Chapter 21: Fire in the Bloodline
Chapter 21
The flames caught fast, hungry for the dry, decades-old wood, racing along the spilled kerosene toward the fallen ledgers scattered across the floor.
"The books!"
Piper lunged from behind the overturned chair, snatching two of the leather-bound volumes from the encroaching fire, tucking them against her chest like a mother shielding a child.
"Forget the books!"
Reaper hauled Rowe up by the arm, pulling her low beneath the shattered window frame as another shot cracked through the smoke-thickening air.
"We need to move, now!"
"You don’t understand," Piper snapped, coughing as smoke rolled thick across the ceiling. "These are the only proofs left. Everything else I destroyed years ago, made copies, hid them—this is the last complete set. If they burn, there’s nothing left to show anyone the truth. Ever."
Rowe’s mind raced even as her body moved on instinct, crouching low, following Reaper’s lead toward the sagging back doorway.
"Then we take them with us."
"I intend to."
Piper’s voice had lost every trace of its earlier composure, raw now, urgent.
"Which is exactly why whoever’s out there wants them burned. Dead men can’t testify. Neither can ash."
Another shot tore through the front wall, close enough that Rowe felt the displaced air brush her cheek.
"Ghost, Viper, cover positions, now!"
Reaper’s voice cut through his radio, sharp and commanding despite the chaos.
"Shooter’s northwest corner, possibly ours. I need eyes, and I need them fast!"
Static crackled back.
Then Ghost’s voice, tight with tension.
"On it, Prez. Converging now."
The back door hung half off its hinges, and Reaper kicked it the rest of the way open. Smoke poured out behind them into the cool night air as they spilled onto the ruined back porch.
Piper followed a half-second later, ledgers clutched tight, her earlier icy composure replaced by something far more human.
Fear.
"There," Rowe breathed, catching movement at the treeline beyond the collapsed barn.
A shape moved low and fast between the junipers, rifle still raised.
Reaper’s gun came up instantly, but the angle was wrong. The shooter was already melting back into shadow before he could get a clean shot.
A burst of gunfire erupted from the opposite treeline.
Ghost’s team.
Engaging.
"Get her to the bikes," Reaper barked at Rowe, jerking his chin toward Piper. "I’m going after whoever that was."
"Jax, no—"
"I need answers, Rowan, and dead men don’t give them."
His eyes found hers, fierce and pleading all at once.
"I trust you to get her out. Please."
Before she could argue further, he was gone, sprinting low and fast into the smoke and darkness, disappearing around the side of the burning house.
Rowe grabbed Piper’s arm, hauling her toward the treeline where the bikes waited, hidden a quarter mile back.
Piper stumbled once over broken ground, the ledgers still clutched against her chest like the only thing tethering her to sanity.
"Why do you even care if I make it out?" Piper gasped between labored breaths as they ran. "I’ve spent fifteen years trying to destroy your family."
"Because you just told us the truth for the first time in fifteen years," Rowe shot back, "and I am not letting whoever’s out there bury it along with you."
They broke through the treeline just as Viper’s silhouette emerged from the shadows ahead, gun raised, scanning the darkness with lethal focus.
"Prospect," he called low, recognizing them and lowering his weapon fractionally.
"Where’s Reaper?"
"Went after the shooter," Rowe said, breathless. "Northwest, near the barn."
Viper’s jaw tightened.
"Get her to the bikes. I’m going after him."
"Viper—"
"I know what you’re thinking," he said, already moving past her into the dark. "You think I’m the one who’s been feeding intel this whole time. I’m not. I never was. But I understand why you’d wonder, given everything that’s happened tonight."
He paused just long enough to meet her eyes, something raw and sincere cutting through his usual gruff exterior.
"Your mother said it wasn’t Viper. Believe that much, even if you don’t believe anything else right now."
He vanished into the smoke-hazed trees before she could respond.
The gunfire had stopped by the time Reaper finally emerged from the darkness nearly twenty agonizing minutes later.
His cut was torn at the shoulder.
Blood trickled from a shallow graze along his temple.
