Page 32 of Heresy (The Lost Gospels #1)

TWENTY-FOUR

THE BUTCHER'S BILL

HEX

T he armored van screams through the pre-dawn gray of the city, a ghost of a war machine leaving the battlefield behind.

I'm driving, my knuckles white on the steering wheel, my body a single, coiled knot of bone-deep exhaustion and cold, heavy dread.

The adrenaline is gone, burned away, leaving only the ash of failure in its wake.

In the rearview mirror, I can see the chaos in the back. The floor is slick with Rook's blood. Doc is a whirlwind of focused energy, barking out orders, his hands a blur as he works to keep my brother alive. And beside him, moving with a calm, efficient grace that defies all logic, is Vera.

I watch her, not with the familiar fire of obsession, but with a kind of stunned, clinical detachment.

Her face is pale and streaked with grime, but her eyes are sharp, her hands steady as she applies pressure to a fresh dressing, her voice a low, steady murmur as she responds to Doc's commands.

She doesn't flinch. She doesn't hesitate.

She is an impossible variable that has become the lynchpin in the equation of our survival.

We finally pull into the quiet, tree-lined street of a sleeping suburb.

The houses are identical boxes of beige stucco, a picture of civilian anonymity.

I kill the engine in the attached garage of one of the houses, and the sudden silence is deafening.

This is one of our deepest safe houses, a place reserved for the most dire emergencies, a ghost on a street of ghosts.

We move with a grim, practiced efficiency.

The garage door slides shut, sealing us in.

A hidden door in the back of the garage opens onto a set of steep concrete stairs leading down into a fully equipped, sterile white medical facility.

It’s a stark, brilliant white world of beeping machines and stainless steel, a clean room for dirty problems.

We get Rook onto the operating table. Doc immediately begins hooking him up to monitors, the steady, fragile beep of the machine the only sound in the room.

I watch Vera as she helps, tearing open sterile packets, her movements fluid and sure.

She is no longer a prisoner. She is not a liability.

She is a member of the surgical team, and no one, not even Zero, questions her presence here.

She has become essential. And I have no idea what the fuck to do with that.

Rook is stable. That is the only victory of the night. After three hours of watching Doc work his grim magic in the sterile basement, I leave my brother's side. My duty is not just to the living; it is to the dead, and to the ashes of my kingdom.

I ride back to the clubhouse alone, the rising sun a sickly yellow against the smoke still clinging to the Brooklyn sky.

From a block away, I see the devastation.

It's not a home anymore. It's a corpse. The front gates are twisted, blackened metal.

The facade is a pockmarked ruin, the proud Serpent Cycle Works sign shot to ribbons.

Zero is waiting for me at the broken entrance, his face a mask of stone carved from exhaustion and fury. He doesn't say a word, just gives a single, grim nod. We walk through the ruins together.

Every step is a hammer blow to my soul. The main room is a slaughterhouse.

The floor is a sticky, black mess of dried blood and shattered glass.

The beautiful, hand-carved bar is splintered firewood.

My brothers' bikes, their pride and joy, are twisted, burnt-out skeletons.

I see ghosts everywhere—Talon laughing by the pool table, Preacher polishing the chrome on his ride.

Now they are just memories in a tomb I built for them.

We walk in silence, Zero letting the devastation deliver its own report. Finally, we stand in the center of the workshop, the heart of our legitimate business, now a wreckage of shattered lifts and ruined machinery.

"The butcher's bill," I say, my voice a dead thing in the quiet ruin.

Zero begins his report, his voice flat, emotionless, each word a perfectly calibrated hammer blow.

"We lost four patched members. Preacher.

Talon. Anvil and his prospect. Three others are with Doc, their conditions critical.

We lost seven bikes. The workshop is a total loss; they torched the lifts and the diagnostic machines.

The armory was breached. They took everything. "

He pauses, letting the weight of the losses settle. "The cost is catastrophic. We've been set back a decade. Cain didn't just hit us, Hex. He crippled us."

I stare at the wreckage, at the bloodstains on the floor, at the ghosts of my fallen men.

This was my watch. I was outmaneuvered by Cain.

I was blinded by a traitor I should have seen.

I was distracted by a woman in a cage. The full weight of my failure as President crashes down on me, heavier than any crown.

This crown isn't made of gold. It's forged from the lead of my own mistakes, and it is crushing me.

The church room is the one place the fire didn't fully reach, but it's not untouched.

The air is thick with the chemical smell of fire extinguishers and something else—the coppery scent of old blood.

A stray burst of gunfire has shattered the single light fixture, so we meet in the semi-darkness, the only illumination the harsh glare of a single battery-powered work light set in the middle of the table.

My surviving patched members gather, their faces grim and haunted in the stark light. They are not the proud, arrogant predators of a week ago. They are the exhausted, broken survivors of a slaughter. The mood is somber, angry, and fragile.

