Page 12 of Heresy (The Lost Gospels #1)

EIGHT

THE RHYTHM OF THE CAGE

HEX

T he clubhouse breathes in darkness, but it is not at peace. It’s the tense, watchful quiet of a beast feigning sleep. The air, usually thick with stale beer and smoke, is electric tonight, charged with the ozone of an approaching storm.

I’m at the head of the church table, the wood still warm from the dozen bodies that surrounded it an hour ago.

The emergency meeting was short, brutal, and ended with no good answers.

Across from me, Rook stares at a cracked cell phone on the table, its screen displaying our newest problem: a photo.

It shows one of our gun crates, the Serpent Cycle Works logo clearly visible, sitting in the back of a Sin Santos pickup truck.

The photo was sent from a burner, the message a simple declaration of war: Your move.

"They're not just hitting our supply lines anymore," Rook says, his voice a low growl. "They're parading our business in the open. They're trying to force our hand, make us come out into the street."

"The Santos aren't this smart," I counter, rubbing the back of my neck where a headache is starting to form. "Someone with a bigger brain is feeding them this strategy. Someone's pointing them at our weak spots."

"Cain," Rook says, the name dropping into the silence like a stone.

The ghost I've been chasing for years. A rival I thought I'd buried. My gaze drifts to the name carved into the back of my chair. ABEL. The two names are forever linked, a curse I can't escape.

"We need to retaliate," Zero says, his voice coming from the shadows where he stands by the door. "A show of force. Hit their leadership. Hard."

"And walk right into their trap?" Rook shoots back. "They want us to start a war in the open. That's when the Feds come knocking. This is a chess game, not a bar fight."

I hold up a hand, silencing them both. The weight of the crown presses down. On one side, a ghost from my past is orchestrating a war. On the other...

On the other, a ghost in a cage is waging a war inside my head.

"Handle it," I say to Rook, my voice flat, tired. "Shut down the route. Find the leak. I need to think."

It’s a dismissal. Rook and Zero share a look—a flicker of concern I choose to ignore—before they nod and retreat, leaving me to the silence.

I stand and walk out of the church room, the weight of a two-front war on my shoulders: one for the soul of my club, the other for the tattered remains of my own.

The clubhouse breathes in darkness—a beast collapsed into exhausted slumber.

Empty beer bottles stand like amber sentinels on scarred tables, ashtrays overflow, and the air hangs thick with testosterone and the metallic tang of unspoken threats.

The only light emanates from my personal altar: the cold, blue-white glow of security monitors painting my face in shades of digital purgatory.

A half-empty glass of Macallan sweats beside my hand.

This has become my ritual. My addiction.

For five nights running, after the last brother has stumbled off to his room, I migrate here. To Glitch's sanctuary. To the nerve center where digital eyes never blink. I sit in his chair, and I watch her.

The feed from her cell flickers on Monitor Three. At first, this was an operational necessity, a security protocol. Now, it is something else entirely. A compulsion that operates below command. An obsession that feeds on itself.

I watch the montage of her resistance. The pacing—three steps one way, pivot, three steps back, a caged wolf learning the exact dimensions of her trap.

The brutal regimen of self-punishment—push-ups until her body trembles, a testament to a will that refuses to surrender.

The stillness—sitting motionless on the thin mattress for hours, staring at a wall as if she can see right through it, right through me.

She should be broken by now. They all break. The silence is a surgical instrument, designed to hollow out a soul from the inside. It always produces the same results: tears, screams, bloody knuckles on steel.

This one endures. She builds a new cage inside the one I provided, a fortress made of discipline and will that I can feel even through the low-res screen.

And that resistance is driving me slowly, methodically insane.

A low growl rumbles in my chest. I hate her resilience with a passion that borders on religious fervor, a constant, silent challenge to everything I know about breaking human spirits.

I watch her now, in the space between day five and six, as she finally sleeps. Curled on her side, she appears smaller, almost fragile. A dangerous lie. Even unconscious, her spine is tense, her muscles refusing to fully relax. Sleep provides no surrender.

