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29

EMBER

A tom should have messaged by now.

The thought has been on repeat since he left an hour ago. It’s five a.m. and the birds are starting to greet the morning. But I’m listening for gunshots or similar in the distance.

I have tried to call Atom. I’ve tried to call my father.

I even called Wraith.

No one is answering their phone, and I feel sick to my stomach.

I keep thinking they must be in church, the one place phones aren’t allowed.

The keys to Atom’s truck hang on a hook by the wall, and I contemplate them as I sip the coffee I brewed. It’s dark and bitter and does little to ease the anxiety that has settled in my chest.

I know Atom would want me to stay here, but if my father found out about the two of us, then I should be there to help Atom defend us.

Because if this relationship is going to be the one of my dreams, we’ll tackle big problems together.

We’ll never leave the other to hang in the wind.

I turn the coffee pot off, leave my cup on the counter, and snatch the keys off the wall.

Five minutes later, I pull up outside the club and can see all the bikes in a line.

In some way, the sight of them makes me feel better.

But there’s an ominous air when I step toward the clubhouse.

Catfish, the most amiable of all the bikers, is looking on edge when he stops me from entering.

“Where is he?” I ask, knowing Catfish will understand who I mean.

Catfish shakes his head. “Can’t let you in. Been sent out to stop you.”

I glance over his shoulder, but the door to the clubhouse is closed.

“What happened?”

“Can’t tell you that either.”

“Hudson’s in trouble, isn’t he?”

Catfish looks at me for a millisecond too long, and I know he is. So, I do the only thing I can think of—I shove him, hard, out of the way.

The action catches him off guard, and the momentary stumble is all I need to force my way inside.

The club are in the bar, not church, and I catch my father shouting, “It can only be you. And that’s why you were there for the fire. What did you know?”

As the door spills open, all eyes spin to me.

“Shit,” Wraith curses.

“Get out!” My father’s face is one of fury.

“Em,” Atom says, and I look to him.

I take a deep breath, knowing I’m the reason he’s holding off answering the question. At university, we learned about this concept called game theory. It’s a way of statistically playing out strategic actions of multiple sides. Who is holding what information? How much is the information worth? What would the other person do with the information? You play those actions out, over and over again, to determine the best possible outcome.

There isn’t time to run through all the scenarios now, but if my father is going to discipline Atom for whatever this is about, he needs to know the truth.

My father has always made it crystal clear what he would do to a biker in the event they touched me, but he’s never said what he would do to me if I touched a biker.

Maybe he’ll disown me, but I’ll be in Atom’s arms, so it won’t matter. Maybe he’ll give Atom the benefit of the doubt and realize that I have a good man who will always protect me. Or maybe he’ll attempt to follow through on his promise of hurting the man who would go that far, but maybe I can somehow change his mind.

I smile softly at Atom, and he stands and tips his head, telling me to walk to him.

“Oh, fuck,” Grudge mutters as I do.

If this were a movie, there’d be a montage with music composed by someone like James Horner or John Williams. It would start with a flashback from our very first meeting. Friends at club picnics. The day he saved me from being thrown from Aurelius. The day I offered him my heart in a field. And him sitting at the bar, sniping about the temperature of my beer.

Maybe even our first kiss.

When I reach him, I’m a little uncertain of what to do next. I don’t know how far he wants the revelation to go. And that, in itself, is a surprise to me, because I want him to take the lead, let him decide how to navigate what we do next.

He slips his arm around me, kisses my forehead. “Morning, sweetheart,” he says, like the senior leaders of the club aren’t looking at the two of us as if we’ve changed into gorgons overnight.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Oh, fucking no,” Dad says, and I look at him. “This better not be what I think it is.”

“It’s exactly what you think it is,” Atom says. “Loved your daughter half my life. You want to know why I was at Whiskey Fever that morning? I knew you’d left a prospect and an old-timer in charge of her, but I’m the one responsible for her safety, for protecting her. I drove over there to make sure she was taken care of. Was gonna have a word with the two of them. Then, I saw the fire from the street and knew something was fucking wrong.”

“Everything he just said is true,” I say.

Dad glares at me. “You were fucking unconscious. You don’t know shit, and you’re talking out of turn. How long has this been going on?”

Something inside Atom snaps. “You can say what you want to me, however you want to say it, but you’ll show Em some respect around me.”

My father stands, and I’m glad Atom took the time to arm himself. Because the look on his face suggests he’s about to put a bullet through one or both of us.

Intuitively, I step in front of Atom like a human shield. Surely my own father won’t shoot me. But firm hands grip my shoulders.

“Don’t ever put yourself in harm’s way for me, sweetheart. Remember the conversation we had about what my job was.”

It was the conversation we had the night of the fire.

It’s my job to take care of you. It’s my job to take care of this town. There is no version of our future wherein the event there’s a problem, I send you out to do my work for me.

I won’t emasculate him in front of his brothers, so I let him move me to his right, so his left hand is free to reach for his weapon if he has to.

Wraith leaves his chair and comes to stand by us. “Everyone needs to calm the fuck down.”

“You all know the rules about Ember.” Butcher leans forward, slamming his hands onto the round table in front of him. His cheeks are red, his eyes bulging as he speaks.

