9. Viper
VIPER
Trapper’s bike sits nose-out by the south doors, parked in the same spot he now claims at the community college every Tuesday. I’m one row over on my bike with a water bottle going warm against my thigh and a clean line of sight on every exit Eden could walk through.
With the Crimson Warriors getting bolder, Saber put out an order: No Old Ladies or kids move through town alone.
Both Shelby and Eden have classes at the community college, so there are prospects and brothers here any time one of them is in attendance. But I don’t need Saber’s order to protect Eden. I’m with her every moment possible.
Trapper yells over to me. “You ever think about taking a class? You’re here enough. Could get a degree in sitting.”
“You could get one in learning when to shut the fuck up.”
He laughs.
Eden’s class lets out soon, and then it’s my favorite part of the day—the part when I get to take her back home and have her all to myself.
There’s movement to my right, and I lift my head to look. The van feels wrong before it finishes the turn.
Gray panel, windows blacked out, and it’s taking the speed bump without lifting off the gas. It swings wide of the visitor spots and lines up on the south entrance.
I’m off my bike before the side door slides open.
Four men pour out of it.
No colors. Doesn’t matter. I’ve stood across a county line from two of those faces. Crimson Warriors.
They’re here with bats, a length of chain, and the one in front carries a blade low against his leg.
They didn’t ride on bikes. They planned, but they didn’t have the guts to do it on two wheels. Fucking cowards with a getaway van.
They don’t come at me.
They go for Trapper.
“Trapper!”
The first bat catches him across the shoulders before he’s off the seat, and the bike goes over with him half under it. The second swing takes the headlight apart. Glass sprays across the asphalt. They drag him out from under his bike, and I’m there.
The chain swings for my head. I step inside the arc, catch the arm, and put my elbow through the man’s face. He sits down in the glass and stays there.
Two of them have Trapper on the ground. The man with the blade comes at me low, and for half a second, I get a flashback to the night Eden found me on the road.
Not this time. This time, I’m rested, I’m upright, and the man holding the knife is standing between me and a Kings’ prospect.
He makes a swipe with the knife. He catches my forearm instead of my ribs. Before he gets a second chance, I close my hand around his wrist.
Bones move under my palm as I snap his wrist. He screams. The knife rings off the asphalt, and I run him into the side of their van hard enough to fold the panel in.
Then the building doors open.
Class change time.
Students pour out of the south entrance into a lot full of blood and swinging bats, and the screaming starts. Phones are already up, and from across the way, I spot auburn hair coming toward me.
Everyone on this campus is running away from the violence.
Eden is running into it.
“EDEN!”
She doesn’t look at me. She isn’t running to me. She doesn’t even see me.
She’s running to Trapper, who’s bleeding on the asphalt with a boot driving into his ribs.
I don’t think. I run.
The man standing over Trapper raises the bat.
Over her.
I’m there before it comes down. The bat lands across my shoulder instead of her head, and then I have him. Throat and belt. I lift him clear off the ground and slam him back into it. He quits holding the bat. He’s unconscious.
The fourth man is already behind the wheel. He lays on the horn, and the ones on the ground drag themselves and each other in through the side door. The van is driving off before the door shuts.
There is no rear license plate. They planned this to avoid getting caught.
Sirens are far off, but closing in.
“Up.” I get an arm under Trapper. “We’re leaving.”
“My bike,” he slurs.
“Is coming with you. You’re riding it.”
“He is not riding.” Eden has his head in her two hands, thumbs finding the split above his ear. “He’s got a head wound, and his ribs are cracked. He needs—”
“He needs to not be in this lot when the cops roll in.” I haul Trapper to his feet and hold him there while the ground quits moving for him.
“Ambulance means hospital. Hospital means reports, means his name on an assault, means questions about why four men with bats attacked him. He rides, or the law decides what happens to him. Pick.”
She looks toward the sirens’ direction, then at Trapper, swaying but upright, and I can see her hating every part of this.
“Pupils,” she says, and grabs his chin, and checks one eye and then the other with her face an inch from his.
“Follow my finger.” He follows it. She steps back.
“Fine. Slow. You stay in front where we can see you, and if you drift one inch, we’re stopping.
And when we get there, you’re mine until I say otherwise. ”
“Yes, ma’am,” Trapper says, grinning through the blood, because he’s young and an idiot.
We pick his bike up off the asphalt. The headlight’s gone, and the bars are scraped, but it starts. I put Eden on behind me, her arms locking around my ribs. We roll out with Trapper in front of us.
The first cruiser’s lights show in my mirrors as we take the far exit.
He drifts twice. We don’t stop. Eden’s arms cinch tighter both times, and that’s the only argument she makes the whole ride home.
Eden has Trapper flat on the long table with his scalp stitched, his ribs wrapped, and a bag of frozen peas from the bar kitchen mashed against the side of his face. He’s grinning under it, telling Joker that four grown men needed a minivan and a head start to take down one prospect.
“You ran toward it,” I say.
She doesn’t look up from packing her kit. “He was on the ground.”
“Eden.”
“He was on the ground, Viper.” Now she looks up. Green eyes level, not one inch of give in them. “You don’t get to be surprised. You met me kneeling on a county road.”
There’s no answer to that, so I take her hands instead. A bruise is forming on her forearm where something caught her that I didn’t see. My thumb moves over it once.
Rage is a cold thing in me. It always has been. It drops another degree.
“I’m fine,” she says, gentler. “You were there.”
“Sit,” she says then, and points at the chair. The whole clubhouse pretends not to smile while the club’s Enforcer sits down on command. She flushes the cut on my forearm, threads the needle, and sews me shut for the second time since she found me on that road.
Only two stitches this time. Barely anything. Probably didn’t need them.
“You’re making a habit of this,” she says.
“You’re the one who keeps showing up where I’m bleeding.”
“Somebody has to.”
By the time Doc arrives, there’s nothing left for him to do.
The porch door bangs. Saber comes in with Crash behind him, and the room changes. Joker straightens. Trapper quits talking.
Saber takes in Trapper on the table, the peas, my arm under Eden’s care, the bruise on her forearm.
His face shutters. “Doc get you all fixed up?”
“She did,” Doc says from the end of the table, pointing at Eden. “Wasn’t much left for me.”
Saber looks at Eden a beat longer than he needs to. He gives her a respectful nod. Then he pulls a chair around backward and sits, forearms on the rail of it, and gets to the thing he came in carrying.
“Phone’s been going all afternoon. It’s on the news, on the internet—broad daylight, a college campus, civilians filming.
” He scrubs a hand across his jaw. “I talked to National an hour ago.
Our lawyer is already on it. Footage shows four armed men jumping a man off his bike.
Nobody's pressing charges, the Warriors sure as hell aren't filing anything, and Viper's face never shows up on a single video. A detective came by the bar asking questions. He left with nothing.”
The room holds still.
“Are we retaliating?” Joker asks.
“National has been tracking the Warriors’ movements.” Saber’s eyes come around the room, man by man, and land on me last. “Word is this: we can’t keep letting this slide. Not after today. What comes next gets decided above us, and it’s coming.”
Nobody cheers. This isn’t that kind of news, and every man in this room has buried brothers over less.
Eden heard every word of it.
Saber didn’t send her out, and that means something. She’s not a stranger who’s seen too much anymore.
She’s family.
Her hand settles flat over my fresh bandage. She doesn’t say anything, and neither do I.
The war doesn’t scare me.
But the thought that Eden might decide she wants no part of this—that scares me.