Page 22 of Gonzo’s Grudge (Saint’s Outlaws MC: Dreadnought, NC #1)

“GJ?” Disciple asked. “You want me to get word in, or is that a you thing?”

“Peanut keeps him looped in and breathing because we got Grip on the inside now as his cellmate,” I stated. “I’ll talk to him tonight.”

Burn closed the laptop and leaned in. “You goin’ to her?”

“She told me she won’t be a pawn,” I muttered the words like gravel in my mouth. “If I show up on her porch after that, I prove the wrong man right.”

“You gonna let a mayor run you off a girl?” Loco asked, not mocking—astonished.

“I’m going to let the girl choose,” I shared, “And I’m going to take the mayor apart brick by stolen brick until she can see me without his smoke. Didn’t mean for feelings to get tangled in this shit, but I’m not gonna let her burn with the rest of them. She deserves better from me.”

Tower sat back, eyes narrowing like he was seeing if the plan fit. “That was the right sentence,” he stated finally. “I hate that it is, but it is.”

“Church adjourned,” I said, not commenting back to my VP who knew what a damaged man I truly was.

The gavel didn’t sound like Pop’s because my hand wasn’t his. It sounded like mine—heavier than I liked.

Avery Mitchell Corrections sits on the end of a road like a dare. Razor wire sketched against a big sky. I hate it. I went anyway.

In county, I could put cash in the right hands and get a minute in a back room if I needed to.

In prison you get phones that smell like bleach and a clock counting out your heartbeats.

I took a seat in a booth that has seen too many broken men and picked up a handset scratched to hell. The line clicked and went alive.

They brought my boy on the other side of glass with a guard who could have been nineteen if you scrubbed the mustache off him. GJ sat down. He looked older than the last time I saw him, which is a sentence I’m getting tired of telling myself.

“Dad,” he said, defeated more than before.

“Boy.” The word always came out rough. Not because it hurt. Because it meant too much.

“They moving me tomorrow,” he said, like he was telling me he’d switched classes. “Grip’s guys say it’s better. Less heat in the showers.”

“Good.” It wasn’t good. It was less bad. “You eating?”

“Yeah.” His eyes flicked to the corner of the room like he could feel something crawling there. “You hear from her?”

I had made sure my son was looped in before anyone else, like his mother, told him some half-cocked story about what I was doing. So he knew I had an entanglement with IvaLeigh Walsh. I swallowed. “She sent me a message.”

He watched my face the way men in cages learn to—like they’re picking locks with your eyebrows. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

I huffed a sound that wanted to be a laugh. “You get mouthier every year.”

“Comes with getting older,” he said. He leaned in, the handset cord stretching between his knuckles. “If she runs, let her. Don’t burn your hands yanking on a rope you can’t hold onto.”

“Who taught you that?” I asked.

“You did,” he shared, and smiled the wrong kind of proud. “You said never chase someone out of a building that’s already on fire unless they’re ready to come out. Don’t ever push a woman because when they push back the burn will always leave a scar.”

“I was talkin’ about sex and not forcing shit on a chick.”

“Same geometry,” he stated casually. “You do the math. I’ll do my time.”

“No,” I said, frustrated. “You’ll do my time while I figure out how to end it.”

He sat back. “You gonna kill a judge because I don’t see how this ends, Pops?”

“Don’t say that into that phone.”

He grinned then, a flash of the kid who used to put plastic soldiers in my boots and laugh when I cursed. It faded as fast as it came. “All jokes aside. You get him, Dad. But get him clean. I want out because we burned liars with truth, not because we added ash to the pile.”

“I hear you,” I agreed. It felt like another weight added but necessary.

The guard tapped the glass. Time.

“Keep breathing,” I reminded.

“You too,” he remarked, and they led him away like he was a danger because that’s easier than admitting he’s a man like everyone else.

I walked out under the towers and made myself feel the wire with my eyes. Men built this. Men break it. Both things are true, and the distance between the buildup and the breaking was always cost.

Back at the cabin, the world had moved half an inch without me.

The bed smelled like her hair because smells lingered like bastards. I didn’t lie in it. I sat on the floor with my back to the mattress and pulled out a pad of paper because sometimes the only way to make noise shut up is to write it down.

IvaLeigh,

You were never in my plan like this. That’s the problem and the miracle.

