Part 1

It was 107 degrees in the shade when the world changed.

I was standing inside the Iron Brotherhood clubhouse, nursing a lukewarm beer and listening to the AC unit rattle against the relentless Arizona heat. 3:47 p.m. A Tuesday. The kind of day where the asphalt softens and the air feels like the inside of an oven.

Then came the thud.

It wasn’t loud. It was a soft, sickening sound—like a dropped doll hitting the concrete.

“Stone. Someone’s outside.”

That was Carlos “Hawk” Rivera, our former Army medic. He has ears like a bat.

I moved to the door, years of hard-earned caution making me check the window first. We’re a motorcycle club. People don’t usually just drop by unannounced unless it’s trouble.

But this… this was different.

Through the dirty glass, I saw them. Two small bodies on the scorching pavement.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, shoving the door open. “Hawk, get out here!”

The heat slammed into me like a physical force. Lying there on the concrete were two children. Twins. Maybe six years old. They were holding hands.

Their clothes were filthy, sizes too small, plastered to skeletal frames that shouldn’t belong to any living child. The girl’s arm was twisted at an unnatural angle. The boy… the boy looked like he was already gone.

But his hand was extended toward our door, knuckles white, clutching a piece of crumpled paper like it was a holy relic.

Hawk dropped to his knees, his hands moving with practiced, terrifying precision. “Pulses are thready. Core temps are through the roof. Stone, they’re cooking out here. We have minutes.”

I knelt beside the boy. “Hey, son. Can you hear me?”

His eyes fluttered. Pupils blown wide. He tried to speak, his lips cracked and bleeding. “Mace…” he whispered. Then he shoved the paper at me.

I gently pried it from his fingers.

It was a crayon drawing. Crude, shaky, but deliberate.

Stick figures in cages.

More stick figures standing guard.

And at the bottom, written in wobbly letters: 2314 Desert Rose Lane. Help more kids.

My stomach dropped. I looked at Hawk. “This isn’t an accident. They escaped.”

“We need to get them inside. Now!” Hawk barked.

We scooped them up. They weighed nothing. It was like carrying birds. We burst back into the cool air of the clubhouse, shouting orders.

“Ice! Water! Wet towels! Get Doc Harrison on the line, tell him we have pediatric heatstroke and severe trauma!”

The brothers—men who look like they eat nails for breakfast—moved with gentle urgency. We laid the twins on the worn leather couches. Hawk went to work, cooling them down, checking airways.

“The girl’s shoulder is dislocated,” Hawk said, his voice tight. “And look at their wrists. Ligament damage. Bruising.”

“From what?” Tommy “Wrench” Williams asked.

“Restraints,” I said, my voice cold. I held up the drawing. “They were tied up.”

The room went silent. Eight pairs of eyes fixed on that crayon map.

“That address,” Viper said, pulling out his phone. “Desert Rose Lane. It’s two miles from here. Run-down area. Foreclosures.”

The boy, Mason, stirred. His hand shot out, grabbing my leather vest with surprising strength.

“Promise,” he gasped.

I leaned in. “What, son?”

“Promise… get Elena.”

“Who is Elena?”

“Sister. Four. Still there.” His voice was a jagged whisper. “They hurt her because we left. Please. Promise.”

Tears cut tracks through the dirt on his face. “We left her. We left her there.”

I looked into this kid’s eyes. I saw terror, yes. But I also saw a courage that shamed me. He had walked two miles in lethal heat, dying on his feet, to save his baby sister.

I covered his small hand with my massive one.

“I promise,” I said, and I felt the weight of it settle in my bones. “We’ll get Elena. We’ll get all of them.”

He passed out.

“Stone,” Diesel said quietly. “What are we doing? Do we call the cops?”

I looked at the drawing. Stick figures in cages. A four-year-old girl left behind.

“If we call the cops,” I said, “they need a warrant. They need probable cause. They need a judge to sign off. That takes hours. Maybe days.”

I looked at the boy dying on my couch.

