Chapter 3 VICTOR

POV: Jason De'Leon

The name sat in the desert air like something dead.

Victor Kane.

Jason said nothing. He turned the name over in his mind the way a man turns over a stone he has already known was there, waiting for him, half-buried in the dirt at the end of a road he had been walking for three years without knowing it.

Victor Kane, who had been riding with the Iron Wolves since before Jason was born. Victor Kane, who had taught him to field-strip a Harley engine when he was twelve years old, patient and exacting, correcting his hands without mocking him when he got it wrong. Victor Kane, who had stood beside Marcus De'Leon at the head of the table for twenty years, the second name, the right hand, the man who swore loyalty the way other men breathed, automatically, without thinking, because it was just what you did.

That man had cut his father's brake lines on a mountain road and left him to go over the edge alone.

"He's running everything now," Anna said. Her voice had gone flat with the particular exhaustion of someone who had been carrying a secret so long the weight had become load-bearing. "The club. The compound. The money." She paused, and in the pause he heard the thing she had not said yet, and he waited, because he had learned in three years that waiting was a form of violence all its own. "And me."

He looked at her.

Really looked at her. The loose clothes and the lost weight and the way she watched the road. The way she had flinched when he first reached for her. The way her hand kept going to her neck. He read it the way he had learned to read men in the yard, the micro-expressions and the body language and the things people advertised without meaning to.

"Define running you," he said, very quietly.

"It doesn't matter right now."

"Anna."

"Jason, please. Not here. Not now." Her eyes went to the guard tower, to the empty road, to the heat shimmer at the edge of the lot. "He has people everywhere. People who tell him things. We should go."

He let it sit. He would come back to it. He filed it in the part of him that catalogued debts and what was owed against them, a ledger he had been keeping his whole life and that had grown considerably heavier in the last five minutes.

"He's got cartel money," she continued, filling the silence with the particular desperation of someone trying to talk a man down from a height. "Federal protection, Jason. People who cross him just vanish. You just got out. You have a chance to disappear, start over somewhere he can't reach you. California, maybe, or up north, somewhere with no history."

He listened to her. He let her talk. It was a kindness he could offer, the appearance of consideration, because she deserved that much.

When she was finished he said, "A chance for what? To play dead while Victor walks around in Dad's house, sits at Dad's table, runs Dad's club?" His voice did not rise. It never did anymore, not when it mattered. "While he has you?"

Her mouth opened and closed.

"He doesn't know what I'm capable of," Jason said. "The man he knew, the kid he taught to ride, the one he watched get walked out of that courtroom in chains, that man is gone. I buried him in a federal correctional facility in Nevada, and whatever walked out of those gates this morning is something else."

He said it without theater, without the kind of declarative menace that required an audience. He said it the way a man states weather. She flinched from it anyway.

He did not blame her. He stepped past her toward the Chevy, and behind him he heard her keys jangle as she caught up, heard the gravel crunch under her boots, heard the small sound she made that was not quite crying and not quite not.

He slid into the passenger seat. He tossed the plastic bag into the back where it landed with a hollow sound. He lit his third cigarette since walking out and stared at the horizon where the sun was bleeding red and orange across the Nevada sky, all that color spilled out like something that had been cut open.

Anna got in. She sat with both hands wrapped around the steering wheel, knuckles going white, staring at the dash like it owed her an answer.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

Smoke curled toward the cracked roof of the Malibu. In the passenger window, his own reflection stared back at him, harder than the face on the driver's license in that wallet, harder than the face in the photograph he still had not looked at, carved down by three years to something essential and unhurried and patient in the way that only dangerous things were patient.

"Get on the highway," he said.

"Jason. Where are we going?"

He took a long pull off the cigarette and let the smoke out slow.

"To bury Victor Kane."

Anna's knuckles went white against the wheel. She did not start the engine. She did not move. She sat there with three years of lies and fear sitting between them in the hot cab of that dying car, and neither of them spoke, and the desert held its breath around them the way the desert did before something permanent happened.

Then she put the key in the ignition.

The engine turned over on the second try. The Malibu pulled out of the lot, past the yellow line, past the guard tower with its watching eyes, out onto the blacktop where the heat came up in waves and the mountains rose in the distance, and somewhere up in those mountains on a road Jason had never driven, his father had gone over an edge that someone had engineered for him.

The lighter's flame caught once in the moving air, throwing sharp orange light across the angles of Jason's face, and the desert opened up around them, flat and pale and endless, and the prison gates shrank in the mirror until they disappeared.

Jason De'Leon was free. And he wanted blood.