I had a line to walk: son first, club always, judge and mayor piece by piece.

Then you. You weren’t leverage. You were a hand on my chest that made the old wiring stop sparking long enough for me to see life smoothly for a change.

Somebody came to you. He told you a story about me that had just enough truth in it to feel right when it’s wrong. I won’t chase you. I won’t come knock until you open the door. But I won’t let him keep drawing this version of me for you either.

I’m not a good man. I told you that shit. I’m loyal. Sometimes that looks the same. Sometimes it doesn’t. With you, it does.

When you want me, call. If you don’t, I’ll keep my promises anyway—to my son, to my brothers, to the version of me you saw that night when the smoke dropped and I wasn’t pretending to be anything but yours.

— G

I stared at the page until the lines blurred and then folded it, slid it into an envelope, and wrote her name. I didn’t know if I’d mail it. Maybe it was just a way to move breath past a place it had been stuck.

My phone buzzed. Burn again.

“Talk.”

“Two things,” he stated. “One, we got the campus footage. It’s clean.

He went in alone. He left alone. No security.

No escort. Two, got the media looped in.

Somebody leaked in another county that funds went missing and contractors with no trucks got paid for roads and repairs on buildings that don’t exist.”

“Good,” I stated. “Keep them hungry to share a story but make sure it releases when we say so.”

“And three?—”

“You said two.”

“Consider this one a bonus,” Burn added. “Your ex’s key don’t work anymore. She apparently tried and came to the clubhouse to let you have it. I educated her on not stepping into a man’s place uninvited.”

“Thanks, I think. I’ll deal with her shit once I got GJ free. She’ll chill once she can hug her boy again.”

“You want me to talk to Cat? GJ is one of us. He’s gonna get that patch. She needs to come to terms with her place in your life and his.”

“No,” I stated. “She said what she wanted to say. Nothing you can say back changes any of it. She will calm down and go back to being quiet Cat again.”

“You gonna tell IvaLeigh Cat was right about old you?”

“I already did,” I shared.

“And new you?”

“Doesn’t exist,” I stated. “There’s just this me trying to do better.”

He was quiet long enough for me to hear him deciding not to say something he knew I’d hear wrong. “We got you,” he replied instead.

“I know.”

I hung up and stared at the letter with her name on it until the ink blurred again.

Night rides make me a person who felt alive.

I took my bike out on county roads that know me better than some men do.

The wind scraped thoughts out of my muddled head.

Trees pulled their shadows across the asphalt like curtains cloaking me in the safety of darkness.

Headlight turned deer eyes into coins and then out again.

At a crossroads I stopped and cut the engine and let the kind of quiet you only get in the middle of nowhere lay over me. Somewhere far, a dog barked. Closer, something small moved in leaves like it didn’t know men ruin everything they touch.

“I’m not going to ruin you,” I stated to the dark, and if that makes me a crazy old bastard talking to night like it’s a confessional, then put it on my list. I was already halfway to insanity anyway.

I got myself twisted and tied up in a woman more than half my age playing a game with her mind, body, and spirit that I never should have started.

I cranked the bike and headed toward her parents’ subdivision without letting myself decide not to.

I rode past their house slow knowing the code to get in.

Shanks sat two doors down in a Jeep that used to be neon green and now was black and set up stock just to remain anonymous.

He tipped two fingers off the wheel. I didn’t stop.

I wanted to. Men who want to do right sometimes do worse because of it. I kept going.

On the way back through town I rolled past city hall and looked at it like you look at a man who thinks his money can turn law into leash.

A late light burned in Stanley’s office.

He wasn’t there; his assistant was. The building had a new security company sign out front—a dog with its teeth out on a blue shield.

“Cute,” I told it, and kept rolling.

At the cabin, the lock turned clean. New bolt set with long screws.

The way you make a door less easy to kick.

I set the envelope on the table where I couldn’t miss it in the morning and shook two pills into my palm I don’t like admitting I take.

They’re not for pain. Not the kind you can mark on a chart.

They slow a heart that thinks it’s a hammer.

I slept two hours. Woke up to nothing. Slept one more. Woke to a text.

Not from her.

From Waverly:

Visitor logs in hand. Campus is rattled. They know they messed up. Got a loop in on a Fed for the funds situation.

Another ping came through.

From Burn:

Bank VP’s wife—Darlene—just bought a plane ticket to Miami. Leaving Friday.

