Page 100 of The Bonds We Break
I glare in his direction. “You mention Rae and fucking in the same sentence again, I’m going knock all your teeth out so you can’t say her name again.”
He raises both palms. “Easy, Prez.”
I look back at Saint. “You’re back, without constraint. You’ll get paid again starting January.”
Saint swallows hard, then looks down at the table. “And Rae?”
“She’s free to go, but she isn’t going anywhere.”
He huffs a laugh. “She got to you, yeah?”
This time I do smile. “Yeah. She got to me. Somewhere between quotes about dead Danish kings and broken Japanese pottery, she got to me.”
Saint smiles too. “She has that effect on people.”
“Yeah. Well. We got lost as a club because I lost myself. For that, I apologize to you all. I haven’t been the leader and president you need. Hell, I haven’t even been the brother or human being you deserve. But I promise you all, it changes now. We’re one club. Track, we’ve got your back. All the way. Whatever it takes to keep you out of prison. But we got to get straight as a club before it tears us apart.”
Track glances at Saint, then back to me. “I’ll take you at your word.”
Saint leans forward. “I will forever be unable to testify. They’ll struggle to make the case without my testimony.”
“We also need to help you, Saint. I’m guessing you’re in a world of hurt from the ATF. If you testify, you’ll incriminate yourself.”
“I know. If that would let everyone else off the hook, I’d do it. But I’ve been advised by a lawyer that it’d just make things worse for everyone,” Saint says.
“We’ll make sure your legals are covered. I want you all to come together.”
“This is bullshit,” Niro says.
Spark rolls his eyes. “Here we go.”
“What?” Niro says. “I’m allowed an opinion.”
“You are,” I say. “I understand where you’re coming from, Colton. But individual rights and wrongs are not more important than this club. We’re vulnerable when we’re fighting. And there’s enough shit going on outside these walls to worry about. I want us to stand together. All of us.”
Niro folds his arms and looks down at the table. I’ll talk to him one on one later to smooth things over.
Clutch slaps my shoulder. “And we’re all with you. Iron Outlaws. Tomorrow be ours.”
Everyone yells our phrase.
“Yo, Prez,” Halo shouts above the noise. “You never answered Clutch’s question.”
I look up at Dad’s cut in its glass case on the wall. I think of Mom, of the love I remember them having. “Yeah. I’m claiming Rae.”
And Saint is the first of my men to stand and hug me.
36
RAE
Three days later, there’s a knock at King’s front door, and when I answer it, Niro stands on the porch.
“Was supposed to meet King here in twenty minutes to measure the front bedroom for your office, but I’m a bit early.”
I look at the man who makes me uneasy. It’s not his scar, not least because that would be ableist, and facial scars have long been used to demonstrate the villain in movies. It’s a bullshit trope. With Niro, the uneasiness comes more from his lack of moral compass. There’s a glint in his eye—it’s the way a hunter looks when they’ve got a deer in the kill shot. When he first came with King to take me, it was almost as if he enjoyed it.
I can’t explain it better than that.