“Do you think they have days?”

“No,” Hawk said. “Based on this dehydration? They don’t have hours.”

I stood up. I looked around the room. These were my brothers. We’ve walked the line between right and wrong for years. But this? This wasn’t a grey area.

“We go,” I said. “We go now.”

“We’re bikers, Stone,” Wrench said, grabbing his helmet. “Not cops.”

“Today,” I grabbed my Glock and checked the chamber. “Today, we’re whatever those kids need us to be.”

Part 2: The descent into the Inferno

The decision was made in the heartbeat between one breath and the next. We weren’t a police force. We weren’t a government agency with protocols and oversight committees. We were eight men in a clubhouse that smelled of stale beer and motor oil, staring at a crayon map that promised a destination of pure evil.

“Mount up,” I said, my voice sounding unfamiliar to my own ears. It was colder, harder. It was the voice of the man I used to be in the desert of Kandahar, not the man who ran a construction business in Arizona. “We ride in two minutes. Viper, kill the GPS on your phones. We go dark. If we get pulled over, we don’t stop. Is that clear?”

“Clear,” the brotherhood echoed. There was no hesitation. Not a single blink.

We moved with a synchronized efficiency that would have terrified a civilian observer. Viper and Diesel were already at the gun safe, pulling out the tactical vests we usually kept for show or the occasional rivalry that got out of hand. Today, they weren’t costumes. Today, they were armor. Animal was loading magazines for his legally carried sidearm, his massive hands moving with delicate precision.

I walked out into the blinding afternoon sun. The heat hit me like a physical blow, 107 degrees of atmospheric pressure trying to push me back inside. I straddled my Harley, the leather seat burning through my jeans. The engine roared to life, a guttural growl that vibrated through my chest. It was a sound of violence, and for the first time in ten years, I welcomed it.

We rolled out of the lot in a tight stagger formation. I took the lead. Viper was on my left flank, his eyes scanning the road ahead. Animal brought up the rear, a massive sentinel on two wheels. We didn’t look like a rescue party. We looked like a thunderstorm rolling in across the pavement.

The two-mile ride to Desert Rose Lane felt like it took a lifetime. Every red light was a test of patience. Every police cruiser we passed was a potential end to the mission before it began. I kept my eyes locked forward, replaying the image of Mason’s skeletal hand clutching my vest. Promise me.

The neighborhood changed as we crossed the tracks. The manicured lawns of the suburbs gave way to cracked sidewalks and chain-link fences. Houses here sat slumped and defeated, their paint peeling like dead skin. It was a place where hope went to die, the perfect camouflage for monsters who wanted to remain invisible.

2314 Desert Rose Lane sat at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was a two-story structure that radiated neglect. The windows were boarded up or barred with iron grates that looked far too new for the rest of the house. The yard was overgrown with brown, brittle weeds that crunched under our boots as we cut the engines two blocks away.

“Standard breach is off the table,” I whispered as we gathered behind a rusted pickup truck. “If we kick down the front door, they might hurt the kids before we get upstairs. We need to be ghosts.”

“Mason said there was a basement window,” Viper reminded me, checking the schematic he had pulled up on his phone. “East side. Behind the AC unit. He said it was small.”

“I’ll fit,” I said.

“You’re six-four and two hundred fifty pounds of muscle, Stone,” Diesel whispered. “You ain’t fitting through a laundry chute.”

“I’ll fit,” I repeated. “Animal, Viper, you take the back door. Wait for my signal. Wrench, take the front. If anyone tries to run, you tackle them so hard they don’t wake up until next Tuesday. Hawk, stay with the vehicles. We’re going to need medical prep the second we bring them out.”

I moved toward the east side of the house, keeping low. The silence of the street was unnatural. No birds sang. No dogs barked. It was as if the neighborhood itself was holding its breath, terrified of what lived inside number 2314.

