Page 12 of Damron (Bloody Scythes MC #1)

Chapter eight

Damron

T he Bloody Scythes’ clubhouse sounded like a bar brawl at a gun show, but I’d stopped hearing it.

My head was in the books, or the bottle, or both, most nights.

Tonight was no different. My office was stacked with IOUs, vendor bills, and a half-eaten sandwich growing a civilization in the wrapper.

I was the last one in, catching up on paperwork nobody else could be trusted to touch.

Someone had to keep the lights on and the bail money ready.

The lifestyle wasn’t glamourous. I wore jeans, sometimes torn, a leather cut, a tee underneath.

Sometimes I smelled like leather, other times oil, and then other times like gunpowder.

On very rare occasions, I smelled good. Women didn’t seem to mind the changing smells.

Most of them smelled of cigarettes and beer.

I guess the lifestyle wasn’t glamourous for anyone involved in the club life.

I was no different than other men who’d had a relationship crash and burn—I lost myself in my work and took pussy as it came along, never daring to be serious about any of it.

Couldn’t trust myself to make the right decision when it came to another serious relationship.

But I wasn’t a pretender. If I was going to hit it and quit it, I let her know up front.

if she still wanted to fuck after that, then life was all good.

My phone buzzed. It was Nitro, which meant it was either business or someone was bleeding.

“Yeah,” I answered, keeping my eyes on the spreadsheet.

“Boss, it’s your ex,” he said. “She’s been hit. Hospital says arm wound. Bullet’s through-and-through but the Feds are crawling up her ass already.”

My hand froze on the mouse. “Who did it?”

“Don’t know yet. News says shooter’s still at large. Some of ours are already watching the place, but she’s asking for you, man. Specifically.”

I heard the room get quieter. Funny how you could sense when the universe was lining up its next punch. More than likely an upper cut to send me to the mat.

“You got wheels?” I said.

“Meet you there in twenty,” Nitro replied, and then he was gone.

I hung up. The glass in my fist cracked and bled rye across the ledger. Didn’t even notice until I set it down and saw my fingers slick with whiskey and glass. I wiped them on my jeans, then stood and bellowed down the hallway. “Prospects!”

They scrambled. Four seconds later, I had two kids at the door, both half-dressed and wide-eyed like I’d caught them jacking off to Internet porn.

“Lock the building and keep eyes on every approach. If anyone, and I mean anyone, looks sideways at the gate, you call me or Nitro. If you let the cops in without a fight, you’re out. Understood?”

They both nodded like bobbleheads. “Yes, Prez.”

“And fix that goddamn handle on the garage door. I will personally staple your nutsack to the pool table if it’s still busted tomorrow.”

That got a nervous laugh from one, but they both vanished fast.

I grabbed my cut from the back of my chair.

Leather stiff as hell, the Bloody Scythes insignia across the shoulders and my name stitched above the heart.

The arm holes were dark with the sweat of a thousand bad nights.

I slid it on, relishing the weight. In the mirror, I saw a forty-year-old with too much history and a jaw that still remembered every fist that tried to break it.

I wiped the blood off my hand and didn’t bother with a bandage.

Out in the garage, my bike was waiting: 2015 Harley Dyna, all matte black and chrome, with a pipe loud enough to wake the devil. I threw a leg over and fired it up. The engine’s growl drowned out the last of the house noise. Bikers rode their bikes like they rode their women—long and hard.

The street was empty, the kind of empty that told you even the criminals were keeping their heads down tonight.

I peeled out, burning rubber and taking the first corner hard enough to make the rear wheel skip.

I’d made the run from the clubhouse to the hospital so many times—usually to visit someone who’d just been stitched up, or to drop off a cash envelope for a nurse who looked the other way.

I didn’t think I’d ever done it with my own hands shaking.

The ride bled the edge off. But the second I hit the main drag, my brain started spitting out flashbacks like a busted projector.

Carly in white, wind whipping her veil at our wedding, both of us laughing like idiots because the justice of the peace couldn’t pronounce her last name.

Carly on the back of the bike, arms clamped around my chest, shouting to be heard over the engine, “Take it faster, you pussy.” I did, and we almost ate shit in a ditch, but she never let go.

Carly on her knees, hands hooked in my belt, that feral look in her eye before she dragged me down.

