Prologue "Kid Chaos"
The garage smelled like old oil and cold coffee—home, basically. Cian Teller sat on the hood of a primer-gray Cutlass with his boots crossed at the ankles, laptop open, the screen glow painting his face a ghostly blue. The clubhouse was quiet in that early hour when even the jukebox slept. A police scanner murmured on the workbench beside a tray of bolts, hissing static between county codes.
He wasn't looking for anything. He liked letting the noise run past him, like watching a river and pretending you could feel the current. Control was a lie. Chaos told the truth. You didn't steer it—you rode it.
A floor jack sighed somewhere in the dark. In the office, a CRT monitor blinked security feeds across grainy squares. The black-and-white picture made everything look far away—the empty bays, the line of Harley fronts like jaws, the SAMCRO Reaper grinning on the wall. A moth banged itself dumb against the fluorescent light, again, again, like it didn't learn because it couldn't.
Cian smirked, flexed the laptop's trackpad with one thumb, and—click—sent a packet through the county's traffic net just to see if he could. A minute later, the scanner dutifully chirped a unit shift on Route 12. He hadn't redirected anything important. Nothing that would get anyone shot. Just enough to confirm the world still did what he wanted when he bothered to ask.
"Christ, kid," Chibs's voice drifted from the shadows, the soft Glaswegian lilt turning curse to lullaby. "You ever sleep?"
"Power nap," Cian said. "Twelve minutes. Woke up smarter."
Chibs stepped into the light, lines carved deep around eyes used to looking past trouble and into it. He peered at the laptop. "That NASA?"
"Movie night," Cian said, deadpan. "Place has a decent library if you know the back door."
Chibs snorted. "One day you'll get bored enough to hack God, and then what?"
"Ask Him for better lighting in here." Cian snapped the laptop shut. He slid off the hood and stretched, joints popping like distant gunfire. "You need me?"
Chibs jerked his chin toward the lot. "Jax is out. Clay's coming in hot with Tig. Gemma's pacing the clubhouse like a drill sergeant. Safer to be moving."
Safer for who went unsaid.
---
He'd grown up on this concrete; the stains in it felt like family. The first thing he remembered with real color was the rumble of a Dyna under him and Gemma's hands—hard and gentle at once—tight around his ribs to keep him from bouncing off. He was five. Jax was already darting between men with the feral grace of a kid born to own a room. Clay smelled like leather and cigarette paper and something darker—hot metal, old secrets. He threw Cian up in the air and caught him with hands that could crush and didn't.
"You hold tight, kid," Clay had said, beard bristling against Cian's cheek. "World drops you if you don't hold tight."
Gemma told stories about John at night when the house was quiet enough to hear the old refrigerator hum. She said "your father" like a prayer you were trying not to profane. Cian didn't ask questions because he understood early that some answers bit back. He learned people better than letters, faces better than numbers. Numbers came easy anyway—unfair easy, like they wanted to be known. He coasted through school on tests he didn't study for and detentions he didn't attend. When teachers called home, Gemma smiled into the receiver and lied like a professional, which she was.
By sixteen, Cian could pull apart a carburetor blindfolded because Bobby had made him, and he could skate through a firewall because he'd been bored one rainy weekend. He never bragged, never needed the eyes. He liked the hood-up, engine-idling quiet where you could choose whether to be seen.
He also liked Tig.
"Kid's got a mean sense of humor," Tig told anyone who'd listen, which was everyone. "Reminds me of me. That should scare you."
Cian didn't scare. He collected edges and saved them for later.
---
Clay arrived with Tig exactly like Chibs had promised—headlight sweep across the lot, engines coughing down to two throaty heartbeats. Clay dismounted in a grunt and rolled his shoulders like the leather cut weighed ten pounds more than yesterday. Tig prowled behind him, eyes alive with the kind of energy that made furniture nervous.
"Morning, boys," Clay said, which meant it wasn't. He looked at Cian, and the flicker there was pride camouflaged as appraisal. "That thing on?" He tipped his chin at the scanner.
"Always," Cian said.
Clay gave a short nod, the kind he kept for men he wanted the room to see him respect. It worked. It always worked.
