Page 9 of Gonzo’s Grudge (Saint’s Outlaws MC: Dreadnought, NC #1)

Gonzo

W hen they told me GJ was being transferred, it felt like somebody shoved a blade between my ribs and twisted. I knew it was bound to happen, but I thought we would have more time.

County was bad, but county was manageable. County was local. I had Shanks greasing deputies, Waverly pulling strings with the sheriff’s office, and brothers making sure GJ had eyes on him every damn second. In county, I could still feel close. I could still convince myself I had some control.

But prison?

Prison was a whole different hell.

And the bastards were rushing it.

The news came fast, slipped through Burn’s contacts before the papers even printed the notice.

“Tomorrow morning,” Burn said, sliding the folder across the table. “Six a.m. transfer. Avery Mitchell Detention.”

Avery Mitchell. The kind of place you don’t come back from the same.

I clenched my fists so hard my knuckles went white. “He’s just a kid.”

Burn didn’t flinch. “Kid or not, they’ll eat him alive if we don’t make sure he’s covered.”

“I’ll make sure,” I growled. “Whatever it takes.” We had a couple of brothers doing time there, but if he didn’t land in a unit with them, I wasn’t sure how this would go.

And not knowing was unacceptable to me.

That night I worked the phone, calling in every favor, digging deep into the club’s reach. Avery Mitchell was crawling with men who owed the Saints—some patched, some not, but all loyal enough to know what it meant when I said protect him like he’s your own.

“He didn’t kill Pop,” I told every contact, every voice on the other end. “You hear me? GJ had nothin’ to do with it. You spread that word. You put it in stone. Anyone says different, you shut them up.”

There was a pause, then a promise.

“We’ll keep him safe, Gonzo.”

Safe.

I wanted to believe it. But I’d lived long enough to know prison was never safe.

The morning came too fast.

I stood in the lot behind county jail, cut weighing heavy on my back, and watched helplessly as they loaded my boy onto the bus.

Shackled at the wrists, chained at the ankles, orange jumpsuit glowing like a target.

His eyes found mine through the wire-reinforced glass, and for a second, the kid in him showed—the same boy who once climbed onto my bike seat, helmet too big for his head, grinning like the road was his kingdom.

Now he looked like a caged animal being shipped to slaughter.

I raised my fist, slow and steady. He mirrored it, shackles clanking, and then he was gone. The bus engine roared, belching black smoke, and rolled out of the lot. I swung my leg over my bike and followed.

The ride was torture. Forty-eight miles of asphalt and exhaust, the bus lurching forward, me tailing it like a shadow.

I wanted to tear the doors open, drag my boy out, throw him on the back of my Harley-Davidson Street Glide and disappear into the wind.

But I couldn’t. Not without destroying every chance we had of proving his innocence.

So I followed just to keep my eyes close to him.

Mile after mile, the cage carried my son closer to Avery Mitchell’s gates. High fences topped with razor wire rose from the horizon, gray concrete walls swallowing the sky. The bus pulled in. Guards in towers watched with rifles slung casual, like vultures waiting.

I killed the engine and sat there, watching those gates close behind him.

And I’d never felt so damn powerless in my entire life.

The ride back was nothing but fury. My chest burned, my hands itched for violence, and the roar of my bike did nothing to quiet the storm in my skull.

By the time I hit town, I couldn’t go to the clubhouse. Couldn’t go home. I needed to breathe, to keep from shoving my fists through walls.

And that’s when I found myself at the college looking for her.

The campus was alive with people spilling out of classrooms, books clutched to their chests, laughter ringing through the air. They all looked so damn young. Carefree. Like the world hadn’t touched them yet.

And then I saw her.

IvaLeigh Walsh.

Her hair caught the sunlight, her steps tired but steady as she walked across the lot with her backpack slung over one shoulder. But what made my blood heat wasn’t her—it was him.

The young man who put his arm around her and I watched her jerk out of his grip. That little bastard shadowed her steps, his eyes fixed on her like he owned her. Like she was something he could toy with and discard. I read the fucker like a damn book.

IvaLeigh’s shoulders hunched, quickening her pace. He matched it.

My rage shifted, focused sharp as a blade.

Not today.

