Page 53 of Damron
“Clear,” Nitro muttered.
“Clear,” I echoed, my breath ragged. My side was on fire, blood pulsing between my fingers as I tried to keep the wound closed. We waited, backs to the wall, as the rest of the Scythes swept the building.
Augustine came in, face pale, rifle barrel still steaming. “Main floor’s ours. No sign of the VP, but Giammati’s here—he’s in the VIP lounge, shitting his own pants.”
“Take us,” I said, voice tight.
The corridor stank of death and burned insulation. The lounge was worse—a velvet-rope fantasy turned bunker, the carpet sodden with spilled whiskey and someone’s blood. Three more men inside: one unconscious, one sobbing, and Giammati, white as a corpse, trying to dial his phone with trembling hands.
Nitro ripped the phone away and flung it into the wall, shattering it.
“Evening, Senator,” I said, smiling through a mask of blood and gunpowder. “Fancy seeing you here.”
He whimpered something, but I didn’t care enough to listen. I grabbed him by the lapel, dragged him upright, and slammedhim into the wall. Nitro leveled his SIG at the man’s heart, just in case he grew balls.
“You want to explain why you’re pissing yourself in a room full of dead bikers?” I asked.
Giammati just sobbed. From down the hall, the sounds of violence were fading—just the last few shots, the scrape of boots over tile. I could hear the city waking up around us. Sirens, far off but closing in. It was time.
I turned to Nitro. “Time for the fun part?”
He grinned. “Always.”
We dragged Giammati out, through the bowling alley-turned-charnel house. The Scythes were already torching the place, setting gasoline trails along the lanes and lighting the trophies for good measure. Outside, the sky was tinged with dawn.
I held Giammati upright, made him watch as the building burned. “This is how it ends,” I told him, my voice colder than I thought possible. “Not with a vote. With fire.”
He tried to run, but Nitro clipped him behind the knee and he collapsed, sobbing into the dirt.
The police would be here in minutes. We had seconds to disappear. But the job was done. The Dire Straits would never recover, not from this. And the message was sent: You come at my family, I take yours apart piece by piece.
As we mounted up, I looked at Nitro. “You think they’ll get the message?”
He laughed, the old, real laugh I hadn’t heard in weeks. “They’re not that dumb, Prez.”
We peeled out, showering Giammati with rocks and smoke, the city lighting up behind us, the sirens coming on like a chorus. Tonight was what the outlaw biker life was all about—retribution, turf wars, family. We didn’t fuck with those who left us alone. Los Alamos knew this. It’s why we were able to coexist. The MC was about a lifestyle its members wanted to live,essentially giving the middle finger to the 9-5. Although we had parameters, we did what we pleased, went where we pleased, and fucked with who we pleased. Bikers had this shit in their DNA. We weren’t meant to be tied down. We weren’t meant to comprise. We loved the club and the brotherhood. It came first and everything else was a distant second, and therein laid Carly’s issue with the club.
For the first time in years, I felt something close to peace. If only for a minute.
Chapter eighteen
Carly
Damron walked in like he owned the air. His shirt was ripped down the side, fresh stitches zippering his ribs, and his leather cut—painted with his blood, someone else’s, and something like axle grease—hung open like a flayed animal. There was a trick to moving through the MC world when you were a politician or a woman, and I’d long since mastered both, but right then I felt like a little girl at a monster truck rally, trying not to flinch at the noise. The rest of the Scythes raised their bottles as he passed—Augustine, half his face still green from bruising; Seneca, shirtless and sporting a cartoonish roll of gauze around his bicep; and then Nitro, who looked less like a man and more like a problem set to explode in ten seconds.
Nitro saw me first. He stepped forward, hand raised for a backslap, but stopped cold when he spotted me by the pool table. His grin flickered out like a blown fuse. I wasn’t supposed to be here. Not tonight, not after what happened. My throat went sandpaper-dry, but I kept my eyes locked on Damron, the only man in the room who could make a tailored blazer feel like a bulletproof vest.
He clocked me without breaking stride. For a heartbeat, the whole place went silent, the way churches go silent when a woman in a red dress stumbles through the doors on Sunday. He didn’t slow, didn’t even blink. Damron walked right past Nitro and the rest, picked up a bottle from behind the bar, and popped the cap with his thumb. No glass. He just swigged and set it down, eyes never leaving mine.
The others took the cue and vanished. Not literally—Scythes didn’t run from drama, they just pretended not to give a shit unless there was money or violence involved—but they faded into the shadowy alcoves, leaving me and Damron in a hemisphere of silence lit only by the pink glow of the neon and the cheap Christmas lights someone had run across the ceiling six years ago and never bothered to take down. His jaw was clenched so tight it looked like he was grinding concrete between his molars. The way he flexed his left fist—absent the ring finger, still healing—made the missing digit more noticeable, not less.
I started, “I heard what happened at the Dire Straits clubhouse.”
He grunted, reached back for the bottle, and poured a shot into a sticky glass. Didn’t offer me one. “Yeah? You come to lecture me about excessive force, Senator?” His voice had gone husky with smoke and pain meds, or maybe just plain old contempt.
“I came,” I said, “to say I’m sorry.”
That stopped him for half a second. He kept his back to me, shoulders hunched, shirt ruined, skin like road rash over granite. “For what, exactly?” He turned, the half-empty glass trembling in his fist. “For leaving? Or for pretending I was just another bad decision you could un-sign like a fucking amendment?”