Gemma pushed through the clubhouse door like a storm front—hair perfect, mouth tight, eyes taking inventory first because eyes always had. "Coffee's fresh." In Gemma-speak, that meant drink up, then move. She touched Clay's arm, just enough to claim him without feeding gossip. Her gaze skimmed Cian last, softening for a half-second into something almost too human to hold. The next second it was gone.
"You eat?" she asked.
"Had a cigarette," Cian said.
Gemma made a face. "Breakfast is not filtered."
He saluted with two fingers. "Noted."
It was the way Gemma looked at him in between the looks she gave everyone else—the mothering that had calcium in it, bone, threat— that had always told him two things at once: you are mine, and nobody gets to hold that over you. He lived in that double truth, rode it like a line between rooftops.
Jax rolled in late, grin carved nice and easy, eyes a little far away. That was new lately, the distance. He hugged Gemma because you didn't not. He clasped Clay, shoulder to shoulder, then Cian—headbutt light, the kind of brother hello you could do half-asleep.
"You're up," Jax said.
"Physically," Cian said. "Spiritually, jury's out."
Jax laughed, short and clean like a gear clicking into place. "Come ride."
So they did.
---
Charming at dawn had a different color, a washed-out gold that made the town look like it hadn't done anything wrong yet. Cian rode behind Jax—wind whipping his hair into a mess that Gemma would fix without asking later, because she could never not mother a thing with his face. The Dyna under him sang that old song: piston, spark, burn; piston, spark, burn. The road unspooled like tape.
They passed the old Teller-Morrow sign—letters you could spot from a hundred yards because they meant you had arrived someplace that fixed things, even if the men running it couldn't fix themselves.
"You ever read Dad's book?" Jax yelled over the wind.
Cian let the question sit in the helmet like a fly. He'd seen John Teller's words once, a few ripped pages in a box Gemma never opened, handwriting that looked like a man arguing with himself. He hadn't read properly. He knew it wasn't a story for him. Not yet.
"Nah," Cian yelled back. "Spoilers ruin the fun."
Jax's mouth crooked. "Maybe the fun needs ruining."
There it was again, the distance—like Jax could see a road Cian wasn't on yet. Cian didn't hate it. He filed it where he kept all the growing things he wasn't ready to water.
---
He earned his patch at nineteen, handed it by Clay in a room that smelled like victory and disinfectant. Boys his age were chasing the kind of freedom you could buy with cheap beer. Cian had it sewn into leather. There were whispers—too young, too easy, Teller fast-tracked. He let whispers be. He knew the work he'd done. He knew the rides no one got credit for, the dirty mornings after nights that didn't end, the blood cleaned off floors before anyone else woke up to see it.
He also knew the part of him that thought: this is too easy because you're too good at it, and that's what scares you.
Gemma cried, the theatrical kind that still somehow belonged to her. Clay hugged him, grip iron, a man anchoring a thing he wanted to claim without saying the word. Jax kissed his knuckles like a boxer and said, "Now you gotta earn it twice."
"Lazy as I am," Cian said, "I'll settle for once and a half."
They laughed. They always did.
That night, Cian sat at the bar while Tig held court, telling a story about a Chihuahua with a taste for human toes (it had to be Tig) and watched the room spin around the gravity of the patch on his back. The Reaper grinned, a mirror and a dare. He lifted his whiskey.
"Doesn't mean anything if it doesn't cost you something," Chibs said at his shoulder.
"What if it's already paid for?" Cian asked.
Chibs's gaze flicked to Clay, to Gemma, back. "Then somebody's keeping the receipt."
---
Unser knew. Of course he did. The man kept Charming in his bones the way other men kept regrets. He showed up at the garage three days after the patch and leaned on the office door like it owed him rent.
"You boy now," he said to Cian, no hello. "Not a kid. Not for these purposes."
Cian wiped his hands on a red rag. "Good to know, Wayne. What are my purposes?"
Unser chewed that for a second. "Don't break my town. If you do, break it clean."
"Define clean."
Unser's laugh rattled. "You'll know it when you don't see it."
He started to leave, then stopped. The air tightened a fraction. "Your ma," he said, not looking at Cian. "She loves hard. Hard'll hurt you if you let it."
"Noted." Cian tucked the rag into his back pocket. "You want me to translate that from Chief to English?"
Unser's mouth twitched. "Don't let love make you stupid." He turned to go, added, "And don't let anybody tell you that you ain't who you say you are, just 'cause other people got ideas."
