Page 5 of Damron (Bloody Scythes MC #1)

Chapter four

The End

H e came up through blackness, not like waking from a dream but more like drowning—sudden, violent, his lungs snapping open before the rest of him figured out he was alive.

The hospital ceiling was yellowed with age, a light panel flickering overhead.

Damron’s first instinct was to swing at the source of the pain, except his arms barely moved, and everything below the rib cage felt like it’d been torched with a cattle prod.

“Boss is up,” someone said, a voice he recognized as Augustine’s, a man who’d once killed a pit boss with his bare hands in a fight over a poker debt.

“Don’t fuckin’ crowd him.” Another voice, lower, full of iron: Nitro. Always Nitro.

Damron turned his head, which cost him a full-body flinch, and saw the shapes gathered in the room. Three men in leather, denim, and various stages of bloodstain. The sight of it made him want to laugh, but even the thought of laughter threatened to dislodge something vital in his chest.

Nitro stepped forward, arms crossed, tattooed veins bulging against the biceps. “Welcome back to hell, Prez,” he said.

Damron licked his lips. His mouth tasted like copper and old bandages. He tried to prop himself on one elbow. The room tilted; a monitor bleeped in protest. Nitro’s hand was on his shoulder, pressing him down with gentle violence.

“Doc says you need rest,” Nitro said.

“Doc can eat my dick.” Damron spat a clot of dried blood into the sheets. He forced his eyes to focus on the others. “You want to tell me what the fuck happened?” Damron said.

Nitro nodded at Junior, who started talking fast, tripping over the words. “Came outta nowhere, boss. Dire Straits. They—they rammed the bikes at the Four Corners light. Augustine got clipped, I tried to pull you back, but there was, uh… a lotta guys. I think I shot at least—”

“Three dead,” Augustine said, his voice flat. “Two in critical. Dire Straits boys. One’s at County, the other’s still in surgery. We lost none. Couple got nicks.” He gestured at his own arm, wrapped in what looked like a bar towel from the clubhouse.

Nitro’s gaze didn’t leave Damron. “You took a knife under the ribs. Lost a lotta blood, but you’re patched. They had to do something with your kidney. You got less of it now.”

Damron snorted, a dry, ugly sound. “I was using it too much anyway.”

He tried to sit up again and made it halfway before the pain slammed him back down. This time he swore and didn’t stop until the pain became background noise, just another channel in the radio static of his existence.

“Where’s my phone?” he said.

The phone had seven percent battery and a spiderweb crack through the corner. He punched in his code and scrolled to the messages, thumb stiff and dumb. No missed calls from Carly. Not a text. His stomach did a slow turn, bile coating his throat.

He glanced up. The brothers were watching him, all three, like he might detonate.

“Where’s Carly?” he said. He tried to keep it level, but there was a tremor in it. “She know I’m here?”

A silence, as palpable as a knife edge.

Junior broke first. “Uh, she hasn’t been by, boss. Not since the—uh—incident.”

Nitro shot him a look. “She’s safe. We got a guy tailing her.”

“Who?”

Nitro shrugged. “One of the prospects. Lug, I think. He’s got a Honda, blends in. Your old lady’s a moving target.” He was too casual.

“Bullshit,” Damron said. “If you were tailing her, she’d be here.” He tried to swing his legs off the bed, but all he accomplished was dragging the IV pole three inches and almost pitching himself onto the tile. Augustine caught him under one arm, propping him upright with a grunt.

“You want me to walk you to the can?” Augustine asked, deadpan. “Or just aim the piss jug for you?”

Damron gripped the edge of the bed until his knuckles went white.

His body felt like it was made of pulped meat, stitched together with wire.

Still, the pain was less of an adversary than the uncertainty.

He looked at the phone again. He fired off a text: “U alive?” and sent it to Carly.

The status stayed “delivered” for a long, stuttering minute. Nothing came back.

“She leave me?” Damron asked. He tried for humor.

This time even Nitro didn’t answer right away. “Prez, you got your hands full,” he said finally. “If she’s not here, she’s got her reasons.”

“Yeah, like not wanting to mop up the blood,” Damron said.

A long silence. The fluorescent light stuttered in the ceiling, making everything look jaundiced and cheap.

