Chapter one
Seneca
The courtroom always reminded me of the kill house on Quantico base: glassed-off boxes for the public, a central avenue of approach, every angle designed so one bad move meant you were in the crosshairs. This one was old, county issue, the wood paneling pocked and sweat-stained from decades of dog-fight hearings. It was filled to the exits, which meant word had gotten out about the Bloody Scythes’ enforcer making another curtain call.
I stood in the anteroom with my wrists zip-tied together and waited for the bailiff. The kid had a Marine high-and-tight and a trembling upper lip. He flicked his eyes down at my file and then up at my face, like he was checking for extra horns. “Wallace,” he said, voice flat, “you’re up.” The doors groaned open, and I stepped through, boots first, back straight, like I was reporting for a medal instead of sentencing.
A low current of whispers rose as I entered. The prosecution bench bristled with young suits in cheap ties, all turned out to watch me catch hell. Behind them, cops, news hacks, the wives of the men I’d put in the hospital last June, stared invarying shades of contempt. I made a point of scanning every face, letting them know I was logging their names, the old way. Nobody held my gaze except one woman. She was the mayor’s assistant, a bulldog in pearls who hated me enough to show up in person. She’d still not gotten over me dropping off her twenty-one-year-old granddaughter one morning.
Judge Catherine Bellini presided over it all. I’d known her by reputation. A hard-line, ferocious, legendary for her three-minute verdicts and an ability to make even prosecutors piss themselves. I’d expected someone with a bulldozer jaw and permed hair, but when I looked up at the bench, she was something else entirely: tall, dark-suited, eyes the color of cold espresso. She wore her hair pinned back in a severe twist, and her black robe looked custom-fitted, moving with her like a gunfighter’s duster. She was the only one in the building who seemed perfectly calm, maybe even bored. She didn’t look at me right away. She looked at the file, and when she looked up, it was like being caught in a searchlight. There was something familiar in the set of her mouth, and it took me a second to realize it was the expression of someone who’d spent a childhood running with wolves. Maybe not literal ones, but close enough.
“Seneca Wallace,” she read. She tapped the gavel once. “Your attorney is present?”
Jenna Smart, standing just off my left, adjusted her cuffs and flicked a glance at Bellini. She was maybe my age, but looked younger because she refused to go in for the legal world’s lacquered look. Her suit was a shade too blue for true professionalism, and her shoes looked expensive and ready to run. She didn’t smile. “Counsel for the defense, Your Honor,” she said, and nodded at me as if to remind me not to bite anyone.
The charges had been drawn up like a Christmas list: felony assault, menacing with a deadly weapon, criminal intimidation, and some wild-card enhancements for “inciting a riot” after thebar brawl on County Road 40. Only one charge would stick. Jenna was a magician that way, grinding down the state’s case until even the judge had to swallow it. But that didn’t mean Bellini was going to give me a handshake and a lollipop.
She thumbed through my file and let the room sit in the silence. I watched her hands: long-fingered, no-nonsense, nails clipped short. Her left hand had a white scar above the knuckle, the sort you got from a knife, not a paper cut. Her thumb flicked down the page and paused.
“Felony assault,” she said, “reduced from attempted murder. Priors include—” she looked up, eyebrows arched, “—two other felony convictions, neither resulting in custodial sentence, but three separate findings of probation violation.” She shut the file with a snap. “Mr. Wallace, do you have anything to say before sentencing?”
I’d played this game before, but something about her made me want to cut the script. “He attacked my brother, Your Honor,” I said, low and clear, ignoring Jenna’s sharp elbow in my side. “He was going to blind him with a beer bottle. I did what I had to do.”
Bellini didn’t blink. “The record notes that you broke the victim’s arm in three places, shattered his orbital, and knocked out three teeth.”
I shrugged. “He’s got extra teeth.”
A snort came from the back. One of the county sheriffs. I heard Jenna’s sigh before she even made it.