For a second, the room rang. Then the phone on the back wall trilled, interrupting the feeling like mercy.
---
Clay never told him to call him Dad. He never told him not to, either. He gave Cian work. He gave him a leash long enough to feel like no leash at all. It was the only language that mattered between men like them.
They had a ritual: closing time, both hands blackened from the day, two chairs pulled out back near the dumpster where the cigarette smoke didn't bother Gemma. Clay would set his boot heel on the crushed gravel and say, "Here's what we're not going to tell your mother," and Cian would nod, because honesty between liars needed its secret places.
"You got good instincts," Clay said there once, sun dying pink behind the fence. "Don't get stuck in your head. That's where men go to drown."
"Think I was born with gills," Cian said, blowing smoke up and watching it unknit itself.
Clay looked at him a long time, and something passed between them that felt the size of a confession. "Hold tight, kid," he said finally. "World drops you if you don't."
Later, alone, Cian lay on the clubhouse couch and tried on the word father the way you tried on a jacket that almost fit but pulled weird at the shoulders. He folded it back into the dark. Some truths were hungry. You didn't feed them unless you were ready to lose fingers.
---
He kept a private log in his head. Not a book, not a file—he wasn't stupid. Just a running tally of lies told under the Reaper. Not to punish. To know the shape of the thing he loved. If you wanted to protect a beast, you learned its teeth.
Gemma's lie lived first: John Teller's boy, through and through. Her voice never trembled saying it, which meant she believed it when she could.
Clay's lie sat right up against it: We're fine. We're fine. We're fine.
Jax's wasn't a lie yet, more like a shadow of one: I know where I'm going.
Cian's? Easy. I don't care.
He cared so much it threatened to move him, and moving meant he might fall. So he didn't. He watched. He laughed. He rerouted a county cruiser for fun and mapped ATF chatter for real and put a digital lock on the warehouse cameras no one knew existed. He built the club a skeleton key for a future door none of them could see. He smoked too much and slept too little and woke up smarter, just like he joked, except the smarter you got here, the more you realized intelligence was a hazard if you couldn't pretend you were dumber.
He wore his kutte like he'd been born in it. The binary ink behind his ear was a private joke—language nobody in the room spoke but him. The dog tag with no name lay cool against his chest under the leather, a coin paid to the river for someday.
---
The night before it all burned—the warehouse and the easy parts—Cian sat on the roof of the clubhouse with Jax and a six-pack, the town's neon spilling cheap color across their boots.
"You ever think about leaving?" Jax asked, not looking at him.
"Charming or SAMCRO?"
"Either."
Cian thought about highways like veins and cities where nobody knew your face. He thought about waking up somewhere the Reaper wasn't, and he felt that small panic a man feels when his hand goes looking for his wallet and doesn't find it where it should be. "No," he said, because the truth was both simpler and heavier. "This is the part where the movie gets good."
Jax side-eyed him. "You and your movies."
"They end," Cian said. "That's what makes them mean something."
"You saying our story ends?"
"I'm saying it should."
"Should and will." Jax took a pull. "Different things."
"Always."
They sat with that. The air smelled like cut grass and hot metal. Somewhere below them, Gemma's laugh cut through a song on the jukebox, tall as a flag. Clay's baritone followed, round, affable, dangerous. Tig cackled like a lunatic and someone hit the table and somebody else said "shut up" and nobody meant it. Home. The brilliant mess of it. The only kingdom Cian wanted to kneel for.
He tipped his head back and watched the sky until the stars found their places. He tried to picture John Teller's face the way Gemma told it—handsome and haunted—and couldn't bring it into focus. Clay's was easier. Clay had angles you could cut yourself on. Cian touched the dog tag through his T-shirt like a tell.
"Hey," Jax said softly, almost lost to the air. "Whatever happens, you're my brother."
Cian swallowed because the word landed heavy. "That's all the reason I need," he said.
Jax smiled, small and real. "You're a lazy bastard."
"Allergic to bullshit," Cian corrected. "Different diagnosis."
They finished the beers and climbed down when the night got cold. Cian paused in the doorway, hand on the jamb, and looked back at the empty roof like it might hold his shape a second longer.