I found the window. Mason was right; it was tiny. The frame was rotted wood, eaten away by termites and time. I jammed my fingers into the gap between the wood and the brick foundation and pulled. The wood groaned, a sound that seemed deafening in the silence, and then snapped. I cleared the debris, staring into a rectangle of absolute darkness.

I exhaled all the air in my lungs, squeezed my shoulders together, and pushed. Concrete scraped against my tactical vest. A rusty nail tore a jagged line through my sleeve and into the skin of my forearm, but I didn’t feel the pain. I felt only the desperate need to be inside. I wriggled forward, inch by agonizing inch, until gravity took over and I tumbled headfirst onto a concrete floor.

I landed in a crouch, weapon drawn, listening.

Silence.

I clicked on my tactical light, shielding the beam with my hand to keep it focused. The basement was cold, a stark contrast to the oven outside. The air smelled of damp earth and something sharper—bleach. Gallons of it.

The beam of my light swept across the room and stopped.

It wasn’t just a basement. It was a processing center.

Along the far wall, rows of metal hooks had been drilled into the concrete. Hanging from them were small sets of handcuffs, the kind that shouldn’t exist. Below them sat a row of plastic dog bowls.

My stomach churned, bile rising in my throat. I swallowed it down. This wasn’t the time for disgust. This was the time for war.

I moved deeper into the room. To my right, a corkboard covered an entire wall. I stepped closer and felt my heart stop. Photographs. Hundreds of them. Polaroids of children. Some were marked with red X’s. Some had dates and dollar amounts written in sharpie across the bottom white borders.

$15,000 – Sold. $20,000 – Transit. Damaged – Dispose.

I saw a photo of Mason and Maya. They looked healthier in the picture, terrified but fed. The date was from three months ago. Beneath it, someone had written: Training Phase.

I took a photo of the wall with my phone. Evidence. Then I moved toward the stairs.

The wooden steps creaked under my weight. I froze, waiting for a shout, a footstep, a gunshot. Nothing. I continued upward, reaching the door at the top. It was unlocked.

I eased it open and stepped into a kitchen that looked disturbingly normal. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink. A pot of coffee sat on a burner, filling the room with a burnt, acidic aroma.

“I’m telling you, the new shipment is late,” a man’s voice grumbled from the next room. It was deep, bored, the voice of a man discussing the weather.

“Shut up and count the money, Earl,” a woman snapped back. “Crow said he’d handle the transport. You just make sure the inventory is prepped.”

Inventory. They were talking about human children like they were crates of autoparts.

I signaled Viper on the radio, two clicks. Move in.

I stepped into the doorway of the living room.

Two people. A woman in her fifties sitting at a dining table covered in stacks of cash. A massive man, Earl, lounging on a sofa watching a game show.

“Don’t move,” I said. My voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It carried the promise of immediate, lethal violence.

Earl was fast for a big man. He scrambled for a shotgun leaning against the sofa.

He never touched it.

I crossed the room in three strides. I didn’t shoot him; a gunshot would terrify the kids. Instead, I drove the butt of my Glock into his temple. The sound was like a hammer hitting a melon. Earl crumpled to the floor, unconscious before he hit the carpet.

The woman, Miss Rita, froze. Her hand hovered over a cell phone on the table.

“Touch it,” I whispered, pointing the barrel at her chest. “Give me a reason.”

She slowly raised her hands. Her eyes weren’t filled with fear, but with a cold, calculating malice. “You have no idea who you’re messing with, biker trash.”

“Where are they?” I asked.

“You’re dead,” she sneered. “My husband will—”

Glass shattered in the kitchen as Viper and Animal breached the back door. They swept into the room, weapons trained.

“Secure her,” I ordered. “I’m checking upstairs.”

I took the stairs two at a time. The hallway upstairs had three doors. Two were padlocked from the outside.

I kicked the first door. The wood splintered near the lock. I kicked it again, putting every ounce of my rage into the blow. The door swung open.

The smell hit me instantly. Urine, sweat, and despair.

The room was empty of furniture. Just mattresses on the floor. Stained, filthy mattresses.