I slid off my bike, leaned against it like I had all the time in the world, and waited. My eyes tracked every move Collin made. The second he reached for her a second time, I pushed off and headed casually toward her.

She almost ran to me, her breath catching, and before she could ask, before she could explain, I grabbed her waist and pulled her flush against me.

“Follow my lead,” I whispered. And then I kissed her.

Not soft. Not careful. A kiss that burned, that took the air from both of us.

Not a claim. A shield. But the moment our mouths touched, something I hadn’t planned roared awake anyway.

Her lips parted under my touch, shock giving way to something deeper, something that left her trembling against me. My hand cradled the back of her head, my body shielding hers like I’d been doing it forever.

She tasted like mint and the last of a too-sweet coffee she’d probably nursed through class.

Her breath hitched and then found mine, soft at first, then deeper, answering.

She was shaking—adrenaline, fear, maybe both—and I steadied her by the small of the back, pulling her into the shelter of my chest so the whole damn quad could see there wouldn’t be a scene here.

Not the kind that ends with tears on concrete.

Heat traveled through her like a fuse. I felt the exact second she stopped bracing and started choosing.

Her free hand slid up the leather over my ribs and curled there, anchoring.

The world around us thinned—the static of voices, the click of a camera phone somewhere—all of it faded behind the drum of her heartbeat, the hum of mine, the far-off idle of car or truck with a knocking that told me it needed some extra oil.

I deepened the kiss by degrees, giving her room to breathe, to decide. She chose. Met me. Opened. There was nothing complicated about it; no pretty speeches, no bullshit. Just two people finding the exact middle of a storm and standing upright for once.

I let it break clean.

Pulled back an inch. Another. Kept my hand against her cheekbone, thumb tracing the damp line where tears would have been earlier if she’d let them fall. Her lips were swollen. She blinked up at me like she’d just stepped out of the dark into a room with the light on.

Over her shoulder, Collin had stalled mid-step.

Man had a whole future of bad choices mapped across his face and this one just got interrupted.

Jaw clamped. Phone half-raised, like he’d thought about recording the approach for leverage until reality slapped it out of his hand.

I stared straight through him until he flinched, until the part of him that still understood sheer male dominance and remembered his place.

He dropped his gaze first. Good. Then he drifted to the edge of the moving crowd and kept going, pretending he’d meant to walk that direction all along.

IvaLeigh’s focus came back to me piece by piece. Breath shivered against my throat, then steadied. She realized where my hands were—one at her waist, one cradling her jaw—and didn’t move away. Not yet.

“You were reading him,” she said. Voice hushed. Sure.

“Yeah.” My thumb stroked once more along her cheek before I forced my hand to fall. “He was going to play nice until you were within arm’s reach. Then he was going to get brave. Which would have been stupid, but he didn’t know I was here.”

Her mouth parted. A tremor lifted, then set in her chest like a sigh she hadn’t given herself permission to let out until now.

She glanced over my shoulder and caught the last of Collin ghosting by.

She saw it. Understood. The knowledge tightened something new in her eyes—gratitude, but not the kind that makes people small.

The kind that makes them stand taller because someone else stood up first.

“Gonzo,” she whispered, like my name was the first steady step on solid ground.

I leaned close enough that only she could hear me. “If I overstepped, tell me now. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. Not that kind of man.”

Her fingers were still hooked in my cut. They tightened. “You didn’t.”

“Good.” I let the word sit there, plain while leaving the future unwritten between us.

The people kept moving around us. Two girls side-eyed us with smiles they pretended were genuine. A professor pushed his glasses higher on his nose and pretended not to see anything at all. Wind lifted a corner of a flyer taped to a lamppost and snapped it back.

“You eat yet?” I asked, because a man who means to protect ought to start with simple things. Food. Shelter. Sleep.

She shook her head once, quick. The movement tugged a strand of hair from her clip and it stuck to her lip. Without thinking, I smoothed it away with my knuckles. She went still, not spooked, just aware.

I gave her an out, the best one I had. “Ride with me. Dinner. If you want.” I hooked my chin toward my bike. “No strings. Just air and food that’ll give you fuel for the evening and I’ll take you to get your car.”