Inside, the scanner chattered. He bumped the volume with his knuckle on instinct. Lines of sound and numbers ran across his brain like old friends, and one line caught—something about an uptick in chatter from the state fire marshal's office, off-hours. Unusual, not yet alarming, like a cough you'd ignore until it hurt to breathe.
He put his hand on his kutte, palm on the patch, and felt the stitching through leather. He couldn't explain it, but it felt a little like a heartbeat that wasn't his.
He told himself it was just the beer.
He told himself a lot of things.
---
On the way out of the garage, he passed Gemma in the hall. She was putting on lipstick she didn't need; the mirror on the wall didn't dare lie to her. For a second their eyes met—his cold blue catching her brown, both of them too sharp for their own good.
"You good?" she asked, voice light.
"Always," he said.
Her hand twitched like she'd reach for his cheek, then flattened the fabric on his shoulder instead. "You know you can tell me anything."
"Sure," he said, and meant: I could tell you everything and it would bury us both.
Gemma saw something in his face—it flashed, then she crushed it down with a smile. "Get some sleep, baby."
"Planning on it," he lied.
He walked out into the night that tasted like metal and summer and a match struck somewhere he couldn't see. The bikes in the lot crouched like big animals waiting to be told the next bad idea. He thumbed the Dyna's starter, felt the engine's shiver move through him spine-to-teeth, and pulled into the dark.
Somewhere in the county, a moth hit a fluorescent bulb again and again and again, not because it liked the pain, but because that's where the light was.
Cian Teller laughed into the wind, low and private. The road opened like a throat, and he rode.
The cough in the scanner turned into a siren.
"County dispatch, report of fire—industrial park off Highway 18. Possible structure."
Cian froze with one hand on the clubhouse doorframe. The second code came fast, precise enough to pull the air out of his chest.
"Units responding: Engine 3, Engine 6, Ladder 2—keyholder location: Teller-Morrow warehouse, unit B-12."
Shit.
He was moving before the thought finished, boots loud on concrete. The lot smelled like hot rubber and night-blooming jasmine from the fence line. He swung onto the Dyna, engine barking awake, and tore out—no helmet, because he needed wind to stay conscious. As he hit the highway, he flicked his phone awake. Two swipes and he was inside the county traffic system he'd tinkered with all week just because he could. He dragged a finger and moved a roaming CHP cruiser two miles south with a bogus speed trap alert. The less blue and tan he had to deal with, the better.
The fire glow showed before he got there—an ugly orange smear strobing the low clouds. The warehouse looked like a mouth with half its teeth knocked out, smoke pouring thick from a rolled-up door that had warped into a grin. Sirens soaked the air. Sparks flew like furious fireflies.
Unser was already on scene in his battered crown vic, one arm braced on the roof, bathed in red, white, and a hellish orange. He clocked Cian with a single look that said both go home and what did you expect.
Cian ducked under fire tape like it was decorative. He moved low, eyes scanning, brain doing its fast math: accelerant, hot burn, too clean for accident. Firefighters muscled a line in a lineout—"Watch your step!—but the heat at the door was still enough to singe hair.
"Back up, kid!" a firefighter barked through his mask.
Cian pointed at his cut. "I'm the keyholder."
"You're an idiot is what you are," the man said, but he let Cian drift closer to the edges, where the smoke thinned and the evidence lived.
The office door had been popped with a Halligan—clean prying marks. Inside, the desk was ash, along with the file cabinet. He knew before he looked that the racks where crates had been stacked two days ago would be either empty or… melted. He pushed past a sheet of blackened air and saw it for himself: the metal shelving had softened and slumped like wet cardboard, but the floor where the crates would've sat was too clean. No char pattern under them. Gone before the fire.
They stole first and lit after.
Message received.
He stepped back, squinted through tears the heat pulled from him. On the concrete near the roll-up, a dark crescent had printed—a partial sole, part of a boot heel cut in a peculiar way. Not one he knew. He crouched and snapped a photo with his phone before the water took it away.
"Hey!" Unser's voice. "I said back up!" He was hauling, pissed and pale with it.
Cian straightened, hands up as the Sheriff closed in. "Just looking."
"You can look from outside my goddamn tape." Unser's eyes, in the firelight, were coins you couldn't spend. "What do you know?"
"That they took the guns before they burned the place." Cian jerked his chin at the racks. "No char under the crates. Somebody knew exactly what was where and how long they had."
