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By noon, the clubhouse was buzzing like any other day, guys eating lunch, cracking jokes, music low in the background, the faint scent of oil and leather still clinging to every wall. But underneath it, something felt off. Had since Saturday night.

The body hadn’t just washed in with the tide.

It had been sent.

Prime and Cross were at the pool table, shit-talking each other between shots like it was a goddamn tournament. Wannabe and Lost were behind the bar, drying pint glasses and stacking clean ones onto the shelf, their movements slow and robotic, like they were still trying to figure out their place. They were. Wannabe especially. Kid had good intentions but no instincts yet.

Vin, Push, Post, and Piney sat at the table near the windows, tearing into paper plates loaded with hot dogs and crumbled bags of chips. The guys joked around like normal, but every few minutes I’d catch one of them glancing over at the bar where I sat with Pull.

He was nursing a beer with his boots kicked up on the lower rung of the stool, and his eyes a little too focused on the blank TV.

“Why don’t we have any women here?”

he asked out of nowhere.

I turned toward him, brow raised. “What?”

He shrugged.

“Like, regular women. Club girls. Ol’ ladies. Even a couple hang-arounds. Shit, most clubs have something.”

I scoffed and took a long drink from my bottle.

“Because women are nothing but fucking trouble, man.”

Pull grinned.

“You don’t believe that.”

“I do when it comes to the club.”

I leaned forward and braced my forearms against the bartop.

“This is our business. Not a fucking brothel. You wanna get your dick wet, do it off island. I don’t care. But don’t bring it into the clubhouse. Especially not with the shit that’s been going on.”

“Yeah,”

Post called from the table.

“They’re trouble, but I like having a warm body in bed with me at night.”

“Grab one of the mannequins from the prop room,”

Piney deadpanned.

The guys burst into laughter. Even Prime cracked a smile across the pool table.

Pull smirked, leaned over the bar, and grabbed the remote.

“Guess I’ll stick to my hand then,”

he muttered as he clicked on the TV.

“Cheaper and quieter.”

I shook my head but said nothing. A man’s hand didn’t talk back, after all.

The old TV buzzed to life with the local noon news already in progress. A bright-eyed blonde reporter stood in front of the police station.

“Mick Barber has been missing since Sunday,”

she said with practiced concern.

“Police have no leads on where he could be, but his girlfriend is adamant that something bad happened to him.”

On the screen, a picture flashed: a man, mid-thirties, short dark hair, a pale scar across one eyebrow.

The air shifted around me. Something in my stomach dropped.

“Holy fuck,”

I breathed.

“That’s him,”

Pull said. His hand froze on the remote as the screen lingered on the photo.

“That’s the guy.”

He hit pause. The image locked.

Mick Barber. Dead. Sewn shut. KOAMC carved into his chest.

All conversation around the room stopped. Chairs scraped back. Plates forgotten. Every set of eyes turned to the TV. Then to me.

I stood up slowly, heart thudding in my chest like a drum.

“He look familiar to anyone?” I asked.

A chorus of quiet “nope”

and head shakes followed.

“Then why the fuck were our club initials carved into his chest?”

Piney asked, stepping closer.

“None of this makes fucking sense.”

He was right. None of it did.

“It has to be a message,”

Push said, arms crossed over his chest.

“But what message?”

I asked.

“Why now? Why him?”

“Not a fucking good one,”

Cross said from the corner. He leaned his pool stick against the wall and joined the growing circle around the bar.

“Should we let the cops know we found him?”

Wannabe piped up from behind the bar.

Every single head turned toward him like he’d just grown a second one.

“Are you fucking stupid?”

Vin asked, deadpan.

“You want us to go to the police,”

Cross echoed.

“and tell them we just happened to stumble across the guy who’s been missing for four days, with our goddamn club name carved into his chest?”

“You think that’s gonna end well?”

Post added, his voice low.

Wannabe shrank back, rubbing the back of his head.

“We didn’t do anything wrong…”

“Oh,”

I said, raising my voice.

“We didn’t do anything wrong? That’s great. I’m sure the cops will just give us a pass, right? Shake our hands, thank us for reporting the corpse with our club initials carved into him like a fucking brand.”

He looked like he wanted to disappear.

There was a damn good reason Wannabe and Lost were still prospects.

Bob walked past the bar, muttering.

“Shut your mouth, kid,”

and gave Wannabe a hard smack to the back of the head.

Wannabe winced and nodded.

“Yes, sir.”

Pull finally unpaused the TV. The segment rolled on, now showing the missing guy’s girlfriend sitting on a worn couch, holding a picture of them together. Her mascara was smudged, and she looked wrecked, but something about her seemed off.

“She doesn’t even look fucking familiar,”

Piney said.

He was right. I studied her face, searching for any spark of recognition. Nothing. No connection to the island. No connection to us.

But there had to be one.

This wasn’t random. Whoever dumped Mick Barber near our docks had done it on purpose. They’d known what the initials meant. They wanted us to see it.

And they wanted us to know we were next.

The news segment wrapped up. Pull turned off the TV, and silence fell like a curtain.

Nobody made a move. Nobody spoke.

I leaned forward, elbows on the bar, staring down at the wood grain like it might give me answers.

I was the President of the Michigan chapter of the Kings of Anarchy. Skull Island was under my control. My protection.

And some son of a bitch was trying to send me a message in blood.

It was my job to figure out what that message meant and what we were going to do about it.