Page 15 of Open Road

The hall is still dark when I finally let myself get up off the floor, and my back files its complaint the second I move, forty-three years of hard living and a compound floor that doesn’t negotiate. So I straighten one vertebra at a time and stand there a while, listening. Behind the door there’s nothing, no voices, no small feet on the boards, only the dense quiet of people gone all the way under, which is a different animal from the held-breath quiet of people lying still and hoping you’ll pass them by. I’ve spent enough years learning to tell the two apart to know this one’s the real article.

She came out a while back, somewhere in that gray stretch before dawn. I knew it the moment the lock turned, because I have never once slept through a door opening. I wasn’t truly sleeping anyway. My first instinct was to sit up, the way you do to let a person know they’re not alone in the dark, but I killed it before it got anywhere. A woman who packs a bag at two in the morning and drives her kid five hours into nowhere, a woman with a bruise going yellow along her jaw, does not need to step out of a strange room and find a man my size awake and watching her from the floor. So I kept my eyes shut and my breathing long, my face doing nothing at all, and I let her believe I was dead to the world while she crouched for the rabbit I’d stood against her door, edged past my boots like she was defusing something, and padded off down the hall to run the tap.

I followed every step of it without opening my eyes, then felt her come back. I felt her stop, stand over me a few seconds longer than she had any reason to, and it cost me more thanI’ll admit to keep playing possum and let her go back inside believing she’d managed the whole thing unseen.

Some habits you keep because they once kept you breathing. Letting her think she was unobserved was the only thing I had to give her, so I gave it, and I waited until the lock turned a second time and the room went quiet behind it before I let myself move at all.

I roll my shoulders and walk toward the light at the end of the hall.

The compound kitchen is already turning gold. The Florida morning comes in fast and low through the east-facing window, spreading itself flat across the counter as if it owns the place. I didn’t sleep, but I’m not tired. Sleep has always been optional.

Coffee takes two minutes. Black. I drink half of it standing at the sink, looking out at the yard. The bikes sit in a row under the workshop overhang, chrome catching the first pink of dawn. Reaper’s Harley is gone from its spot. He never came in last night, or he left before I noticed. With Reaper, either is possible.

The church gavel hits at first light.

Creed is already at the head of the table when I push through the door. He’s wearing his cut, no shirt, and his arms are crossed over the table the way he sits when he’s made a decision before the conversation starts. Reaper comes through behind me, which means he was in the compound somewhere, but I didn’t hear him. That’s a skill he has. A man his size moves through a building like smoke, unnatural and why he’s still breathing.

Scout drops into his chair, still tying his hair back.

Winchester is last, closing the door behind him with a quiet click, and we’re four.

The gavel comes down twice. Creed’s eyes sweep the table. “Long night,” he says. Not a question.

“Short night,” Scout says. “Way too short.”

“How’s the woman?”

“Asleep.” I wrap both hands around my coffee. “Kid too.”

Creed looks at me. He has a way of looking at you that feels less like eye contact and more like a review—thorough, the kind where he turns you over and checks the underside. I’ve known him for years, watched him become the man he is, but it was the boy I met first. Skinny kid, ten years old maybe, always hanging around the edges of the compound like he was memorizing the place. In and out of foster care, nowhere that stuck. Not everyone the system puts in charge of kids has their best interests at heart. Creed learned that early. Whatever softness he might have started with got burned out before he hit thirteen. He was in and around the club from the time he was fifteen, patched at eighteen, and president by twenty-eight. The youngest this club has ever seen wear that patch, and nobody questioned it. Not once.

Me, I came up differently. Army at seventeen, out at twenty-one, still looking for something that felt permanent, a brotherhood, a home, a place where the code meant something. That’s when I found the Royal Bastards. Creed was already here, younger than me but twice as certain. He built me into whatever I am now. He knows the shape of things I haven’t found words for, usually before I find the words.

Twenty-two years of that, and he still does it now.

He clocks something in my face that I haven’t put there intentionally, sets it aside, and moves on. We’ll get to it. With Creed, wealwaysget to it.

“Winchester,” he says.

Winchester opens the folder he came in with. No preamble. He doesn’t do preamble. “Rivet Knights. Three confirmed units moving south on I-95 crossed into Georgia yesterday morning. Pace puts them in Florida by end of day.” He pauses. “Vinnay flagged it first, Toronto chapter picked them up moving through the Carolinas two days ago and called it in.”

Scout’s chair goes still. The light scratching sound he makes with a pen cap stops. “Why south?” Scout says.

“Because something they want is south,” Reaper says. He hasn’t moved since he sat down. Forearms on the table, eyes on the middle distance, the particular quality of his stillness meaning he’s already somewhere downstream of this conversation, working angles most people haven’t arrived at yet.

“Hector’s gone,” Winchester says. “But the Rivet Knights don’t need him anymore. Axel Vane’s been running them since the compound hit. They’ve got their own reasons to move south now, and those reasons have our name on them.”

“He’s got a reason to come back at us,” Creed says.

“Justice shot him.”

“Justice is ours.”

That’s it. That’s the whole sentence and argument, and the weight of this club in three words. ‘Justice is ours.’The Rivet Knights hit us once on Hector’s behalf. Now, they’re moving south again. The math is not complicated.

“The woman,” Creed says. Still looking at me. “What do you know about her situation?”

“Husband was using his hands.” Plain, because there’s no better way to say it. “Bruising on her jaw. Old enough to be fading. She had the kid and an overnight bag and miles of nowhere behind her.”