Chapter 14 #3
The kid grins red. “Long live the..” Trigger puts the round through his eye so clean the chair doesn’t creak. Silence eats the shed. For a heartbeat, the bulb hum is a choir.
Dagger exhales. “That’s tidy.”
Trigger holsters his gun like he just put a pencil away. He looks at me without judgment, like a man checking a ledger. “You good?”
I’m not. The dead kid’s grin hangs in the air. Lattimer’s name still burns in my mouth. Creed’s hand is on the wall in black paint from a week ago. It all stacks, and something inside slides off its shelf.
I hit the corpse again. My fist cracks his cheekbone, accomplishing nothing. The second strike mashes what’s already gone. By the third, I’m in a tunnel, the roar of the fire and the scream from last night and Syvannah’s voice breaking when she said I lied.
I punch the past, the present, the map of a future I can’t protect. I hit until my knuckles bark and bleed, and the sound in my ears goes from thunder to wind.
Hands grab my shoulder. Trigger’s grip is iron. “Enough.” I shove him back like a fool, but he doesn’t move.
Dagger steps in, blade low, not a threat, but presence. “Brother.”
The word pulls me a half-inch out of the pit. I stand there, chest heaving, blood slicking my hands with a heat that isn’t heat at all.
“Tiny,” Red says softly in my ear. “Come back.”
Footsteps crunch on the gravel outside. I don’t turn because I feel her before I see her.
The shed’s side door hangs on a squeak, and Syvannah stands in the doorway, one hand white-knuckled on the jamb, the other holding her cellphone like it’s a grenade about to go off.
Smoke-smudged face, eyes wide and hurt and, God help me, afraid.
She saw more than the shot. She saw me swinging after the silence.
For a second, none of us move. Trigger’s gaze turns toward the door like a man offering me a mercy kill I’m too slow to take.
I lift my hands without thinking. She flinches, and it hurts my soul. “I…” My voice scrapes. “Syv…”
She doesn’t step back. That should make it worse, but it doesn’t. “Is that who you are?” Barely a whisper. “After.”
I look at the kid in the chair and see nineteen versions of him. I look at my hands and see all the ghosts that led me here. When I look at her again, I see exactly what I always feared, the moment her faith fractures and the hero costume I never deserved burns off.
I search for a word big enough to be a bridge, but I can’t find one.
Syvannah’s gaze drops to my cracked, already swelling knuckles, then back to my face. The pity in her eyes collides with fear, and the collision is worse than hate.
“Say something,” I choke, because I’m a coward who needs saving from the mess I made.
She swallows. “You told me last night you’d try honesty.” The words shake. “Start with yourself.” Syvannah walks away before I can respond, and my stomach drops. Shit. I’ve really fucked up this time.
The quiet that follows is a verdict. Trigger touches my shoulder once, then he and Dagger take the body to the shallow pit we dug for men who chose the wrong oath. The bulb swings.
Red’s voice threads back into my ear. “I flagged the payments. Names we can burn. We’ll hurt him, Tiny. One cut at a time.” I nod to a man who isn’t in the room and feel nothing.
Outside, the horizon is bleeding out the last light heading back to the compound, and the air is still ash and anger. Capone hears Trigger’s two-sentence report without a blink. “Courier down. Confirmation that Lattimer is bankrolling the Hounds.”
“Good,” Capone says like a man standing over wet concrete with a stick. “Now we write.”
Red will ghost the equity shell and light every account it touches.
Trigger will arm heavy and quietly. Torch and Bones will build a new cage out of steel that bends for no one.
Dagger will take outreach and wear a tie that makes teachers say yes, and enemies relax.
Blayze will open old doors in Vegas for a look South by Southwest.
Derange and Aftermath will dust off the things we keep in the back, starting with calling in the Hawaii Chapter. Aloiki Ka’ana’ana, the president of RBMC Hawaii and Aftermath, have a strange bond between the two of them.
Capone doesn’t mention me. He doesn’t have to because everyone looks at me anyway. He meets my eyes last. No judgment. No absolution, only the math of leadership. “You lead the next pass,” he says. “And you keep your head.”
“Yes, Prez,” I answer, voice steady like I didn’t leave a piece of it in the shed.
Syvannah doesn’t come to the common room.
I find her where the garage used to be, sitting on an overturned crate inside the chalk outline of a bay, sketchbook open, charcoal blacking her fingers.
What she’s drawing isn’t the fire, it’s what comes after.
A steel-braced frame with light pouring where the roof will be.
“You shouldn’t have been down there,” I say, because it’s easier than saying what I should.
“You shouldn’t have kept hitting him.” She doesn’t look up. “But here we are.”
I lower myself across from her, knees popping, hands in my pockets so I don’t have to see them again. “You think I liked it?”
“I think you felt it,” she says. “And that scares me more.”
We breathe the same smoke in the same silence. She finally looks up, and it guts me that the first thing she does is track my face for damage.
“I don’t need a hero,” she says quietly. “I need a man who won’t get lost when it’s dark.”
“I was already lost,” I admit. “I’m trying to map my way back.”
She studies me like I’m a sketch she’s not sure earns the next line. Then she reaches out and cups my jaw with the hand she hasn’t wiped clean. Charcoal smears across my cheek like a brand. “Then stop punching ghosts and start cutting ropes.”
My throat tightens around all the things I can’t promise. “I’ll try.”
“Try harder,” she says, and presses her palm harder against my face like she can hold me in place if she pushes hard enough. I close my eyes and lean into it. After a few beats, I take Syvannah’s hand. She doesn’t hesitate to follow me back inside the clubhouse.
Capone and Blayze are talking low at a table with Monica and Danyella at their sides, the kind of conversation that draws lines on maps and men.
Bones laughs loudly to catch the eye of one of the patch bunnies.
Torch curses lovingly at the jukebox, dancing with Daisy and their twins.
Trigger flips a page in the ledger with the reverence of a priest, while Aerianna sits next to him, cleaning her guns.
Footsteps thud outside. Engines pop cool.
The brotherhood moves as one body around a wound.
Red pops his head around the corner with Matthew in his arms. “Tiny,” he calls, eyes bright with the feral light of a man who’s just found a wire to pull, “our shell company has a cousin. And the cousin lives in a warehouse with a dented quarter panel.”
“Same truck?” I ask, standing.
“Same scar,” he grins. “We ghost tonight, or we lose the scent.”
Syvannah drops my hand. The absence is colder than the air. “Go,” she says. It’s not a plea. It isn’t permission. It’s a dare to come back different.
I nod, not trusting my mouth to make a promise my hands will struggle to keep. I touch her shoulder, a small, human anchor, then turn toward the sound of men getting sharper.
As the gate yawns open and the night breathes us in, smoke still smudges the horizon where our garage used to be. The fire’s out, but the war is just waking up.