Page 20 of Tater
He nodded, then vanished into the brush.
The silence stretched too long. Wind stirred dust. Then—an explosion. Small, sharp. A flash of fire, then black smoke curled up from the ridge.
“Trap inside the trap,” Eagle said.
Brick’s radio hissed, then cut to static.
Tater clenched his jaw. “Mount up.”
They climbed the ridge slow. The air stank of burnt powder. The bodies they found weren’t theirs—they were Hades Hellhounds, four of them, charred bad. Someone had rigged their own position to blow.
Eagle crouched beside the nearest corpse, picked up a piece of metal half-buried in the dirt. He turned it over, frowning.
It was a piece of a timing cap from a Bastards-issue grenade.
He looked at Tater. “Ours.”
He said nothing. The wind did the talking for a while.
They rode back silent.
By the time They hit the lot again, the sun was gone. The brothers dismounted slowly, glancing at one another with that unspoken question on every face: Who sold them out?
Tater walked straight past them, into the chapel. Shut the door. Sat down at the table with the map still pinned from the night before. A new stain marked the corner—blood or coffee, didn’t matter.
Eagle came in after a minute. He closed the door behind him.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.
“I’m thinking I don’t like coincidences,” he said. “And I don’t believe in luck.”
He nodded toward the door. “You want me to start digging?”
“Quietly.”
He hesitated. “You sure you want to know who it is?”
“Knowing’s better than bleeding in the dark.”
He nodded once and left.
Tater sat alone again, hands clasped, eyes on the bent gold chain in front of him.
Ren’s fire. His war.
The crown-skull patch above the table flickered in the candlelight like it was grinning.
“Tomorrow,” he whispered, “we stop surviving.”
CHAPTER 9
Night Ride
Night gathered slowly.
The club rolled out just after sundown, engines low, a single column of ghosts sliding through the county. Headlights off until the highway opened; even then, the beams were dimmed to a dull glow. They weren’t hiding. They were stalking.
The wind was cold enough to bite. It carried the smell of rain that hadn’t fallen yet, of cut hay and exhaust and the kind of electricity that lives right before thunder.