Damron remembered the fight in pieces: headlights blinding him, then the crunch of metal and fiberglass.

Someone screaming—a high, tearing sound, not even human.

The feel of cold steel slicing into his side, the wet heat, the moment he realized he couldn’t breathe.

And then Carly, always Carly, somewhere far away and unreachable, like the sun behind storm glass.

He glanced at Junior, then Augustine, then Nitro, all of them lined up like a firing squad.

“If she left,” Damron said, “I want to hear it from her.”

Nitro nodded, but there was defeat in it. “You will,” he said. “But right now, you got club business.”

“I’ll be ready,” Damron said, though even he didn’t believe it. He fell back into the pillows, vision swimming. The pain was almost a comfort.

###

Carly packed her life in silence, room by room, drawer by drawer.

The house was a tomb, all the noise and blood drained from it, but she couldn’t leave anything to chance.

Every step had to be precise, or she’d lose her nerve.

She started with the closet. Each movement should have been clean, but her fingers kept shaking. She gritted her teeth and kept going.

The suitcase was cheap, the kind they give you for opening a new credit card.

She filled it half with clothes, half with paperwork—legal pads, folders, bills, a zippered pouch of flash drives.

She didn’t bother with the hangers. When she finished, the closet looked like a crime scene: his leather jackets and club cuts slouched together, everything else missing.

She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the battered nightstand.

Damron’s side had a ring of dust the size of a whiskey bottle, a collapsed paperback with an American flag bookmark, and a scattering of loose change.

Her side was all charger cables and half-used chapstick.

She let her eyes move over it, slow, taking inventory.

Nothing here worth saving, really. She found her purse by the bathroom door, slung it over her shoulder, and zipped the suitcase shut.

The sound echoed in the house like a gunshot.

She waited for something to happen—yelling, footsteps, a door slamming.

But the only noise was the hum of the fridge and the whir of cicadas outside.

She padded into the bathroom, the tile cold beneath her bare feet.

The counter was a still life: his safety razor flecked with dried blood, her toothbrush worn down to nubs, the cap from his aftershave thrown beside her expensive moisturizer.

The contrast was obscene, but familiar. She wiped the counter with a towel, leaving everything a little too clean.

Back in the bedroom, she paused at the dresser.

Their wedding photo waited there, trapped in a five-dollar frame.

The shot was all sun and wind—her hair loose, his hands in her pockets, two idiots grinning at nothing.

She stared at his face, the way his eyes narrowed when he laughed, the scar that made him look dangerous even when he smiled.

She touched the glass, then flipped the frame down. It landed with a flat, resigned smack.

The ring was harder. She’d stopped wearing it around the club, but here, in the house, it was always on.

She twisted it back and forth, letting the metal bite the skin.

There was a tan line, paler than the rest of her hand, a perfect white circle that would probably never fade.

She pulled the ring off, slow, and set it on the nightstand beside Damron’s keys and wallet.

For a second she thought about taking it with her, but that would have been a lie.

She left it there, like a crime scene marker.

Carly grabbed a yellow sticky note from the kitchen counter, wrote “I can’t do this anymore.

Not after last night. I’m sorry,” and stuck it under the bottle of Advil by his side of the bed.

She almost added more, but there wasn’t anything else to say.

She was tired of explaining herself to people who didn’t want to listen.

She walked through the house one last time.

The living room was a patchwork of their life: her law books wedged next to his motorcycle magazines on the shelves, a coffee table stained with both tequila and highlighter, the couch where they’d made up after every single fight.

She smelled his cologne in the cushions, her perfume in the curtains, and for a second she almost sat down and waited for him to come back, let him yell, let him break something, let him convince her to stay. But she kept moving.

At the door, she hesitated. She realized she’d never know which ones to pack and which to leave behind.

All of it felt borrowed, rented, doomed to be repossessed.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She knew it was the hospital, an automated update, maybe a nurse.

She silenced it without looking. The last thing she needed was another excuse to turn around.

Carly gripped the handle of the suitcase, stepped outside, and let the screen door snap shut behind her.

For the first time in years, she didn’t lock it.

###

They let him out at noon. The nurse was younger than some of his tattoos, and she had a way of talking that made every instruction sound like a threat.