Page 35 of The Fire We Crave

But, with some careful driving, and always staying at least seven cars back, we manage to catch up with the truck that’s decided to drive in a way so as not to catch attention either.

Stands out like a sore thumb, though. It rides high, so high, it’s easy to see over the other vehicles stuck patiently in traffic.

It winds west out of Denver, headed to the outskirts, to the damn warehouse we found our weed at when they stole it from us. They park up, and a guy in a gray suit and a crisp white shirt emerges from inside the building.

“Holy fuck,” Catfish mutters, grabbing his phone to snap a couple of photographs. “That’s Lev Zakharov. He’s the guy who pretended he was interested in Ember to get intel on the club. Butcher and Atom have been looking for him.”

I reach for my gun. “If they want him, then we should get him.”

“Wait, look.”

More men are coming out of the warehouse, and from the way Zakharov yells and tugs at his hair, it’s apparent he’s angry.

“We should get out of here,” Catfish says. “Two of us in a fucked-up vehicle against all of them is the equivalent of signing our death warrant.”

He starts the truck and turns it around, and then I put my hand on his wrist. “Stop. Be ready to go when I tell you.”

“Ah, don’t do this,” Catfish says.

I grin, feeling closer to normal than I have in a long time, as I carefully point my gun in Lev’s direction. It’s gonna be hard to hit him without a proper rifle and scope.

But I empty my chamber anyway.

“Go,” I yell. But not before I see Lev Zakharov drop to his knees.

10

SMOKE

The ride back to the clubhouse is quiet, apart from the odd mutter and curse from Catfish about the state of his truck. For some reason, his radio no longer works. And it’s a wild feeling, air rushing in through the nonexistent front windscreen and out through his much-reduced rear window.

Sheriff Radcliffe is parked up on the side of the road at a well-known speeding spot, talking to the officer holding the speed gun.

He shakes his head in disgust as we go by in what is clearly a not-fit-for-purpose vehicle. But he knows better than to pull us over for something that trivial. The guy’s a fucking coward of the first order.

Catfish childishly flips him the bird as we drive by.

But even that doesn’t loosen the tightness in my gut.

In all that gunfire, I lost a piece of myself. It took the first twenty minutes of the ride to settle my heart rate. But I think my palms are still sweating. And it wasn’t fear of the situation we were in, because firing at Zakharov didn’t bother me at all. It was some kind of muscle memory connecting the sounds around me with the fire.

For a moment, I wasn’t sure whether I was in a back alley in Denver or on a mountainside in Idaho in the middle of a fire.

Even now, I feel the lingering pull. I’ve had to focus hard out the window, counting the branches on trees, trying to guess the distance in meters between us and the truck in front, just to keep my mind off the faces of dead friends.

It’s like a magnet, tugging me back, even though I don’t want to. I can’t resist the pull.

When the clubhouse comes into sight, relief washes over me. Familiarity eases through my bones. And a feeling of…safety.

Atom is on his horse, doing some kind of fence inspection, stopping to make notes on his phone. I’ve often wondered, if you made the guy choose between horses and motorcycles, which he would pick.

I stick my arm out the window to wave to him as we go by, and he gestures at the state of the truck in confusion. He digs his boots into the flanks of his horse and gallops up the path to meet us at the clubhouse.

Taco, one of the newer brothers, is on the gate. The guy was a prospect for a while, a good one. Things are always changing.

And then, we reach the clubhouse that Atom’s family helped build, a proper log cabin structure made with wood cut from their land. It’s a thing of beauty. Too wholesome to house all of us.

“We should go talk to Butcher,” I say.

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