Interesting. Before I could reply, another ping. Followed by another. Somehow my phone had become Grand Central Station.

From Lead:

Your boy moved yards. He’s good. Lifers got him. He eats first today notes from Grip.

From Shanks:

House quiet. Dad left early. Mom cried in the kitchen. Girl hasn’t come downstairs.

From a number I didn’t recognize:

Stop.

No name. No context. Just stop.

Stanley loves that kind of message: two letters pretending to be a sentence. I smiled where no one could see and typed nothing back. Silence is a weapon if you know how to hold it.

After coffee, I lifted the envelope again, weighed it, then set it down. Not yet. Not until I’ve put something under the words. A man with my sins doesn’t get to go in easy on anything.

So I put on my cut. Swung my leg over my bike and started the day the way I start wars when I mean to win them: patient.

Loud where it helps.

Quiet where it hurts.

Always calculated.

By noon we had a map on the vault table that would make a city clerk puke.

Names. Arrows. Dollar amounts. Copies of checks with signatures that look like men trying to keep their lies straight.

Waverly had a stack of denials from the county’s records office that read like admissions if you tilt your head the right way.

“Timeline,” I said.

Burn pointed. “Walsh starts seeing Darlene two years ago. Hampton Stanley gets wind a month later. He sets the hook—makes it look like favor, sits back, waits. When the time came to move Bishop out, Stanley backs Walsh’s appointment to district.

Walsh pays it back with rulings. Meanwhile, Hampton Stanley opens three shell corporations.

Money moves when floods hit, when pandemic grants land, when the state parks department sends improvement funds nobody expects to track.

He pays his proxies. They pay him. He pays cops and clerks and whoever else needs to be warm enough to stop shivering. ”

“Proof?” I asked.

“Enough to make Devyn drool,” Loco shared. “Not enough for a jury that wants to be lied to. Not yet. Nita is on it.”

I nodded, knowing what it took for Loco to call in a favor from his ex-girlfriend’s sister. “Then we keep going,” I said. “And we do it without IvaLeigh’s name anywhere near any of it.”

Waverly pinched the bridge of her nose and nodded. “Agreed.”

Shanks looked at me. “You gonna tell her dad what we have?”

“I told him enough,” I said, and tasted the burn of that night in his study when I put him on a wall and put a sentence on his life he’s going to hear again from different mouths. “He knows. He’ll act when he thinks he can save himself. That’s not the kind of help I need.”

Disciple leaned back. “So what do you need?”

“Proof that can’t be mopped up with money,” I said. “And time.”

Church ended and I exited the space to my room on the compound grounds. I looked down at my phone like I could will it to light.

It didn’t.

That evening I went back to the cabin and did the thing I least wanted to: nothing.

I cooked chicken because my hands needed to remain busy. I set a second plate because muscle memory is a bastard. I ate both because eating is a job.

When the sun was moving down for the night and closing out under the trees, I took the letter and a stamp and drove—not rode—to a post box three towns over.

I put it in because some words need help getting where they’re going, and because I needed to do one thing today that looked like faith instead of strategy.

On the way back the sky went first purple then black, and my head filled with a reel of little things: her hair on my pillow, the way she laughed at bad jokes, the weight of her hand on my chest when the world tried to climb between us.

“Don’t be stupid,” I told the windshield, but I didn’t know which of us I meant.

At home I sat on the steps and watched the night.

Somewhere in town, Hampton Stanley poured himself an expensive drink and told himself he owned the board.

Somewhere else, Judge Walsh looked at a photograph he pretends doesn’t exist and wondered how many nights a man can wake up before his sins crash around him.

And somewhere in a house with green shutters, a woman lay in a bed that used to be hers and thought about a man she told to stop playing her like a piece. And that man was full of regrets even if he would do it all over again to rattle the right cages to save GJ.

I lit a cigarette and let the smoke scratch the part of me that never learned how to cry without breaking furniture.

“GJ,” I said to the dark. “We’re going to do this the way you asked. Clean. But I’m also going to do it fast.”

My phone stayed dark.

I’d said once that I’d burn Dreadnought to the ground to get my son free. I hadn’t planned on finding something in the ashes worth rebuilding. Now I had both: a war to win and a house to keep standing.

So I did what I do.

I sat still long enough to call it patience.

Then I went back to work.