Carly the last time, walking out the front gate in a suit that cost more than my whole wardrobe. Not even glancing back.

I punched the throttle. Speedometer hit eighty, then ninety.

The cold wind bit at my skin. Cars parted ahead of me like a school of fish in the presence of a shark.

Every time the light turned red, I split lanes and gunned it through.

A pair of college kids in a Honda tried to match my pace.

I scared the shit out of them with a close pass and a show of my middle finger.

At ninety-five, the engine got a little loose, and the front end started to float. Most men would have let off. I kept it wide open, staring into the night like it was a living thing I planned to choke out. I was a biker on a mission and not a fucking thing stood in my way.

I had the hospital in sight in under ten minutes.

The place was a fortress: blue lights everywhere, news vans parked at the curb, and at least three patrol units staged at the emergency entrance.

For an instant, I wondered if maybe the shooting wasn’t political, just random—but nothing in my life had ever been random, especially not when it involved Carly.

I parked the bike on the sidewalk, ignoring the signs, and killed the engine.

The silence was instant, complete. My hands had stopped shaking, replaced by a tight ache in my chest. I took one long breath.

The inside of my nose burned with the scent of gasoline and leather.

I was still wearing my colors, and the Bloody Scythes logo might as well have been a bullseye.

Good. Let them try something. I lit a cigarette, crushed it out after one drag, and started for the entrance.

It hit me, walking up those steps—maybe for the first time since she left—how much I wanted to see her alive. Even if it meant she’d look at me with that old, familiar hate. Hell, maybe that was what I deserved.

I hit the ER doors at full tilt, stride long, head up.

The lobby was a war zone in its own right: harried nurses, the slow bleed of insurance forms, and a line of people moaning about their various flavors of self-inflicted misery.

Behind the reception desk, a kid in blue scrubs clocked me instantly.

His eyes darted to my chest, to the Bloody Scythes patch, then to the phone under his hand.

His fingers twitched, but he didn’t pick it up.

“Looking for Carly St. James,” I said, voice carrying enough for everyone in earshot to remember it later.

“Are you family?” the nurse asked, already regretting it.

I let the word hang. “Closest thing she’s got.”

He scrolled a screen, maybe stalling. Two security guards flanked the hallway, hands on their radios. I watched them out of the corner of my eye, but they didn’t make a move. Probably remembered the last time someone tried to throw out biker trash and ended up with a broken wrist for their trouble.

“She’s in 3C,” the nurse said. “But you need to check in—”

I was already moving. The elevator was slow, so I took the stairs, boots pounding up the concrete.

The walls were a washed-out white, covered in those motivational posters about teamwork and hope, like anyone here had either to spare.

I counted the floors and found her wing by instinct, not signage.

The door was open. I stopped on the threshold, letting my eyes adjust to the bright, artificial light.

She was smaller than I remembered—hospital beds do that to people.

Her arm was wrapped up, IV in the other, hair pulled back from her face in a way that made her look both ten years younger and older at the same time.

Her lips were pale, but her eyes were alive and sharp, zeroed in on me like she was reading the inside of my skull.

The room was clean and impersonal, the only personal item a cheap plastic vase of daisies.

I stood just inside, not crossing the line.

The air smelled of alcohol and disinfectant.

My own sweat and exhaust clung to me like a warning label.

She saw me and something flickered in her face—something that almost looked like relief before it rearranged itself into wariness. “Damron,” she said, her voice hoarse but steady.

I nodded once, hands jammed in my cut’s pockets. I wasn’t going to make this easy for her.

“Didn’t think you’d show,” she said.

I glanced at her bandaged arm, the dried blood on the gauze a sharp contrast against her skin. “Didn’t think you’d want an outlaw in your fancy political life,” I said, voice ice cold.

She winced. Not from the pain; I could see her flexing her hand under the blanket, testing for weakness. No, that one landed where it was supposed to.

“Thanks for coming,” she said anyway. “I know it’s… complicated.”

I shrugged, but the gesture didn’t reach my face. “I’m not here for small talk, Carly. I want to know who did this. You remember anything?”

She took a slow breath. “Just the flash, the noise. Saw a man with a baseball cap and a phone—thought he was a protestor. Then my shoulder went numb.”