Huddled in the far corner were six children.

They screamed when they saw me. It was a high, unified sound of pure terror that shattered something inside my chest. They scrambled backward, pressing themselves against the wall, trying to merge with the plaster.

“No! No! We were good!” one of them cried out. “We were quiet!”

I holstered my weapon immediately. I dropped to my knees, making myself smaller. I held up my empty hands.

“Hey,” I said softly. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m not him. I’m not Crow.”

They didn’t believe me. Why would they?

Then I saw her. A tiny girl with dark curly hair, holding a ragged stuffed bear. She matched the description Mason had gasped out before he passed out.

“Elena?” I asked.

The little girl flinched. She looked at the older girl protecting her—a nine-year-old with bruises on her neck.

“Elena,” I said, keeping my voice steady, fighting the tremor in my hands. “Mason sent me. And Maya.”

Her eyes went wide. “Mace?”

“Yes. He’s safe. He’s with my friends. He told me to tell you something.” I took a breath. “He told me to tell you that the butterflies are coming.”

The room went silent. The fear didn’t vanish, but it shifted. It became something fragile. Hope.

“The butterflies?” Elena whispered.

“Yeah, sweetheart. The butterflies are here to take you somewhere safe. No more cages. No more hungry.”

I held out my hand.

For a long, agonizing second, nobody moved. Then, Elena took a step forward. Then another. She reached out and touched my tattooed fingers with a hand that was shaking.

“Can we go now?” she asked.

“Yeah. We can go right now.”

I picked her up. She weighed nothing. It was like holding a ghost.

“Animal! Viper!” I shouted. “We have six. Get them out. Now!”

We moved fast. Animal carried two boys, one under each arm. Viper guided the older girls. We burst out the front door into the blinding sun.

And straight into a wall of police cruisers.

Sirens wailed, cutting through the heavy air. Red and blue lights flashed against the gray siding of the house. Officers were crouching behind their doors, guns drawn, pointed straight at us.

“Drop the weapon! Put the children down! Get on the ground!”

The megaphone barked orders that made no sense. Put the children down? On the hot asphalt?

“Hold your fire!” I screamed, shielding Elena’s head with my hand. “We are bringing out victims! Do not shoot!”

“I said get on the ground!” the officer yelled.

I didn’t move. My brothers stood around me, forming a human shield around the kids. We weren’t putting them down. We weren’t letting go.

“Lieutenant Chen!” I roared. “I know you’re out there! Get control of your men!”

A moment later, Sarah Chen emerged from behind a cruiser. She pushed the barrel of a rookie’s gun down. She walked into the open space between the law and the outlaws.

“Jake,” she said, her voice tight. “What the hell have you done?”

“I did your job,” I said. “Check the basement, Sarah. Go look at the wall. Go look at the cages.”

She looked at Elena clinging to my neck, burying her face in my shoulder. She looked at the zip-tied traffickers Viper had dragged out onto the porch. She looked at the bruises on the children’s arms.

She turned to her officers. “Lower your weapons! Medic! We need medics here now!”

The standoff broke. EMTs rushed forward.

I tried to hand Elena to a female paramedic. Elena screamed. She clung to my vest, her fingers tangling in the leather.

“No! No! The butterfly man! I want the butterfly man!”

The paramedic looked at me, helpless.

“I’ll ride with her,” I said.

“Sir, you can’t—”

“I said I’m riding with her,” I growled. “She doesn’t leave my sight until she’s at the hospital.”

Chen nodded. “Let him go.”

The ride to the hospital was a blur. Elena fell asleep in my arms in the back of the ambulance, exhausted by terror. I stared at her small, dirty hand resting on my knee, and I made a silent vow. Anyone who touches you again dies.

At the hospital, it was organized chaos. Dr. Kim, the head of pediatrics, took over. She was a woman of steel. She took one look at the kids and cleared the entire ER trauma wing.

“Severe dehydration. Malnutrition. Bone density loss. Signs of repeated physical trauma,” she listed off as she worked on Mason, who had regained consciousness.