Unser's chewing eased. He looked at the floor, then back. "You boys got cameras in there?"
"Not anymore," Cian lied automatically, feeling the weight of the small weatherproof box he'd hidden behind a ceiling joist when no one was watching. The house cameras fed to the office they torched. His didn't. A contingency he'd built because he believed in failure.
Tires screamed. Clay's Dyna slid into a stop hard enough to bounce. Tig's followed, feral grin barely contained by a face.
Clay shouldered through two firefighters and made a show of not seeing the tape. "You okay?" he asked Cian without sounding like it.
"I'm standing." Cian tipped his head at the black hole that used to be their livelihood. "The guns aren't."
Clay's jaw ticked. He shifted to Unser. "How bad?"
Unser gave him a look so old it creaked. "It's a goddamn inferno, Clay. I need your boys back, or I'm cuffing Sons in my tape all night."
Clay returned the stare for one long county heartbeat, then nodded. He jerked his chin and the club boys fanned out—not compliant, just smart.
Jax arrived a minute later, helmet under his arm, eyes already somewhere else. He hugged the perimeter of the chaos and came to Cian at the edge of the roll-up, the heat reflecting in his irises so they looked like amber.
"Mayans?" he asked.
"Feels like." Cian showed him the screen with the boot and the shape of a pry on the office door. "They stole first. Fire's punctuation."
Jax looked at the racks, the bulging, heat-warped skeletons of them, and nodded like the pressure in his chest was confirming what his brain already had. He put a hand on Cian's shoulder—heavy, brotherweight—and squeezed once. "We'll get them back."
Cian didn't say sure. He said, "I've got a thing I need to pull before the water finds it." He pitched his voice low. Clay's head snapped to any sound that even sounded like information.
Jax's gaze sharpened. "You want cover?"
"Give me sixty." Cian cut sideways along the wall where the smoke thinned, popped a service door with a utility key he wasn't supposed to have, and slipped into the side corridor. The heat was vicious but the air moved. He counted joists by memory, lifted onto a shelf like a cat, fingerknew the cheap metal junction box he'd riveted and painted to look like part of the conduit. He twisted, felt the tiny click, and the lid came free in his palm.
Inside: a micro DVR, still warm. A power line scorched but not dead. He yanked the unit, jammed it into his kutte's inside pocket, and dropped down onto concrete that felt like an oven floor. He swallowed smoke and came out the service door coughing—a man who'd gone too far to be smart but not far enough to die.
Unser saw him, of course. His mouth made a line, then he turned away like he hadn't.
Cian stood in the open air and forced two lungs worth of non-fire inside him. Jax met him, eyes flicking to the bulge in his kutte like he could see through leather. Clay wasn't looking; Clay was talking to Tig in a low-voiced rage that promised something bloody for breakfast.
"Go," Jax mouthed.
Cian's bike lifted him away from the sirens like a hand. He cut the back road to Teller-Morrow, parked behind the bays, and locked the office door behind him. The CRT hummed to life in a hiccup. He made himself slow down. Panic makes sloppy code.
He jacked the DVR into a tool he'd built from a cannibalized media player, watched the folder tree populate, and dragged the most recent stream onto the screen. Grainy gray spilled over the monitor, then resolved into the warehouse interior, timestamp in the corner marching toward the moment his gut had noticed before his brain did.
The first men came like shadows—two, then four, then six—faces behind bandannas, arms moving with professional economy. They didn't stumble. They didn't rush. One held a tablet open, checked something, pointed. Another disappeared off-camera and the roll-up rattled half-up. Headlights ghosted in, backlit a van nose just inside the bay. Crate by crate, the men moved. Fifteen minutes and the place was a mouth with no teeth.
A seventh shadow stepped into frame and turned just enough that the patch on his back flashed mid-gray before he went out of view. The Reaper would've smiled if it could: a Mayan's back, the skull-and-sun mocked into static. Confirmation or a frame? No way to know from a shitty angle a hundred yards away.
On the north wall, an external camera Cian had patched into captured a slice of the lot and the cyclone fence. A tow truck rolled past the corner of view: beaten blue, left fender dented, side panel paint oversprayed around a logo he couldn't read. He paused, enhanced pixels until they fell apart, backed off. The first three digits of the plate held: 6J3. California. The kind of lead you could inflate into nothing or squeeze into something if you had a friend with DMV and no conscience.