Something softened in her shoulders. The fight-or-flight bled out slow. She looked at the bike like it was a door she could open and then looked back at me, weighing the danger of a man like me against the certainty of a boy like him.

“Okay,” she said. No hesitation this time.

I took her backpack without asking to be helpful and slung it across my own shoulder. It looked ridiculous on me and that made her smile, quick and unguarded, like I’d flashed a trick card at a rigged table.

I’d take a hundred miles of bad road for that smile.

When we reached the bike, I did the little things that matter. Checked the second helmet. Adjusted the foot pegs. Palmed the seat to make sure the sun hadn’t turned it into a skillet. She watched my hands like they were an instruction manual for something important no one had ever taught her.

“Same as before,” I told her, voice low enough to be private. “Swing your leg over. Keep your knees in tight. Hold on to me when we start moving. If you need me to stop, tap twice on my side.”

She nodded, already moving. When she settled in behind me, her thighs bracketed my hips and it was all heat and faith. Her arms wrapped my ribs and I felt the way her cheek found the line of my back, the way she fit there hit something deep inside me.

The moment the engine came to life, she flinched a little at the first rumble and then pressed closer, letting the machine tell her what I already knew— motion was medicine for the soul .

I eased us off the curb smooth. No showing off. No hard lean to prove a point. Just clean throttle, the kind that says trust me and means it. In the mirror, Collin was a small blur shrinking to nothing. In front of us, the road opened wide and promised the freedom of distance.

We didn’t talk for the first few blocks through the campus.

We didn’t need to. Her breathing synced with the rise and fall of my shoulders.

Somewhere by the athletic fields, she let out a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh but had one inside it, the way thunder sometimes hides behind hills before it rolls.

When we hit the long stretch that leads to the highway, she shifted closer, not scared, but there. Present. Choosing.

By the time I pulled us into the diner lot, the color had come back to her face and the tight wire across her mouth had slackened. I killed the engine and the sudden quiet felt like a blessing.

She slid off and wobbled once on unfamiliar legs. My hand was already there. She took it without looking and squeezed, not thanks, not apology—something older, simpler. Acknowledgment.

“You sure you’re okay?” I asked.

“I am now,” she said, and the way she said it put another crack in something armored inside my chest. I’d been patching cracks with anger all morning—jailhouse buses, razor wire, a son disappearing behind gates—but this one didn’t hurt. It let air in.

I jerked my chin toward the door. “C’mon. Let’s feed you.”

We walked in together. I kept my palm at the small of her back—not a claim, a safety net—felt the way her stride changed under it.

In the reflection of the window, I caught a last glimpse of the campus fucker tossing trash into the parking lot can and slinking off.

I let it go. Let him watch, let him follow.

I had bigger targets ahead. Judges who smirked while sons were caged.

Mayors who paid to make truth bleed out in lies.

But right here, right now, I had one job.

Be her steady.

I’d do it in leather and road dust and silence, if that’s what it took. She was still a means to an end.

I should’ve walked away. Should’ve left her to her college world. But something about the way she looked at me—like I was the only solid thing left in her storm—kept me rooted.

Dinner was at a hole-in-the-wall diner off the highway, the kind of place with cracked vinyl booths and coffee that could strip paint. She didn’t care. She smiled, soft and tired, sipping her milkshake like it was the best thing in the world.

And then she told me. “Darla and Collin… they’re together,” she said, voice tight. “She’s my roommate. And he’s… he’s him. It’s awkward. More than awkward. I can’t even breathe in that room.”

I clenched my jaw so hard it hurt. “He’s a piece of shit.”

She laughed, shaky but real. “Yeah. That’s one way to put it.”

I reached across the table, covered her hand with mine. “You don’t deserve that. You deserve better.”

Her eyes shimmered, but she didn’t cry. Not this time. She didn’t ask when I offered her another night at the cabin. She just came. I offered to take her to her car, but she said it could wait until tomorrow, she had homework and a big test to study for.

The bed was hers again. I took the couch, same as before. Nothing happened. No lines crossed. Just silence and safety.

But when I heard her breathing steady in the dark, I knew one thing for certain.

She was becoming the light in a world that was trying to swallow me whole.

And I’d burn every bridge, break every law, to keep her safe. That made her dangerous.

To me. She just didn’t know it.