I stand at the head of the scarred oak table. "We were betrayed," I begin, my voice a low, hard thing that cuts through the silence. "Cain didn't find a leak. He had one. A brother at this table sold us out."

A low, angry murmur ripples through the room.

"The civilian," I continue, my voice flat, "the one I have in containment.

Her eyes are sharper than ours. She saw an exchange.

Grizz and a prospect, conspiring in the open because they thought no one was looking at them.

She brought the information to me in the middle of the firefight. It was a truth I was too blind to see."

I let the weight of my own failure hang in the air for a moment before I continue. "I delivered the club's justice to Grizz myself. His name is now to be stricken from our history. He is anathema. Any man who speaks his name again will be punished. He is a ghost we will not acknowledge."

The men give a single, grim nod. The first piece of business is done.

"Which brings us to the prospects," I say, and the tension in the room thickens.

Zero speaks from his place at my right hand, his voice cold and absolute.

"The system is compromised. The boy Static was a message.

The prospect who worked with Grizz was a tool.

We don't know how deep the rot goes. We cut them all loose.

Now. A clean break. We can't afford another traitor hiding in plain sight. "

A few of the older members shift, their faces tight with disagreement. "They're just kids," one of them, an old road captain named Skinner, grunts. "Scared. Eager to please. That's not the same as being a traitor. We cut them all loose, we're throwing away good men for the sin of one."

They are arguing for loyalty, for the brotherhood we are supposed to represent. It's the argument Abel would have made. It's an argument that, in a time of peace, I might have listened to.

But this is not a time of peace.

"Zero is right," I say, my voice a final, absolute decree that silences all debate. "We can't afford the risk. The rot is in the foundations, and we have to burn it out before it brings the whole house down."

I look at each man, my gaze a heavy weight.

"The current prospect class is to be disbanded.

Effective immediately. Give them each five hundred dollars for their trouble, point them toward the bus station, and tell them to forget they ever knew our name.

We will rebuild. We will recruit. But we will do it after this war is won. "

It's a painful, necessary amputation to save the body of the club. Another hard choice. Another piece of my soul traded for the survival of my kingdom. And in the grim, silent nods of my brothers, I see the cost of my crown reflected back at me.

The church meeting is over. The brothers file out in silence, leaving me alone in the wreckage of our most sacred space.

The weight of the decrees I just made, of the men I have lost, of the war that is still coming, settles on my shoulders until I feel like I can't breathe.

I am at my lowest point, a king of ash and bone.

I can't stay here. The ghosts are too loud.

I walk out of the clubhouse, get on my bike, and just ride.

I don't have a destination. I am a man seeking something he can't name, a moment of quiet in the storm of my own making.

The ride is a blur of city lights and empty streets.

Eventually, I find myself pulling onto a quiet, tree-lined street in the suburbs, the houses all identical boxes of civilian slumber.

I kill the engine in front of the safe house. I am deliberately seeking her out.

I enter the house. It's quiet, the only sound the low, rhythmic beep of the heart monitor in the basement medical bay where Rook is sleeping.

I find her in the small, sterile kitchen, methodically cleaning a tray of Doc's medical instruments.

She looks up as I enter, her body instantly tensing, her eyes wary.

I am a wreck. Covered in the grime of my ruined clubhouse, my knuckles split and bleeding, the full weight of the day etched on my face.

I don't speak. I just walk over to the sink, turn on the water, and hold my battered, bloody hand under the stream, wincing as the cold bites into the raw flesh. It’s a silent, broken request. An admission of a pain I can't fix on my own.

She watches me for a long, silent moment. I see the conflict in her eyes, the warring instincts of a survivor and something else, something I don't recognize. Then, she takes a clean rag from the counter, wets it under the hot water from the tap, and steps toward me.

Without a word, she gently takes my hand.

Her touch is a shock, light and careful.

She begins to clean the blood and grime from my scraped knuckles, her movements precise and clinical.

It's a silent, direct echo of the moment at the bar that started all this chaos, but the dynamic is completely, irrevocably inverted.

I let her. I am too exhausted to fight, too broken to pretend.

As she tends to my wound, her focus absolute, the full, undeniable truth crashes down on me with the force of a physical blow.

Without her intel, we would all be dead, slaughtered in a trap I never saw.

Without her calm in the cell, I would have died in a suicidal, pointless rage.

Without her steady hands, Rook would be dead.

My life. My brother's life. The very future of my club. It all rests on the actions of this woman I held captive. The debt is unpayable.

I look at her, at the concentration etched on her face as she carefully wraps a clean bandage around my hand.

I don't see a splinter. I don't see an asset.

I don't see my property. I see the architect of our survival.

The power dynamic between us has been shattered.

He is in her debt, and in his world, a debt to someone like her is a more terrifying and complicated cage than any he could ever build for her.