A figure came back into view, bent near the office door with a pry. He pointed. Another returned with two five-gallon cans. Gas. They moved like men who'd burned things before, not like kids with a thrill. One of them paused, head cocked, as if listening to a voice none of them could hear. Then a lighter closed, flame kissed a poured line, and the world widened into white.
Cian let it run to smoke and static. When it ended, the office made a little popping sound, like it was relieved. He pulled the DVR, slipped it in a rag-wrapped coffee can he labeled "bolts" because lying well was just organizing your truth.
He pinged Juice, a single line: 6J3, blue tow, left fender dented—pull shop invoices last month within thirty miles?
Juice: on it. u good?
Cian: define good.
Juice sent a crow emoji and a skull. Club language. We keep breathing.
He texted Jax: got footage. Not here. Will loop you.
Three dots pulsed and disappeared. Then: meet later. storage.
Cian stared at the word. Storage. It anchored in a part of his head that had a map no GPS knew about. He thought of the key on Gemma's ring she never used, the one that wasn't for any door he'd ever seen in the house. He thought of the way Jax's eyes had been somewhere else at the fire.
He killed the office lights and left the bays dark. The scanner kept coughing to itself on the bench, like an old man who wouldn't admit he was sick.
---
The storage place off Barrett looked like all storage places—beige corridors, a code gate, cameras that made you feel watched without making anyone any safer. He cut his headlight two blocks out, parked in the shadow of a box truck with a FOR RENT sign fading on the side, and waited to see if the night breathed back.
Jax's headlight rolled in quiet, killed before the gate, then the keypad beeped and the gate dragged itself open like it resented work. Cian followed thirty seconds later, tailing the black line of shadow in a way that felt like a sin and a duty.
He didn't get off his bike. He let the engine tick cool while he watched Jax shoulder up an old corrugated unit door, the metal yowling in the hall. Inside, a fluorescent stuttered awake, harsh and lonely. Cian kept his distance, just another patch in the night.
Ten minutes. Maybe twelve. Jax came out with a banker's box that had seen too many summers and winters, edges furred with use. He held it like it was both heavy and nothing. He tucked it into a saddlebag and stood a second in the half-light, hand on the bag, like a man trying to remember a prayer. He turned—and saw Cian.
For a second, Jax's body went tall with surprise. Then it softened. The crooked smile came like muscle memory, but the eyes didn't join.
"You lost?" Jax asked. No accusation. Not even a question, really.
"Good at finding," Cian said. He nodded toward the bag. "You want company or I pretend I never learned how to read?"
Jax stood there with his mouth like he'd bitten something sour and liked it. "You ever think Dad's words should be for you?"
"I think they're yours first." Cian looked past him into the unit. Saw a shape he recognized as a bike frame under a tarp, old and loved. Saw a milk crate of photos snapped with a film camera that had been heavy in someone's hands. "I'm not a church man. Not great with scripture."
Jax almost smiled. "I don't know what it is yet."
"Then it's dangerous."
Jax nodded like he accepted that. He stepped forward and knocked the side of Cian's helmet with his knuckles, affection and warning. "I'll bring you the bits that don't sound like a man drowning."
"Bring the drowning, too," Cian said, surprising himself. "We live in a town of lifeguards who never learned to swim."
Jax's eyes cut sharp, amused and pained. He mounted up. "We got work before philosophy."
Cian watched him ride. Something white fluttered in the hall where Jax had been—paper that hadn't made it into the box. Cian waited a full minute, counted his breathing, then walked to it like it belonged to no one.
It was a page torn jagged. Handwriting, slanted and angry, marched across lines yellowed by time. He didn't read the whole thing; he scanned like a thief and let only a few words in. Enough.
…the crow on our backs was meant to carry the dead, not feed on the living. When the men forget that, the patch becomes a shroud…
He folded it twice, smaller than it wanted to be. He slid it into his inside pocket behind the dog tag, leather pressing everything flat again.
Outside, a train moaned somewhere past the highway, the sound of a thing that only knew forward. Cian swung onto the bike and followed it out of the lot. He did one more small sin from loyalty—he scrubbed Jax's visit from the storage place digital log, a keystroke from a phone that looked like any other. Not because he was hiding it from the club. Because he was buying his brother time to decide what it meant.