I take a long drink of whiskey, but the fire does nothing to touch the ice around my heart.

The splinter she has become lodges deeper with each passing hour, an infection in a system designed for sterile control.

I find myself returning here night after night, drawn by a gravitational pull I can't resist, watching her sleep like a lovesick teenager instead of the president of an empire.

What the fuck is happening to me?

The question hangs in the recycled air, a digital glow reflecting off my glass like a prayer to a god of demolition. On the screen, she stirs, a small movement in the concrete tomb. I lean forward, a moth drawn to a flame I know will incinerate me.

Because I need to know what makes her different. I need to understand what forges that kind of unbreakable will. I need to discover if she dreams of escape or revenge.

Or if she dreams of me.

The thought emerges unbidden, a poison from a part of my soul I've spent years trying to kill. It transforms this surveillance into something intimate. Something dangerous.

This isn't security anymore. This is a fascination. This is an obsession. The question isn't how to break her.

It's how to stop this from breaking me.

The days are a different kind of hell. While the club is awake and moving, I am the President.

I handle business. I make calls. I project an aura of cold, unshakable control.

But she is always there, a persistent ghost at the edge of my thoughts, a black-and-white image of a woman pacing a cage superimposed over everything I see.

The heavy oak door of the church room swings shut behind me, the sound of the main clubhouse vanishing as if it were in another world.

A deadbolt slides home with a heavy, metallic THUD , sealing us in our sanctuary.

The only light comes from a single fixture hanging low over the massive oak table, illuminating the scars and names carved into its surface over decades—a historical record written in wood and blades.

The air is thick with the ghosts of stale smoke and secrets that have been soaked into the very timber of the room.

We take our seats, the table already a scarred battlefield of beer bottles and ashtrays.

Rook lays out a series of surveillance photos, their glossy surfaces a stark contrast to the ancient wood. They’re grainy, taken from a distance, but the images is clear enough.

"This is from last night," Rook says, his voice a low growl. "Our source inside the Santos' crew finally paid off. He got a picture of the man who's been giving them their new strategy, the one telling them where to hit us."

My eyes, still clouded with thoughts of Vera and Abel, drift to the photos.

They're grainy, taken from a distance. A man in shadow.

But the set of his shoulders, the arrogant tilt of his head…

It's a ghost I know. A cold dread begins to crawl up my spine, a familiar sickness churning in my gut. It can't be.

Rook taps the central photo, his voice a low growl for the whole table to hear. "Our source inside the Santos' crew got a picture of the man who's been giving them their new strategy. He calls himself their new 'consultant.'"

Rook looks up from the photo. His gaze sweeps over the brothers before it lands and holds on me. He sees the recognition on my face. He sees that I already know. His expression hardens, a silent acknowledgment of the history we share.

He lowers his voice slightly, the next words meant more for me than for the room.

"It's him, Hex. It's Cain."

The name lands in the room like a grenade, sucking all the air out.

My eyes are fixed on the head of the table, on the name carved deep into the oak.

ABEL. The two names are forever linked, my greatest failure and my greatest sin.

And now, a new, dangerous thought begins to form, linking all of them: the ghost from my past, the enemy at our gates, and the ghost in the cage upstairs.

Abel trusted me, and Cain forced my hand until I put my brother in a grave. This woman, Vera, looks at me with that same defiant fire, and I’ve put her in a cage while Cain is maneuvering outside my walls.

It’s the same pattern. The same curse. Cain creates chaos, and I am forced to sacrifice a piece of my soul to contain it.

"...he's making his move. What's the call, Hex?"

Rook’s voice cuts through the fog. I look up. The entire table is silent, watching me. I realize I missed half the report. I, the man who misses nothing, was lost at the exact moment I couldn't afford to be.