“Dad,” I say, trying to hide the tremble in my voice. “There are no rules about me. That’s a construct you made. I’m a woman, not a girl. And you don’t have a say in my love life or who I choose to spend the rest of my life with. And I choose Hudson. No matter how difficult that is for you to hear. I’m safer with a good man like him, than any civilian who doesn’t understand the threat I guess I’ll always live under, no matter how hard I try to distance myself.”

“I want a vote. I say Atom has violated the bond of trust. The fact he’s lied about this shows he’s capable of lying about other things too. He should be removed from the Iron Outlaws.”

“Butcher,” Grudge says. “Don’t do this, brother. It doesn’t end well. I don’t believe for a hot minute that Atom brought that bug in here.”

“There’s a bug?” I whisper to Atom.

“In church.” His eyes remain on Dad the same way they do when he’s around Big Don or any of the other bulls. There’s a heightened awareness of their impulsivity, their need to charge, and I know he’s monitoring what my father might do.

But there’s no fear.

Atom is standing confidently in the face of judgement from his peers, knowing deep inside that he is right.

Catfish nods. “There are two different issues. Who the fuck is bugging the club? That feels like club business. The other is who your daughter wants to be with, and I feel like that shouldn’t even be discussed here. It feels like a family matter, not a brotherhood matter.”

Wraith throws his hand over Atom’s shoulder, and given I’m under Atom’s arm, I feel it land heavily. “Atom’s a good man, Butcher. You know this. Even if this is personal, it should be an easy call.”

Dad slumps back into his chair. “You forget, I know just how all you fuckers are with women. Don’t want my daughter around assholes like us.”

“Because you’re one of them,” I say. “But Atom isn’t.”

“You forgetting he fucks Karlie and the other club girls on the regular?”

The words slash through me. It’s a sharp, breathtaking pain. “He did. He doesn’t now.”

“Fuck you,” Atom says, the words directed at Butcher. “Shouldn’t have to explain myself, but I haven’t touched another person except Ember since our first kiss.”

He doesn’t say when the kiss was. My father doesn’t need to know. It won’t help him adjust to the situation.

“We’re still missing the point,” Taco says. “I know I’m the newest brother, but it should be us against the rest of the world, right? Whoever placed the bug, it was probably opportunity. Church is rarely locked. On any day, any person could have placed the bug. Hell. No offense, but it could be Ember, for all we know. But it was done to act against us. It was placed there so they could conquer us. And partly to listen to us infight and blow ourselves up. You’re falling into their trap, Butch.”

Grudge nods. “Taco has a point. We’ve wasted an hour in here, arguing, losing sleep, when we should be uniting to figure out who the fuck planted this thing.”

“This is my club,” Dad says.

Atom stands to his full height. “Built on my fucking land, with my fucking lumber. Even the table in church was built by my grandfather’s hands. There is more of me in the club than there is of any of you. Without my family, you wouldn’t even be sitting here.”

I place a hand on Atom’s chest, and can feel his heart beat furiously. I know he’s right. And I no longer want him to offer his land for compromise, he shouldn’t have to.

“You’ve embarrassed me,” I say to my father. “I’ve dealt with your bullshit my entire life. I know you love me in your own way, but I’ve always come third to this club and these men. Including this man.” I look up at Atom. “He’s grown into such a good person, and you can’t even see it because you’re so busy trying to protect me from the world like I’m still five. And the irony is, you did a shit job of it back then too. Because if you had been a good husband and father, you’d have kept your dick in your pants, and I’d still have a mom here. Or you would have paid for me to take Lemmy with me, like you could always afford to, instead of bribing me to stay, not because you wanted me here, but because you just wanted to win against Mom.”

Tears spill, and I swipe them away, even as Atom wraps me in his arms. But I force my way out of them and jab my finger toward my father. “I hate you for this.”

“Em,” Dad says, but it’s that tone he uses when he thinks I’m being unreasonable, or too much, or any other complaint he has about me.

“I’m done trying to make you proud,” I say. “Stay away from me. Stay away from my bar. And if you do anything to Atom, I will cut you off and never speak to you again.”

I finally let Atom tug me into his arms and wrap me up in them. And even here, with rules broken and boundaries destroyed, I feel safe.

“You want to believe I placed that bug, go ahead,” Atom says. “I didn’t. But my word is all I got. You want to believe I won’t be a good man to your daughter, go ahead. Because the only person I need to prove that I’ll be a good man to is Em. And at the end of the day, you need to ask yourself if you really believe any of this bullshit, because my guess is that, right now, you aren’t mad at me because of a bug, you’re mad because I’m fucking your daughter. And if you just stopped being a dick for a heartbeat, you’d realize two things. I’m not the source of your problem, and I love your fucking girl.”

I place my forehead to his chest and do my best to breathe through it, because while I understand Atom’s world is blowing up, and my father just destroyed our relationship, Hudson and I are now free to build our own lives.

“We’re leaving,” Atom says. “Figure this shit out on your own. You think I really did this, shoot me in the back on the way out of the door like the fucking coward you’re being, Butcher. You’re scared, I get it. I see it in your eyes. The club feels out of control, and you don’t know how to fix it. But it sure as shit isn’t like this. A good leader would have united us, not separated us.”

“Ember stays,” Dad says.

I look at my father. I see every version of him. The young father. The dissatisfied husband. The unfaithful biker. The lost president. And the first man to break my heart.

“Like fuck I do.”

I look up to Atom and he nods, leading me out of the club.