But he was alive.
Whole.
Walking under his own power.
Rowe was off the bike and running before he’d fully cleared the treeline, throwing herself against him hard enough to nearly knock them both off balance.
"You’re hit," she said, hands flying over his shoulder, his temple, checking for the extent of the damage with frantic urgency.
"Graze. I’m fine."
His arms banded around her, holding tight, his breath still ragged from the chase.
"Shooter got away. Knew the terrain too well—had an exit route planned, vehicle waiting on the old fire road. I got close enough to see the bike, though."
He looked at her.
"Custom paint job. Distinctive."
"Whose?"
Reaper’s jaw tightened, something dark and furious moving behind his eyes.
"I’ve seen it in our lot a hundred times."
A beat.
"It belongs to one of our own."
Viper emerged from the trees a moment later, breathing hard, his own expression grim.
"Confirmed it, Prez. Tire tracks match a bike that left the compound two hours before we did tonight."
His gaze swept over the group.
"Someone knew where we were headed before we ever gave the order to ride out."
"Which means," Piper said quietly from where she sat propped against a boulder, the ledgers still clutched protectively in her lap, "there’s a second traitor."
Her eyes lifted to Reaper.
"One deeper inside your ranks than Coyote ever was."
A pause.
"Someone with access to your plans, your timing, your movements."
Reaper’s eyes swept the small circle of faces around him—
Rowe.
Viper.
Ghost, now emerging from the trees as well.
Two more patches are trailing behind him.
Rowe watched something harden in his expression.
A terrible.
Necessary.
Calculation.
"From this moment forward," he said, his voice carrying the flat, lethal authority of the president, "nobody outside this circle right here knows what we found tonight."
He looked each of them in the eye.
"Not the club."
"Not the officers."
"Nobody."
"Whoever’s feeding information doesn’t get fed anymore."
"That’s going to look suspicious," Ghost warned. "Members will notice if you go quiet."
"Let them notice."
Reaper’s gaze cut to Piper.
"You’re coming with us."
"Not as a prisoner."
"As a witness who’s finally decided to talk."
"I want those ledgers somewhere safe."
"And I want you somewhere I can actually protect, whether you trust me or not."
Piper studied him for a long moment, some old, complicated grief moving behind her steel-gray eyes so similar to his own.
"Fifteen years," she said quietly, "and this is the first time a Kane has ever offered to protect me instead of erase me."
"Things change," Reaper said.
"Family shouldn’t have to earn safety."
His voice softened just enough.
"Mine did once."
"Won’t happen again while I’m breathing."
Something in Piper’s carefully guarded expression cracked.
Just slightly.
Just enough for Rowe to glimpse the exhausted, grieving woman beneath fifteen years of calculated vengeance.
"There’s more in these ledgers," Piper admitted.
"Than just names."
"A location."
"Somewhere your father hid something even more valuable than records—something Elias apparently discovered right before he was killed."
"I don’t know exactly what it is."
"Only that whoever finds it holds power over every club in this territory."
She met Reaper’s eyes.
"Reapers and Disciples both."
Reaper’s expression sharpened.
"Where?"
Piper’s gaze drifted toward the burning ruin of the Kane homestead behind them.
The old roofline was fully engulfed now, flames consuming what remained as sparks spiraled upward into the dark desert sky.
"That," she said grimly, "was supposed to be the last piece I showed you tonight."
A beat.
"Before someone decided burning this place down was easier than letting the truth survive till morning."
In the distance, sirens wailed faintly.
A volunteer fire crew.
Hours too late to save anything.
Racing toward the glow on the horizon.
Rowe looked between Reaper’s grim, resolute face and Piper’s exhausted, wary one and felt the shape of the next battle already gathering on the horizon.
Vast.
Unfinished.
Stretching far beyond anything her father’s letter had prepared her for.
The truth wasn’t buried in one grave.
It was buried in generations of them.
And somewhere out there—
The second traitor was still riding free.
Watching.
Waiting.
Already planning the next move in a war that had started decades before Rowe Callahan was ever born.
Comments