Page 11 of Bitter’s Sweet

Secrets in ash.

By 1997, the old heads split territories like a family cutting pie with switchblades. Virginia kept the roots. Tennessee got the hollers, the highways, and the kind of small towns where a funeral procession can block traffic long enough to move damn near anything if the right men are riding escort.

Now we are respectable from the road.

Mortuary contracts. Custom coffin shop. Festival sponsors. Charity rides. A cosmetology program for the dead, because somebody decided the future of funeral work needed girls with steady hands and mascara wands.

Underneath all that, we’re still us. Grave Prowlers MC. Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth. And if that ain’t enough, we got shovels.

“What kind of shipment?” I ask.

Nevermore’s face goes blank in the way that means worse than normal.

“Hyde wants church.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

I look toward the hallway where music thumps through the walls. “I was planning to have a beer.”

“You were planning to answer coffin girl.”

“Woman has a name.”

“What is it?”

I open my mouth.

Nothing comes out.

Nevermore’s brows rise. “Classy.”

“I was gonna get there.”

“You got inside a coffin with her before you got her name?”

“I got priorities.”

“You got brain damage.”

“My priorities had a good night.”

“Move.”

He turns and heads for the door. I grab my cut from the peg by the workbench and shrug into it. The leather settles on my shoulders like weight and warning. The patch on my back doesn’t ask if I’m ready. It never has.

Grave Prowlers MC.

Tennessee.

A skull face grinning like he knows where all the bodies are buried because, more often than not, we do.

I take one last look at the open coffin. The satin is wrinkled. I shut the lid and run a hand over the glossy top.

Nevermore shakes his head and walks out.

I follow him into the hall, past framed photos of dead brothers, festival flyers, and a bulletin board covered in invoices, ride routes, and one hand-drawn sign from Boogie that says BOBBING FOR BONES NEEDS MORE BONES. The clubhouse used to be a funeral home before the Prowlers bought it, expanded it, drank in it, bled in it, and turned the viewing rooms into places where men laugh too loud because silence reminds them what the building was built for.