Bellini looked at me, but there was no moral lecture coming. “You know, Mr. Wallace, the point of these proceedings is not to teach lessons. It’s to keep the blood off my docket. But the Bloody Scythes seem to think they’re in charge of law and order around here.” She set the file down and leaned forward, fixing me with that espresso stare. “I’m sentencing you to thirty days in county jail and a five-thousand-dollar fine. Report to SheriffBurden by next Monday, or I’ll make it six months, and I’ll see to it personally.”
The gavel hit wood, sharp and final. My hearing was over. But Bellini didn’t look away. Not until Jenna gave a discreet cough and motioned me toward the exit.
Outside the box, Jenna guided me by the arm, her voice a low hiss. “We can appeal. Thirty days for a first offense is bullshit. I can have the DA eating out of my hand by Friday.”
I barely heard her. My eyes were still on Bellini, who had moved on to the next file, her fingers whitening around the gavel like it was a talisman. She was already reading the charges against some DUI, but I knew she felt me watching.
“She’s not scared of you,” Jenna muttered, half amused, half concerned. “I think she actually likes you less than she likes the DA. You’re making new friends everywhere you go.”
I smiled, a dry stretch of lips. “Remind me to send her flowers.”
Jenna rolled her eyes and started in on strategy. It was related to the inadmissibility of the witness statement due to a technical issue with the police report. I tuned her out. The inside of my head was humming with the scent of wood polish, the memory of Bellini’s hands, and the faint but unmissable tremor in the room every time someone said my name. It was the same as always, but with a new edge. Maybe thirty days in the box would let things cool down, or maybe it would just give me time to plan something better.
In the meantime, I had a week to get my shit together, and a thousand new rumors to kill before they metastasized. I let Jenna lead me through the side door, out of the main kill zone, and down the hall toward the cold, clean air.
But the only thing I could really think about was the way Bellini had gripped her gavel as if, given the chance, she would have smashed it right through my skull.
Most people never notice how every public building is designed to strip you bare. The fluorescent lights, the bulletproof glass, the six-inch step from the lobby to the courthouse plaza. They want you exposed, vulnerable, a spectacle for anyone with a grudge or a camera phone. As soon as the bailiff cut my wrists free and handed back my cut, I felt the stares gather on me like gnats to roadkill. Los Alamos at its finest.
The steps outside ran wide and shallow, stone warmed just enough by late morning sun to make you squint. A row of planters lined the railing, each one filled with the kind of shrubs that never flowered, just sat there, tough and ugly, waiting for dogs or drunks to abuse them. The front plaza was mobbed with office drones on cigarette breaks, courthouse regulars, and a news crew who never had anything better to film. I stood there at the top step, blinking against the light, and watched the clusters part around me, as if I were the shark at the aquarium.
Someone whistled, low and mocking. Another voice, female and brittle, said, “That’s him. The one with the scar.” A couple of city cops lounged by the column, arms folded, like they expected me to charge back in and finish what the judge started. I adjusted my cut and walked down the steps at an even pace, careful not to break rhythm for any of them.
On the third step down, a pair of middle-aged women in polyester suits stopped dead in front of me, both clutching purses like shields. They moved aside just enough to make it clear I had to detour around them. As I passed, one of them murmured, “Animals, all of them,” and the other nodded, quick and sharp. They didn’t look at me, not really. They looked at the patch on my back: red scythe over death, letters arched above and below like a war banner.
Damron St. James was first off the line, the club president. He didn’t need the patch to mark him as the one in charge. He was built like he’d been carved out of some harder, meaner elementthan the rest of us. His shoulders were squared, hands scarred and blunt, eyes set deep under a shelf of brow that could stop bullets. His cut was clean, the patches bright, the bottom rocker stitched by Carly herself back when they still pretended that marriage and MC business could be two separate animals. He killed the engine and let his boots drop heavy to the curb, then looked up at me, expression neutral.
“Dodged a bullet,” he said. “Bellini can be hell to deal with.”
