1
DASHIELL
The acid-faded denim jacket hung loose on my shoulders, the Iron Vow MC patch sewn across the back—a skull with crossed pistons, the words “IRON VOW” curved above it in gothic script, “EST. 1998" below. I wasn’t wearing my cut. Not to school. My father had made that clear years ago: the school was neutral ground, and while the club donated enough money to keep the football team in new gear and the library stocked, that didn’t mean I got to swagger through the halls like I owned them.
The donation was never about charity anyway. It was about leverage. Favors owed. The principal’s office was a place Cormac Mercer could walk into whenever he wanted, and no one would ask questions.
I sat in the cracked leather chair across from Principal Hartley’s desk, one boot propped on my knee, jaw working a piece of gum with slow, deliberate chews. My knuckles were still raw—split across the middle finger and ring finger, dried blood crusted in the creases. Some kid had looked at me wrong in the parking lot before first period. Some kid with a mouth and no sense. I’d introduced his face to the asphalt.
Now I was here. Again.
Principal Hartley—a thin man with a receding hairline and sweat stains under his arms—shuffled papers on his desk like they might save him. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting everything in a sickly yellow pallor.
“Dashiell,” Hartley began, voice wavering. “Your grades have... they’ve continued to decline. You’re failing every class. Every single one. This is your second attempt at your senior year, and if you don’t pass your finals, you won’t graduate.”
I blew a bubble with my gum. It popped.
“So?”
The word hung in the stale air. Hartley opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He looked like a fish yanked onto a dock, gasping for something that might save him.
Then I felt it—a presence behind me, a shift in the air pressure, the smell of leather and motor oil and cigarette smoke that I knew as well as my own heartbeat. Heat radiated from the figure like a furnace.
I didn’t turn around.
Cormac “Revenant” Mercer moved into my peripheral vision like a storm cloud rolling over the sun. Tall. Broad. Silver-streaked hair pulled back from a face carved from granite. The scar across his throat—an old knife wound from a rival club’s ambush in ’09—gleamed pale in the fluorescent light. He wore his full cut today: the Iron Vow patch, the “PRESIDENT” rocker, the road name “REVENANT” stitched beneath.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at Hartley, and Hartley shrank in his chair.
“Principal Hartley,” Cormac said. His voice was a rasp, courtesy of the scar. Low. Quiet. The kind of quiet that made rooms go still. “I appreciate the call. I’ll take it from here.”
Hartley nodded so fast his jowls wobbled. “Of course, Mr. Mercer. Of course. Whatever you need.”
Cormac turned then. His gray eyes—the same gray as mine, but colder, harder—fixed on me.
“Your mother’s wish, Dashiell. You will graduate.”
The guilt hit like a fist to the chest. Harder than any punch I’d ever thrown or received. My mother’s face flashed behind my eyes—pale against the hospital pillows, eyes bright even as the cancer ate her alive. Her voice, thin as paper:“Promise me you’ll make something of yourself, baby. Promise me you’ll walk that stage.”
I’d promised. My hand in hers, tears burning my eyes, I’d promised.
Hartley cleared his throat, emboldened by Cormac’s presence. “The school has arranged a tutor. The best student in the senior class. A girl named Coral Callahan. Straight A’s, perfect attendance, very bright.”
I laughed. A short, sharp sound with no humor in it. A tutor. Like I was some kid who needed help with fractions. Like any of this mattered.
But Cormac’s eyes were cold, and the threat was unspoken. It didn’t need to be spoken. It lived in the air between us, in the set of his jaw, in the way his hand rested on the back of my chair.
I didn’t agree. I just didn’t disagree.
I stood, shoving my hands in my pockets, and walked out of the office without looking back. I didn’t look at my father. Didn’t need to. I could feel those gray eyes boring into my spine like a drill.
The school was empty.
The last bell had rung an hour ago. The hallways stretched out like the ribs of some dead animal, lockers standing silent sentinel, the smell of floor wax and stale sweat hanging in the air. My boots echoed on the linoleum.
I was halfway to the exit when a hand grabbed my shoulder and slammed me against the lockers.
The impact rattled my teeth. My back hit metal, and then Cormac was there, towering over me, one forearm pressed against my chest. Up close, the similarities between us were undeniable—same jaw, same eyes, same broad build—but he was everything I was still becoming. Harder. Stronger. Meaner.
“You little punk,” he hissed, his voice a low growl that vibrated through my bones. “You think you can disrespect my wife’s dying wish and live to tell the tale?”
I said nothing. My jaw clenched so tight it ached.
“I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it.” His face was inches from mine, close enough that I could smell the whiskey on his breath, the cigarettes, the faint metallic tang of old blood that never quite washed out. “You will not patch. You will not sit at that table. You will not be anything until you finish graduation. You understand me?”
