I wasn't going to drop it.
I knew what I was doing. Walking alone into the Jackals' clubhouse was the opposite of everything I'd ever been. No margin. No position. No invisibility. Just a man standing in frontof a clubhouse full of hostile bikers with nothing to leverage except the truth.
I was apprehensive. I could at least admit that, riding the highway at ninety with the wind tearing at my jacket. I was well aware of the possibility that I'd walk through that door and never walk back out.
But Lola was in that room. Alone, facing her father and men who probably now saw her as a traitor, carrying our child. I'd told her she wasn't alone with this anymore. Those words meant I either got off the bike, walked through that door, and stood beside her. Or they meant nothing. There was no middle ground. There was no version of this where I stayed invisible and she stayed safe. The only version that worked was the one where I was seen.
I knew when I was approaching The Jackals' clubhouse. I saw the bikes in the lot from a quarter mile out. Dozens. Every patched member called in, this was going to be exactly as bad as I thought.
I pulled in and killed the engine.
Nobody outside, so that meant every brother was in.
I sat on my bike for ten seconds.
Forty-one years. Every instinct I had. Every year of training. Every hard lesson about what happened when you made yourself a target. All of it told me to stay on the bike, call for backup, handle this the smart way.
But Lola was in that building. Alone, carrying our child, and facing her father's fury without a single ally in the room.
I got off the bike.
The gravel under my boots was the loudest sound in the world.
I opened the door to the clubhouse.
Thirty faces turned toward me. The room was thick with leather, smoke, the coiled hostility of men held in check byone man's authority and straining against it. Every set of eyes landed. The weight. The heat. The violence ready in every body in the room.
Lola was in the middle. Alone, her face pale, her jaw set. She saw me and her whole body changed. Her face changed. Her hand came up to her mouth. Relief and terror, both. I'd just walked into the most dangerous room in Montana for her, and she knew it.
I walked forward.
Three men stepped into my path. Colt, Brennan, a prospect I didn't recognize. Three bodies between me and Stone's table. I didn't slow down. I didn't go around them. I walked with the unhurried precision of a man who had accepted the possibility of not surviving this and had decided it changed nothing. The certainty of that, the total absence of hesitation, made them step aside. Touching me would have cost them more than letting me pass, and every man in the room could feel it.
Past the bar. Past the pool table. Past the men with their hands near their weapons. My boots on the timber floor were the only sound. Step after step. The room was frozen around me, held in place by the force of a man doing the one thing nobody expected him to do. The invisible man, walking into the center of a room full of killers, slowly, deliberately, making sure every person in it could see him.
I stopped in front of Stone's table.
He was broader than I'd remembered. A physical presence that filled the chair and compressed the air around it. His hands were flat on the wood, and his gaze was locked on mine. Two men, two clubs, a pregnant woman between us. He looked at me the way I looked at everyone, with the thorough, patient attention of a man who read people for a living, and I let him look because I had nothing to hide and he needed to see that.
"You've got fucking balls walking in here," he said.
"Your daughter is carrying my child." My voice came out low and spare. Wasting words in this room could get me killed. "She's mine. The baby is mine. I'm here to take her home."
The room erupted. Voices, movement, three Jackals surging forward. Stone raised one hand. The room froze, the voices quietened. Thirty years of authority in that gesture, thirty years of absolute command, and the room obeyed.
"You think you can walk into my clubhouse," Stone said, "and tell me you're taking my daughter."
“Well, I'm not asking permission."
Silence. The kind that has a sound. I could hear my heartbeat. The creak of leather. The breathing of thirty men held in check by one raised hand.
Stone studied me.
"You know what I could do to you," he said. "Right here. Nobody would find you."
"I know."
"And you walked in anyway."