I see the sharp, worried look in Rook's eyes. I push down the flash of anger—at him for seeing my weakness, at Cain for returning, at myself for being compromised. I slam my fist on the table, the bottles jumping.

"Find him," I snarl, my voice a weapon. "I want eyes on every move Cain makes. I want to know what he eats, where he sleeps, and who he's talking to. This isn't a turf war anymore."

I force my mind back to the war. But it's too late. The ghost from my past is no longer a memory. He’s an active threat, and he's brought my other ghosts to the table with him.

Night falls over Red Hook, painting the grimy brick buildings in shades of bruised purple and black.

Downstairs, the familiar rumble of the clubhouse begins to fade.

The clatter of glasses, the shouts of laughter, the heavy beat of the jukebox—all slowly die away as the brothers drift off to their own restless sleep.

But sleep will not come for me.

I’m in my apartment above the clubhouse, the silence amplifying the frantic thoughts that claw at the inside of my skull. The whiskey sits half-finished on the nightstand, offering no solace. The ghosts are too loud tonight.

I lie in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling, the familiar weight of Abel’s betrayal pressing down on me. The rain. I can almost smell the wet asphalt, the metallic tang of blood. I hear his choked gasp.

Finally, exhaustion drags me under, but the nightmares are waiting. It’s always the same. The alley behind O’Malley’s. The glint of the knife. The rain washes the blood into the grimy street. Abel’s face, a mask of disbelief and pain.

But tonight, the dream twists.

When I look down at Abel, his lifeblood staining the concrete, his eyes still accusing, his face…

it shifts. The familiar features melt away, replaced by the pale, sharp angles of Vera’s face.

Her dark eyes stare up at me, not with Abel's betrayal, but with that same infuriating defiance I saw in the alley, the fire that refuses to be extinguished. The two images collide, Abel’s dying breath mingling with the silent scream in Vera’s unwavering gaze. Two ghosts. One torment. My fault.

I jolt awake with a guttural roar that tears itself from my throat, my body slick with cold sweat, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. The room is dark, the silence pressing in, but it is not empty. The ghosts are here, swirling around me, suffocating me.

Control. It’s the only thing that keeps the beast leashed. And tonight, it’s gone, shattered by a dream.

I jolt awake with a guttural roar, my body slick with cold sweat, my heart hammering against my ribs. The room is dark, but it is not empty. The ghosts are here, swirling, suffocating me. Control is the only thing that keeps the beast leashed, and tonight, it’s gone.

The dream fused them. Abel's dying betrayal now wears her defiant face.

I throw the sweat-soaked blankets off my body and stand.

The four walls of my room are a cage, and the ghost in my head has two faces.

The grainy image on the monitor isn't enough anymore.

I need to replace the phantom that's clawing at my sanity with the real thing.

I need to see the living woman to exorcise the dead man.

I don’t bother with a shirt or boots. I am acting, not thinking, driven by a storm of self-hatred and a desperate need to pry the two ghosts apart. I stalk from my apartment, my bare feet silent on the cold floor, a dead man’s march toward the last door at the end of the hall.

This is a mistake. Rook would call it a liability. Abel would call it a sin. I call it necessary.

I reach her door, the cold steel like a sheet of ice under my palm. I press my ear against it, listening. I expect silence. Maybe the soft sound of a woman crying.

Instead, I hear the soft, steady whisper of footsteps. Pacing.

Even now, in the dead of night, she is awake.

She is enduring. The sound of her unbroken will is a final provocation against my shattered nerves.

Good. I don't want a weeping victim. I need the defiant woman from the alley.

I need her to look at me with those eyes, to prove she is real and Abel's ghost is not.

I need to see her fire to burn the phantom out of my own head.

I reach into the pocket of my jeans and pull out the key. It is heavy and old-fashioned, the key to a tomb. It feels cold and final in my hand.

I slide the key into the lock, the sound of the metal scraping in the mechanism unnaturally loud in the sleeping house.

I turn it.

The bolt throws back with a loud, decisive THUD.