungs forget how to work. My heartbeat stutters once, hard enough to hurt. My vision tunnels. Sound muffles like someone stuffed cotton in my ears. The warehouse disappears at the edges, darkness creeping in until all I can see is that mark.
That goddamn mark.
My right hand starts to shake, so I shove it in my pocket before Torch can notice.
The scar across my palm burns, not phantom pain, real fire, like the cut just reopened.
Blood pounds in my ears. My chest tightens.
I can't breathe right, can't think straight.
Because it's not just any Hellhound mark.
It's Creed's signature.
I know because I learned it from him. I spent three months watching him work before he let me hold the can myself.
The angle of the jaw. The red bleeding into black at the edges.
The left eye socket is slightly larger than the right.
Creed said a wolf keeps one eye on the present and one on what’s coming.
And there, at the base of the skull, where the jaw meets empty space, is a small flourish. Three dots in a triangle. Creed's personal signature. His way of saying, I was here. I marked this. It's mine.
The room spins. Heat crawls up my neck. Sweat breaks cold across my back. The warehouse dissolves, and I'm seventeen again, standing in a different building with a spray can in my hand and Creed's voice in my ear.
"Straight lines," Creed says, his hand guiding mine on the can. His grip is firm but not controlling. Teaching, not forcing. "Steady pressure. You rush it, it bleeds. You hesitate, it fades. You gotta find the rhythm between those two."
The paint hisses out, black mist curling in the afternoon heat.
We're in an old meatpacking plant east of Barstow, claiming territory the Vipers thought was theirs.
The air smells like rust and rotting meat, but Creed doesn't seem to notice.
He's focused, calm, like he's painting a masterpiece instead of a threat.
"Why split the skull?" I ask, watching the center line take shape under his guidance.
Creed grins, all teeth and scars. The scar through his left eyebrow makes him look perpetually skeptical, like he's questioning the universe and finding it lacking.
"Because wolves are pack animals, kid. But every wolf has two sides, the one that hunts and the one that bleeds.
The killer and the killed. You gotta honor both, or you're lying about what you are. "
He steps back, admires our work. The skull seems to watch us, empty sockets judging.
"You bleed on your first mark, it's yours forever," Creed says, pulling out his knife. "Blood makes it real. Makes it a promise."
"A promise to who?"
"To yourself. That you'll never forget what you're capable of."
I don't mean to, but the can slips. The sharp edge of the cap cuts my palm in a quick, clean cut, deep enough to matter. Blood wells up, drips onto the concrete below the mark.
For a second, I panic. Think I fucked it up. But Creed just laughs, low and warm, like I've done exactly what I was supposed to.
"There it is," he says, clapping my shoulder. "You're a Hound now, Tiny. Marked and bound."
I stare at the blood on the ground. My blood, mixing with dust and paint fumes, and feel something shift inside me. Pride and fear twisting together in my chest until I can't tell them apart.