Page 56 of Heresy
I leaveRook 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.
When she emerges, she's dressed in the clean jeans and the black t-shirt. My leather jacket hangs loose on her small frame, swallowing her. It’s a brand of ownership, a public declaration to anyone who might see us. She looks less like a prisoner and more like an old lady, and the thought is a dangerous, unwelcome one.
I lead her through the garage to my bike, the one I rode here. It's not my usual beast; it's a leaner, faster machine. I grab two helmets from a locked cabinet—my own, and a smaller, plain black one. I hand hers to her without a word. She takes it, her expression unreadable.
The ride is a different world from our previous ones. I drive with a smooth, controlled power, leaving the anonymous suburb behind and heading out of the city as the sun begins to set, painting the sky in shades of bruised purple and orange. The air is clean and cool, and the thrum of the engine is a steady, hypnotic rhythm.
This ride is a calculated risk, a move on the chessboard. It’s a reward, a taste of freedom designed to make her more pliable, to remind her of the world she’s lost and the only man who can give it back to her. But it’s also an escape for me. A way to flee the wreckage of my kingdom, the ghosts in my clubhouse, the accusing stare of my wounded brother. It's a way to focus solely on the intoxicating, infuriating puzzle of the woman whose arms are now wrapped around my waist.
For a brief, dangerous moment, there is no war. There is no club. There are no ghosts. There is only the road, the dying sun, and the strange, fragile truce between me and the splinter in my soul.
I push the bike harder,leaving the city behind, climbing a winding road that snakes up into the hills. I finally pull over at a deserted scenic overlook, a concrete ledge carved out of the mountainside. I kill the engine, and the sudden, absolute silence is a stark contrast to the roar of the ride. The only sounds are the wind whistling through the tall grass and the soft, metallictick-tick-tickof the cooling engine.
We are completely alone. Below us, the city is a vast, glittering carpet of light, a silent, beautiful jewel.
She slides off the bike, her movements stiff. She doesn't look at me. She walks to the low stone wall at the edge of the overlook, a dark, solitary figure against the endless lights. The fragile truce holds, a bubble of quiet in the midst of a war.
A harsh, insistent vibration starts in the pocket of my cut. My burner phone. A message from Glitch.
I pull it out, the screen casting a faint, blueish glow in the darkness. I open the encrypted file. The report is concise and brutal. Glitch found it. A single, heavily redacted NYPD police report from eight months ago. An incident at a penthouse owned by Katarina Volkov's father. The call log shows a 911 report of a woman's screams. But the case was marked "unfounded" and buried within an hour. Squashed.
But Glitch, in his genius, managed to pull a single, un-redacted file associated with the report: the personnel photo of the lead detective who personally signed off on it and made it all disappear.
The name on the file means nothing to me—some generic Irish name. But the photograph...
My blood turns to ice. My world, which had already been shattered, fragments into a million impossible pieces. It's a face I haven't seen in years, a face I thought I'd left for dead in a rain-slicked alley. Older, a new scar over one eye, but unmistakable.
It's the face of the man who forced my hand and made me kill my own brother.
It's Cain, staring back at me from the screen in the uniform of an NYPD detective.
The world narrowsto the size of a phone screen. A single, grainy photograph. A face.
My blood, which had been slowly warming in the fragile truce between us, turns to a solid block of ice in my veins. It's a face I haven't seen in years, a face I thought I'd left for dead in a rain-slicked alley behind a forgotten bar. Older, a new scar cleaving one eyebrow, the youthful arrogance replaced by a cold, hard certainty. But it is unmistakably him.
It's the face of the man who forced my hand and made me kill my own brother.
It's Cain, staring back at me from the screen in the uniform of an NYPD detective.
The silence of the overlook is no longer peaceful. It is a suffocating, ringing void. The city lights below are not jewels; they are the cold, indifferent eyes of a world that has been lying to me for years. Cain is not a ghost. He is not a rival MC president hiding in the shadows. He is a cancer inside the very system that is supposed to hunt us. He has been hiding in plain sight, a wolf wearing the shepherd’s fleece.
My breath catches in my throat. The report from Glitch swims in my vision.A wellness check. A 911 call for screams. Aburied case.Eight months ago. The night she disappeared. The night Cain, the lead detective, personally signed off on the report and made the entire incident vanish.
My head snaps up, and I look at her.
