Page 34 of Heresy (The Lost Gospels #1)

TWENTY-SIX

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

HEX

I wake to a world of unfamiliar silence. Not the sterile quiet of the medical bay, but something else. Softer. The first thing I register is the scent—not antiseptic, but the faint, clean scent of her hair on the pillow next to me.

My eyes snap open. The pre-dawn light is a weak, gray thing, filtering through the blinds of the small, anonymous bedroom. She is beside me, curled on her side, her back to me. Her breathing is a soft, steady rhythm in the quiet room. Her dark hair is a chaotic spill across the white pillowcase.

The memory of the night before crashes down on me, not as a haze of passion, but as a cold, clinical series of tactical errors.

The desperation. The raw, unraveling need.

The way I let her see the man drowning behind the king's mask.

The way I held her afterward, a moment of weakness so profound it makes my stomach churn with self-loathing.

The king's cold resolve slams back into place, a sheet of ice over the embers of the night.

That was not a truce. That was not a connection.

That was a catastrophic lapse in judgment.

A commander fraternizing with a high-value asset, an obsession compromising operational security.

She is not the woman I held in the dark.

She is a dangerous, unknown variable that I have willingly allowed to get too close, to see too much.

A cold, desperate need to re-establish distance, to put the walls back up, consumes me. I have to erase what happened, not just for her, but for myself.

I slip out of the bed with the silence of a predator, my movements careful, calculated, ensuring the mattress barely shifts.

I don't look at her again. Looking at her is the source of the weakness.

I find my discarded clothes on the floor and pull them on, the rough denim a familiar, grounding armor.

I stand by the door for a long moment, my back to the bed. I am not the man who was in that bed. I am the President of the Cain's Kin MC, a club at war, a leader with a fallen kingdom to rebuild and a brother to avenge. I am a king. And kings do not have weaknesses.

I pull the door open and step out into the hallway, closing it behind me with a soft, definitive click.

The sound is a promise. I am running from the intimacy, forcing myself back into the cold, hard shell of the man I need to be.

The truce is over. The lesson was not learned. The war has just begun.

I walk down the basement stairs, the cold, sterile air of the medical bay a welcome shock to my system. It’s a clean world, a world of logic and medicine, a world away from the messy, complicated chaos of the bedroom upstairs.

Doc is sitting on a stool next to Rook’s bed, his head in his hands, a picture of pure exhaustion. He looks up as I enter, his eyes bloodshot. "He's awake," he murmurs, his voice a dry rasp. "Asking for you."

I move to the bedside. Rook looks like a ghost. His skin is a pale, waxy gray against the white sheets, and an IV line snakes into his arm. But his eyes, when they find mine, are clear and sharp as ever. The king is wounded, but he is awake.

"Brother," he breathes, his voice weak but steady.

"I'm here," I say, my hand resting on his shoulder, careful to avoid the bandages.

We don't waste time on sentiment. We are kings of a fallen kingdom, and there is work to be done. "The butcher's bill?" Rook asks, his gaze intense.

I give him the report, my voice flat, each word a stone dropping into a well. "We lost four patched. Preacher and Talon at the barricade. Anvil and his prospect in the initial blast. Three others are critical. The clubhouse is a ruin. Serpent Cycle Works... a total loss. I disbanded the prospects."

Rook closes his eyes for a long moment, absorbing the catastrophic losses. When he opens them again, the grief has been replaced by the cold, hard fire of a strategist. "How?" he rasps. "How did they get through the main gate? Our protocols..."

I take a breath, the next words tasting like poison. "We had a traitor. He didn't just leak intel. He opened the door for them."

Rook's face tightens. "Who?"

"Grizz," I say, and the name hangs in the sterile air between us, a testament to our failure.

Rook stares at me, his expression a mask of pure, shocked disbelief. "Grizz? Are you sure? How the hell do you know?"

This is the hardest part. The admission of who saw the truth when I was blind. "The girl," I say, my voice a low growl. "Vera. She saw him with a prospect. A whispered exchange. A burner phone. She saw the rot before any of us did."

The information lands on Rook like a physical blow. He processes it all—the betrayal of a brother, the fact that our salvation came from a captive. His strategic mind, even clouded by pain and morphine, begins to connect the pieces.

