Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
So I start walkin'.
Diesel falls in beside me, a solid presence on my right. I can feel the tension comin' off him. "Legion," he murmurs, "we don't know what the fuck this is."
"Yeah," I say under my breath. "That's why we're gonna find out."
My boots kick up little clouds as we approach. I focus on June first—the woman I abandoned after her husband took bullets for me. The woman I should've visited a month ago with promises and condolences.
"June," I say, voice rough. "Funny. I was just on my way to see you. I meant to, ya know. See you. It's just…" I let out a little breath. "There was a lot goin' on and…I fucked up. And I'm sorry."
She frowns at me. I can't see her eyes, the sunglasses block 'em. But I recognize the signs of sadness even when it's wearin' shades. "It's fine," she says, looking to the side for a moment.
It's not fine. She and I both know this. But a club of fifty or sixty men don't ride three-hundred plus miles for nothin'.
And I'm not sayin' Havoc was nothin', and I do appreciate that he had my back. But he wasn't a child and I wasn't his president.
He and I were equals when the shootout happened. We both made the same risk assessment in the same moment and unfortunately, only one of us got out alive.
His death is not on me.
My lack of respect to June… is.
But again, an entire club doesn't ride from Custer to Terry, Montana on a whim or a prayer.
They ride because they have business.
"What can I do for you today?" I ask her.
June tilts her chin up, slides her shades down, and stares at me with bloodshot eyes. "I got some people I think you should meet."
I crack a small smile. Tryin' my best not to meet the gaze of the man to her right. The man who looks like my father. "I gathered."
"This is my club, Legion. Sons of Dust." She says it with pride. But also like it's a fact that just… is.
A fact that I didn't know about. And now she wants to make it clear.
It's just one more thing in a long list of things Legion Kane didn't know before today. Right up there with 'I am now an unofficial Federal employee'.
"This is my father, Bruiser," June says. Wavin' a hand at the man on her left.
The old man with the gray beard nods once, solemn. His bike's a Heritage Softail, candy-apple red with a blacked-out frame, ape hangers reachin' for God—the kind of bike a man rides when he's got nothin' left to prove and everythin' left to say.
I nod back. "Nice to meet ya, Bruiser." I don't add anything else here. And I don't offer him my hand. Not because I don't want to. I want to tell him that his daughter is a prize. That he must be proud. That I like her. That I'm sorry. That I will miss Havoc.
But I don't.
It's not the time or the place. There's somethin' happenin' here and it's got nothin' to do with meet-and-greet pleasantries.
June turns toward the man on her right. The one with my father's face. "And this here is Laz. Our president."
Laz. The name hits.
Not because it's common, not because it's not.
But because I know. I just know in my bones what that name means.
Laz and I lock eyes.
But I already clocked what he is as I walked up. A bike says a lot about a man. For instance, Bruiser's bike says he's all style and no fucks. Ape hangers. For three hundred miles? Fuck that. My shoulders ache just thinkin' about it.
You gotta really wanna impress someone with that image.
But Laz here isn't tryin' to impress anyone with his bike. He took the smallest Harley Milwaukee builds—a Sportster, or what used to be one—and rebuilt it into somethin' that kills people.
Then he bolted a small brass plate to the frame that reads DANGEROUS, stamped cold and clinical, like a factory warning on a piece of equipment rated for harm.
Every surface that should sparkle has been killed.
The tank is bare hammered steel, no paint, every dent left where it landed.
The pipes are covered in fiberglass exhaust wrap. Tan cloth that looks like field dressings on a wound from WWII that never closed. They're not wrapped up because they're broken. They're wrapped because it keeps the heat in and the horsepower up.
The brass on the headlight has gone green with patina.
The leather seat is cracked from real miles.
None of this is accident. None of this is neglect.
A bike like this costs more to make look poor than most men spend makin' theirs look rich. It's the kind of machine a man builds when he's figured out that real power doesn't announce itself.
It waits for you to come close enough to notice, and by then it's already too late.