Still nothing. My silence was its own answer, its own rebellion.
His arm pressed harder for a moment—just long enough to make breathing difficult—then released. He stepped back with a jerk, like touching me disgusted him.
“Get out of my sight.”
I pushed off the lockers, straightening my jacket. I didn’t run. I walked, steady and deliberate, toward the exit. Each step felt like dragging myself through mud.
We passed the library on the way out. The door was partially open, and through the gap, I caught a glimpse of something—a figure hunched over a laptop, shrouded in an oversized hoodie, face illuminated by the blue glow of the screen. The light made the person look ghostly, insubstantial, like something that might vanish if you looked too hard.
It was mundane. Unremarkable. I looked away and kept walking.
I needed a smoke.
The back of the school was where the smokers went. Behind the gymnasium, near the water tank that hummed constantly with some mechanical complaint, there was a spot sheltered from view by the building’s jut and the overgrown bushes. I leaned against the brick, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it with a battered Zippo.
The first drag hit my lungs like a balm. The second felt like coming home.
I heard footsteps before I saw anyone—heavy boots on gravel, confident and unhurried. Corbin Castellano rounded the corner a moment later, a cigarette already dangling from his lips. He was twenty, two years older than me, already patched as an enforcer. The “IRON VOW” patch sat on his cut like a second skin, and the tattoos crawling up his neck marked him as club property in a way that went deeper than ink.
“Thought I’d find you here,” Corbin said, settling against the wall beside me. He was built like a brick shithouse—broad shoulders, thick arms, a face that had been broken and reset more times than he could count. His sister, Mira, was seventeen, and Corbin would kill any man who looked at her wrong. “Heard you got hauled into Hartley’s office again.”
I took another drag. “News travels fast.”
“Small school. Big mouth.” Corbin exhaled smoke through his nose. “Also heard Revenant showed up.”
The silence that followed was answer enough.
Corbin shook his head slowly. “Shit, man. What’d he say?”
“What do you think he said?”
“Graduation stuff?”
“Graduation stuff.”
Corbin was quiet for a moment. Then he flicked ash into the dirt. “Just do it, man. It’s not worth getting on your dad’s bad side. Especially not over your mother.”
My jaw tightened. “Don’t.”
“I’m serious. You’re already walking a thin line. Revenant’s been in a black mood for weeks, and you’re making it worse. Just... graduate. Get it over with. Then you can patch and none of this matters anymore.”
I stared at the water tank. The rust on its sides looked like dried blood. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I think you know it. I just don’t think you care.”
That hit different. I didn’t respond. Corbin wasn’t wrong. I knew what my father wanted—what my mother had wanted—but knowing and doing were two different things. Grief had made me stupid. It had made me selfish. It had made me not care about anything except the hollow ache in my chest that never went away.
I knew my father would trade me to get his wife back. Any day. Without hesitation. The truth was, I’d trade myself in a heartbeat if it meant seeing my mother’s smile again, hearing her laugh, feeling her hand on my cheek. But that wasn’t how any of this worked. The dead stayed dead, and the living just had to figure out how to keep breathing.
Corbin opened his mouth to say something else, but the sound of voices cut him off.
A group of boys rounded the corner—football players, by the look of them. Letterman jackets, easy laughter, the swagger of boys who’d never been hit hard enough to learn humility. I recognized them. The Ashford brothers—Lucas and Theo—were in the middle of it, surrounded by their friends and a few girls from the cheer squad. They hadn’t noticed us yet, tucked as we were in the shadows behind the water tank.
“I’m telling you,” Theo was saying, his voice carrying in the quiet afternoon. “She’s stacked, man. Stacked. She just hides it to play hard to get.”
Lucas nodded, his expression dark with something that made my skin crawl. “I’ve seen her changing. Trust me. The hoodies don’t hide everything.”
The other boys laughed. The girls giggled nervously, the way girls did when they knew something was wrong but didn’t know how to say so. I felt Corbin tense beside me, saw the way his hands curled into fists.
Corbin had a sister. Corbin despised this kind of talk more than anything in the world. It was a line for him—a line you didn’t cross if you wanted to keep your teeth.
But the Ashford boys didn’t know that. Or maybe they did and didn’t care. Either way, they kept talking as they passed, their voices fading as they headed toward the parking lot.
I didn’t move. I just watched them go, memorizing faces, storing names. Theo. Lucas. Ashford. I’d remember.
Corbin let out a breath. “Those two are going to end up in a ditch one day.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. Definitely.” Corbin crushed his cigarette under his boot. “Their father’s a piece of work too. Donovan Ashford. Runs some investment firm downtown. All flash, no substance. The kind of guy who buys a Harley because it looks cool but can’t ride worth a damn.”