---
Gemma was at Teller-Morrow when he rolled back in, coffee pot empty, ashtray full, posture bright with the kind of energy that only looked like calm. Clay stood by the shop door, arms crossed, jaw powdered with ash that wasn't his. Tig paced like a man who wanted to bite the problem until it bled.
"Where were you?" Clay asked, making it sound like a father question but aiming it like a test.
"Pulling feeds off the street cams near the warehouse," Cian answered, truth, just not the whole of it. He held up his phone. "Got a tow truck with a partial plate and dented left fender. 6J3. Blue. I can shake something out of DMV with Juice by morning."
Clay didn't smile, but the temperature behind his eyes warmed a degree. "Good. We bang on Alvarez before lunch."
Gemma's eyes were knives in velvet. "Jax?"
"Home." Cian shrugged off the leather and hung it on the hook he always used. The dog tag tapped his sternum. He felt the paper behind it like a second pulse.
"You look like smoke," she said, reaching to brush his cheek. The gesture slowed a hair as her fingers passed the outline of the tag under his shirt. The smallest thing. A mother's radar tripping without knowing what it saw.
"Fire'll do that," he said.
Gemma's smile was a weapon sheathed. "You tell me if you see him slipping."
Cian tilted his head. "Who?"
"Don't be cute."
"I've never been cute a day in my life. Handsome, maybe."
She huffed. Clay watched them like a man enjoying a scene he couldn't admit he needed. Tig snorted. The room exhaled. Everyone was pretending the same thing at once—the thing that made mornings easier.
When they broke, Clay caught Cian's shoulder with a hand that knew exactly what it was doing. "You did good," he said, low enough for no one. "We'll fix this."
Cian nodded. He wanted to say: with what, and for who? He wanted to say: I saw a page that makes me think we've been fixing the wrong thing since before I could walk. He said nothing. The Reaper on the wall grinned in the office glass.
---
He didn't sleep. He lay on the narrow clubhouse couch with boots on and the lights off and let the fan slice the air into uneven bites. The dog tag lay flat and cold. He took the paper out and held it in the dark, ran his thumb over the indents of a dead man's words until he knew them by feel.
…the crow on our backs…
He thought about the patch on Clay's back and the way men looked at it when they needed permission to be worse than they were. He thought about Jax's eyes at the fire, already moving toward a road that might not be paved. He thought about Gemma's hand on the fabric at his shoulder, adjusting the place where everything showed if you looked hard enough.
He got up when the night started to gray, when the world had not yet decided whether it was closing its eyes or opening them. He made coffee the way Chibs liked—strong enough to strip paint—and drank it black, bitter as the thing in his chest that wasn't fear.
He opened his laptop, tapped a path through the county's poor-man's camera grid, and found the angle outside a body shop two towns over where a beat-up blue tow truck sometimes slept. He paused the frame when the streetlight hit the left fender and showed a dent shaped like a bitten apple. He took a still and sent it to Juice. He cc'd no one. Not yet.
Then he opened a blank note and typed what he knew the way he always did, not to incriminate but to make a list of the teeth on the thing he couldn't stop loving.
— guns moved first; — fire used to sterilize; — Mayan patch seen (could be bait); — tow truck plate 6J3—dented left fender (possible Alvarez contract or a friend's friend); — Jax—storage—book (John's);
He stared at the last line a long time, then added a dash and no words after it. Some truths you didn't put in writing. Not unless you were ready to hand them a weapon.
The sun put a pale blade through the bay windows. The shop woke up slow—compressor kicking, someone coughing in the hall, Gemma's radio playing early-morning Top 40 like the world wasn't the worst thing sometimes. Cian pocketed the paper, tapped the dog tag, and went to meet the day.
Outside, the smell of smoke still clung to the asphalt—a ghost you carried on your clothes until something cleaner replaced it. He thought of the line he'd stolen and the bird on his back and whether it carried the dead or picked at the living while they stood. He didn't know yet.
He knew this: chaos was talking, and for once he wasn't just going to listen. He was going to answer.
—End of Prologue. Next: Season 1, Episode 1 ("Pilot") — Cian at the fire's aftermath, the first move against the Mayans, and the beginning of Jax's path with John's words.