LOGINJarekThey moved me before sunrise. At least I thought it was before sunrise. The room was dark when the guards came in, and the narrow window showed nothing but black. Time had become unreliable enough that every guess about the calendar felt like bullshit.The smoker unlocked the chain around my waist while I kept my head down. The younger guard stayed near the door with his gun already out, even though I was still cuffed to the chair and drugged enough that my legs had been numb for the last half hour.Mateo had changed the rules after the Daggers got too close to the last place. Good. Fear made people change routines, and changed routines created mistake
MarcusWhen Nixx knocked on the bedroom door and said they had found Tomas Valez, he meant found him.Not another company record. Not an old traffic-camera image. Not a truck sitting empty in a Mesa Verde yard while the man we wanted disappeared somewhere else. Benny had finally caught Tomas himself on a motel camera outside Belen less than twenty minutes earlier, walking toward an ice machine with a phone pressed to his ear.Sable was out of bed before I finished pulling on my jeans. “Where?”“Sandstone Motor Lodge,” Nixx said as soon as I opened the
MarcusBy the sixth day without Jarek, everybody in the clubhouse had started looking at me before they made a move.At first, I had not noticed it. Somebody had to answer questions, assign people, decide which lead deserved bodies and which one needed another ten minutes of checking before we burned fuel chasing it. Jarek was gone, and I was his enforcer. Stepping in was automatic.By Day Six, it no longer felt automatic.Every wrong address cost time. Every driver we checked who turned out to be useless cost time. Every decision to send two men instead of six, to wait for Nixx to confirm a plate, to hold back instead of hitting a property blind, came with the same thought I never
SableBy the fifth day without Jarek, the Black Daggers clubhouse had absorbed the Sons of Doom like they had always belonged there.Not comfortably. Nobody in that building was comfortable anymore. But Max and Emilio knew how to stay out of the way when Nixx and Benny were working, and the Doom riders Max brought with him understood that this was still our clubhouse and our President missing. They took whatever job Marcus gave them, added what they knew about Iron Jackal territory and Serrano routes, and never once tried to turn the search into a contest over whose club had the biggest balls.I appreciated that more than I told any of them.
MarcusBy the time we got back to the clubhouse, I had Mateo Serrano’s name written across three different pages, two maps, and enough search results to make me want to put my fist through a wall.The problem was that knowing his name had not made Jarek any easier to find.We knew Mateo had supplied the Iron Jackals with weapons, money, freight access, and people who could make problems disappear. We knew Diego “Vandal” Serrano had been his younger brother and his direct connection inside the club. We knew Jarek had been held at the south property and moved before we reached it.What we did not know was where Mateo would take him next.Sable stood at the main table while Nixx and Benny worked through Mesa Verde Logistics. Stone and Bryce were calling every contact we had between Middletown and Albuquerque. Hannah kept food moving through the room whether anyone wanted it or not, and Charlie had taken over writing down every address the guys shouted across the clubhouse.I stared at Ma
JarekThe light through the window had changed again by the time Mateo came back, and that was the only clock I had.Sometimes the room was washed in pale gray. Sometimes the strip of light climbed higher on the opposite wall or disappeared completely, leaving me with no way to know whether I had slept for twenty minutes or six hours. They had drugged me again at some point too, not enough to knock me out completely, but enough to leave my limbs heavy and my thoughts slower than I wanted.That had taught me something useful. The men guarding me expected the drugs to do more than they actually did, which meant pretending they worked better than they did might buy me something. 







