Page 44 of Vows & Violence
Ghost takes it and flips it over. Then he looks at me, something shifting behind his eyes. “This is a war marker.”
“What kind of war?”
He stands slowly. “Not gangs or MCs. This is military. Covert ops. Black sites. These coins were left behind like signatures. Kill orders or warnings. Only a handful of units used them, and none of them answered to the law. This... this goes back to D.C.”
Poison steps up behind us. “You telling me we’re in deeper than we thought?”
Ghost doesn’t flinch. “You were never playing small. Vale wasn’t the king. He was a pawn. And whoever’s coming next don’t play by the same rules.”
I stare down at Fisher’s body, then at the coin. My fingers curl around it until the edges bite into my palm.
We thought we were done. But this? This is just the second act.
I look back at the women I ride with. My family. My war-sisters. Then at Ghost, the man I’d bleed for.
“We ride harder,” I say. “We ride smarter. And we don’t stop.”
Poison nods once. “Then we move. Before the next one drops.”
I climb back onto my bike. The engine growls like it’s hungry for blood. The others fall in, silent and grim.
Ghost mounts up beside me, glancing over. “Still think we can win this?”
I grit my teeth, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Winning was never the point.”
We roll forward as the sun breaks over the ruins behind us. The light doesn’t cleanse. It exposes. Sharp and holy, like a blade across truth. Somewhere in the distance, victory is never clean.
Epilogue
Phoenix
The storm passed three days ago.
Not the weather. The war.
The blood on the sidewalk washed away in the Halloween rain. The spirals faded from the city walls. No bodies in the street. No shadows behind our backs. Not this week, anyway.
The safehouse still smells like gun oil and blackout coffee. Ghost’s boots are by the back door, muddy from the cemetery, and the corner of the couch still has bloody bandages where I stitched him up under candlelight. But tonight? It’s quiet.
And in our world, quiet is a love language.
Viper has the windows covered, the locks triple-checked, and a shotgun leaning next to the back door like it’s part of the furniture. Ghost sits on the floor beside me, one leg stretched, the other bent like he’s ready to move. His shirt’s off, chest wrapped in fresh gauze, and the spiral bruising on his skin is finally fading.
Mostly.
I’m still sore. The burn on my ribs hasn’t healed clean, and the mark it left underneath? That’s not going anywhere. We don’t talk about it. Not because it isn’t real. But because it is.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Ghost mutters.
I smirk, biting into a protein bar that tastes like dry rot and disappointment. “Better than bleeding too loud.”
He huffs. “Fair.”
The room is dim, with the generator humming in the background. Tabs mutters in her sleep, one hand resting on her boot like she dreams in battle. Gypsy hums under her breath, still tinkering with the comms. Viper hasn’t said a word in two hours, just keeps marking routes on an old map of Arizona. She’s already planning the next run.
“Do you think this ends?” I ask, not looking at Ghost.
“No,” he says. “But I think we get better at surviving it.”