I stored that information too. “We leaving?”
“Yeah. Clubhouse first. Mack wants to talk to you.”
Mack. Road name Blade. The VP, Cormac’s right hand, a man who’d been with the club since its inception. He was the closest thing I had to an uncle, which meant he’d probably been sent to deliver whatever message Cormac didn’t want to deliver himself.
I pushed off the wall and crushed my own cigarette. “Let’s go.”
The Harleys roared to life in the parking lot—a low, mechanical growl that I felt in my chest like a second heartbeat. My own bike was a ’98 Sportster, black with chrome pipes, not flashy but solid. Corbin’s was a Softail, bigger and meaner, like its rider.
We pulled out of the lot and onto the main road, the high school shrinking in my mirrors. The town stretched out around us—industrial edges, rusting warehouses, the kind of place that had been dying long before either of us was born. The clubhouse sat on the edge of it all, a squat brick building surrounded by chain-link fencing and watched over by a rotating guard of patched members.
I’d grown up in that building. I’d learned to walk on its oil-stained concrete floors, learned to ride in its cracked parking lot, learned to fight in its back rooms. It was more home than any house I’d ever lived in.
We parked in the bike bay—a covered area lined with motorcycles in various states of repair. Prospects moved among them, heads down, doing the grunt work. No one greeted us as we walked inside. That was how it worked. You didn’t get acknowledged until you’d proven yourself, and I hadn’t proven anything yet.
The main room was smoke-hazed and dim. Patched members sat around a scarred table near the back, cards in hand, bottles scattered. An old jukebox in the corner played something slow and sad. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, buzzing with that same sickly sound I’d heard in Hartley’s office.
Mack was waiting by the bar.
He was a big man—not as big as Cormac, but close. His beard was shot through with gray, and his cut hung open over a t-shirt stained with motor oil. A tattoo of a blade ran down his right forearm, the ink faded and blurred with age.
“Dashiell,” he said. His voice was gravel, same as always. “Your dad’s got a job for you.”
I pulled up a stool. “What kind of job?”
“Carburetor. All of them.” Mack gestured vaguely toward the bike bay. “Every bike in the lineup needs work. He wants you to handle it.”
“Every bike?”
“Every single one.”
My jaw tightened. This wasn’t a job. This was punishment. “He’s being an asshole.”
Mack sighed, long and slow. “Look, kid. Whatever’s happening between you and your old man, you need to sort it out. I ain’t getting on either of your bad sides. I got enough problems.”
“He’s the one who—”
“I know.” Mack cut me off. “I know exactly what he’s doing. But here’s the thing—you aren’t the one who lost a mother. You’re fortunate you get to lash out. Your father can’t afford to do that. He lost the love of his life, and instead of falling apart, he’s holding this club together with his bare hands.”
I said nothing. The words hit home, even when I didn’t want them to.
Mack leaned across the bar, his voice dropping. “Your dad loved your mom more than anything in this world. More than the club. More than himself. And now she’s gone, and all he’s got left is you. So maybe cut him some slack, yeah?”
The silence stretched between us, thick and heavy.
“Just do the fucking school thing and get it over with,” Mack said finally, straightening up. “Graduate. Make your mom proud. Then you can fight with your dad all you want.”
He turned and walked away, disappearing into the back office where the club’s business was conducted.
I sat at the bar for a long moment. The jukebox switched tracks—something older now, a woman singing about lost love. The smoke curled toward the ceiling. The cards slapped against the table behind me.
Finally, I stood and walked toward the bike bay. The carburetors weren’t going to clean themselves, and there was something almost peaceful about the work—the smell of gasoline, the weight of the tools, the simple satisfaction of fixing something broken.
I didn’t think about my father. I didn’t think about school or graduation or the tutor waiting for me somewhere in the shadows.
I just worked, and for a little while, that was enough.
Corbin found me an hour later, hands black with grease, the first carburetor in pieces on the workbench.
“You good?” Corbin asked.
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.” Corbin leaned against the bench, watching. “You want me to stick around?”
I shook my head. “Go home. Check on your sister.”
Corbin hesitated. He was a good friend—the kind who’d stay if I asked, who’d fight if I needed. But he had his own family to worry about, his own responsibilities.
“Call me if you need anything,” Corbin said finally.
“Yeah.”
Corbin left, and I was alone again with the bikes and the grease and the weight of everything I’d promised and failed to do.
The clubhouse hummed around me—voices from the main room, engines starting and stopping in the distance, the constant low growl of the world I’d grown up in. It was comforting and suffocating all at once.
I picked up a wrench and got back to work.
There was nothing else to do.
