Page 21 of Her Injured Biker
"Get out of my way," I said. "I'm walking away."
"No you're not." He stepped left, blocking the gap between the truck and the scrub. "Come on. We're just talking. Old friends."
"We were never friends."
"That's not how I remember it." His voice dropped. "We were better than that." He stepped closer. I held my ground. Stepping back was what he'd always wanted from me, and he wasn't getting it. "Heard you went to Houston. Got yourself a whole career. Good for you, baby. I mean that."
"Don't call me that."
"You used to like it." He glanced past my shoulder toward the pavilion. "Devil's Backbone? Really? You're going to hook up with another MC and think I'm not going to hear about it?" A short, ugly laugh. "You always did have a mouth on you. Always had to push. Always had to see how far you could go before somebody stopped you." His eyes came back to mine and the warmth in them was gone. "I stopped you once. Remember that?"
The kitchen floor came back all at once. The ceiling wrong. Someone's hands on my chest doing compressions, counting out loud, and I couldn't get air and I didn't understand why my hands wouldn't work. I remembered waking up on that floor with paramedics over me and not knowing, for one long terrible second, whether I was going to make it.
I kept my face level and my feet where they were.
"You're always going to be mine," he said, low and vicious. "Doesn't matter how far you ran. Doesn't matter who you're spreading your legs for out here. You were mine when you leftand you're mine right now and I think some part of you knows it."
He grabbed me.
Both hands — one fisting in my hair and one around my arm — and he yanked my face toward his. The pain was sharp and immediate. The world went narrow. I was calculating: his weight, my elbow, the gap.
Scorch came around the truck at a dead run.
He didn't yell. Didn't warn him. He covered the distance in four steps and hit Sidewinder with the full weight of two hundred and forty pounds of former Ranger, drove him off his feet and into the red dirt with the kind of focused violence that didn't waste a single movement. Sidewinder got one arm free and swung and Scorch took the punch across the jaw without flinching and hit him twice in the body — short, hard, the right side where it counted — and then it was over. Scorch's knee drove into the center of Sidewinder's back, both wrists caught and wrenched up behind him, and Trevor Gaines was face-down in the Hill Country dust with nowhere left to go.
He was still cursing, still trying to buck free, but his mouth was the only part of him left in the fight.
"Stay down," Scorch said. Low and absolute. The voice he used when he meant it past argument. His jaw was already reddening where the punch had landed. He didn't seem to notice.
I was shaking. I pressed my palms flat against my thighs until it stopped.
The corridor had filled. Cricket and Flint came around the south end of the shelter at a run, two more Devil's Backbone behind them. From the far end, four Pecos Devils members were moving fast, reading the situation, hands loose at their sides. The whole site had gone to that specific MC stillness, every man accounted for, every man waiting on the word.
Brim walked through it like it wasn't there.
He came around the truck, looked at Sidewinder face-down in the dirt with Scorch's knee in his spine, and looked at me. One long read, top to bottom. Then he turned to face the Pecos Devils who had stopped six feet away.
Their president was a big man, gray-bearded, the face of a man who'd stopped being surprised by most things. Wade Pruitt. Road name Dozer. He looked at his man on the ground. Looked at Scorch. His jaw was tight.
"Your man put his hands on a woman on Devil's Backbone ground," Brim said. His voice was conversational and it carried. "Grabbed her by the hair. Had intentions I watched with my own eyes. On my property. At my rally." He let that sit for three full seconds. "That how the Pecos Devils handle themselves when they're guests?"
One of the flanking members started to speak.
"I'm talking to your president," Brim said, without looking at him.
The man went quiet. Above the south ridge a hawk was still circling. The red dirt had settled into the creases of Sidewinder's cut and every man in that corridor was watching the two presidents.
"We'll handle it," he said. The words came out measured, a man conceding what he'd lost.
"You'll handle it now," Brim said. "And your chapter doesn't come back to a Devil's Backbone event until I hear from you personally that it's been handled to my satisfaction. We clear?"
A silence. Shorter this time.
"Clear."
Brim nodded once. He looked at Scorch. "Let him up."
Scorch released Sidewinder's wrists and stood. He didn't step back. He stood exactly where he was as two Pecos Devils reached down and hauled Sidewinder to his feet, and he watched withhis arms loose at his sides and the patience of a man who had already won and knew it.