"Grizz never had the brains for this kind of play," Rook says, his voice an urgent whisper. "He was a hammer, not a strategist. If he was the leak, someone was telling him exactly what to do. Cain was playing him like a puppet."

A cold dread crawls up my spine as he voices my own deepest fear.

"Which means the rot goes deeper," Rook finishes, his eyes boring into mine. "Grizz wasn't the mastermind. He was a pawn. There's another traitor, Hex. Someone who knows how we think. Someone who is still in this club."

Rook’s words hang in the sterile air of the medical bay, a chilling, undeniable truth. There's another traitor. The paranoia, which had been a low hum, now screams in my head. I am a king ruling a kingdom of snakes.

I give Rook’s shoulder a final, firm squeeze. "Rest, brother," I say, my voice a low command. "We'll handle this."

I walk out of the medical bay and up the stairs, pulling out my burner phone as I move.

I don't go back to the bedroom where she is.

I go to the empty living room of the safe house, the anonymous furniture a stark backdrop for the decision I am about to make.

I dial Zero's number. He answers on the first ring.

"Talk to me," I say, my voice all business.

"Perimeter is secure," Zero's voice crackles, all static and exhaustion. "We've accounted for our dead. The city cops have been circling like vultures, but they haven't moved in yet."

"Good," I say. I look out the window at the quiet, peaceful suburban street, a world away from the ruin he's standing in. "The clubhouse is a tomb. It's a symbol of our failure, and it's a compromised location. Cain didn't just hit it; he owns it now. He knows its every weakness."

The line is silent for a moment as Zero processes the implication.

"What are your orders, Prez?" he asks, his voice flat, ready.

This is a painful, brutal, but necessary decision.

I am abandoning my throne. I am abandoning the church room where I broke my own brother's hand.

I am abandoning the scarred table that holds our history.

I am abandoning the ghost of Abel. All of it, to ensure the club itself survives.

It's a purely pragmatic move, the act of a king who knows when to sacrifice a castle to save his army.

"Strip it," I command, my voice cold and absolute.

"I want every weapon, every bike, every ounce of product, every dollar, and every piece of intelligence out of that building in the next two hours.

What you can't carry, you burn. When you are done, I want that place to be nothing but a hollowed-out, empty shell. "

"And the men?" Zero asks.

"There's an old shipping warehouse we own down by the Gowanus," I say, a new, grittier fortress already forming in my mind. "It's ugly, it's cold, and it's a hell of a lot easier to defend. Move everyone there. That's our new den. That's our war room until this is over."

"Done," Zero says, the single word a promise of absolute obedience.

I hang up the phone. I have just ordered the abandonment of our home, the erasure of our history. I am forcing myself back into the role of the cold, decisive king. But as I stare out at the manicured lawns of this quiet neighborhood, I feel like a man without a kingdom, a ghost without a home.

I leave Rook in Doc's capable hands and walk through the quiet, sterile hallways of the safe house. The place is a ghost, a sterile environment scrubbed of all personality, but it is always ready. One of the back rooms is a dedicated supply closet, a testament to the club's paranoid foresight. It’s always stocked with non-perishables, medical supplies, burner phones, and vacuum-sealed packs of clothes in various sizes for both men and women. It’s a contingency for a catastrophe, a place where a brother and his Old Lady could disappear for a month if needed.

I grab a pair of jeans and a plain black t-shirt that look like they'll fit her, and on my way out, I grab one of my own leather jackets from the hook by the door—the one without the club patch on the back.

I find her in the small storage room I locked her in. She's sitting on a pile of old blankets, her face pale but her eyes sharp and wary when she sees me in the doorway.

I don't speak. I toss the bundle of clothes onto the blankets beside her. It's a declaration and a claim, all at once.

"Put these on," I command, my voice a low rumble that leaves no room for argument. "We're going for a ride."

She disappears back into the small room to change. While I wait, I pull out my burner phone, the screen casting a faint glow in the dim hallway. My fingers move quickly, typing out a single, encrypted text to Glitch.

"Forget 'Vera Ivanov.' I want everything you can find on Katarina Volkov. And the man named Dmitri. The night she vanished eight months ago. I want to know what really happened."

I hit send. The message disappears into the ether, a digital bloodhound unleashed. The clock is now ticking.