I stood in the hallway, watching through the glass. My brothers were there. Viper was on his laptop, already hacking. Animal was pacing like a caged tiger.

“Stone,” Viper said, walking over. “I got into the phone we took from Miss Rita. We have a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“The kind that wears a suit. I found text messages. Coordinates. Payments. Stone, the last payment to this trafficking ring came from a shell company registered to City Councilman Richard Blackwell.”

I froze. Blackwell. The man who ran on a ‘Clean Streets’ platform. The man who sat on the police oversight committee.

“Are you sure?”

“I traced the routing number. It’s him. And there’s more. The text messages talk about ‘cleaning up loose ends’ if the operation is compromised.”

“Loose ends,” I repeated. “They mean the kids.”

“And us,” Viper added.

Just then, my phone rang. Unknown number.

“Morrison,” I answered.

“Mr. Morrison,” a voice said. Smooth. Cultured. Electronic distortion at the edges. “You seem to have stumbled into a situation that doesn’t concern you.”

“Who is this?”

“Someone who can make your life very difficult. Or very comfortable. It’s your choice.”

“I don’t make deals with monsters.”

“Everyone makes deals, Mr. Morrison. Here is the offer: You walk away. You tell the police you found the kids wandering the desert. You leave the evidence you stole in a designated trash can. In exchange, your club remains operational. If you refuse…”

“If I refuse?”

“Then we burn it all down. Starting with the children.”

The line went dead.

I looked at Viper. “They know.”

“What do we do?”

“We go to war,” I said. “Call everyone. We need 24-hour guard details on these kids. Nobody gets in or out of this hospital without a biker checking their ID. And get the word out to the other chapters. We need backup.”

The next three days were a siege.

The story broke in the news, but not the way it should have. The headlines read: Biker Gang Raid Leads to Child Rescue; Police Investigate Vigilantism. They were painting us as the villains who got lucky.

But we didn’t care about the press. We cared about the black SUV with tinted windows that kept circling the hospital. We cared about the drone Viper shot down over the clubhouse.

Then, the escalation hit.

It was 2:00 a.m. on the fourth night. I was dozing in a chair outside Elena’s room.

My phone buzzed. It was Diesel, who was guarding the evidence warehouse where we kept our bikes and files.

“Stone! Fire! They hit us!”

I could hear the roar of flames in the background. “Get out of there, Diesel!”

“They firebombed the front! I’m trying to save the servers!”

“Leave it! Get out!”

The line cut out.

“Diesel!”

I ran for the exit, signaling Animal to stay with the kids. I rode my bike like a maniac through the city streets, reaching the warehouse just as the roof collapsed. Firefighters were battling the blaze, but it was gone. Everything. The photos I took. The physical records Viper had printed.

Diesel was sitting on the curb, covered in soot, coughing up black mucus.

“I’m sorry, Stone,” he wheezed. “It happened so fast. Molotovs through the windows.”

“You’re alive,” I said, gripping his shoulder. “That’s what matters.”

But as I looked at the ashes of our clubhouse, I realized this was exactly what the voice had threatened. They were stripping us bare. Removing our leverage.

My phone rang again. Same unknown number.

“I told you,” the voice said. “Now, are you ready to negotiate?”

“I’m going to find you,” I said, my voice low and deadly. “And I’m going to rip your throat out.”

“Brave words. But you have a weakness, Mr. Morrison. You can’t be everywhere. While you’re watching the hospital, who is watching the safe house?”

My blood turned to ice.

We had moved the three oldest kids—Sophia, and two others—to a temporary safe house run by Child Protective Services earlier that evening. We thought it was safer than the hospital, which was becoming a circus.

“What did you do?”

“Sophia is a lovely girl. It would be a shame if she ended up on the next flight to Bangkok.”

I hung up and dialed Chen. “Sarah! Check the safe house! Now!”

“Jake, I have officers there—”

“Check it!”

Ten minutes later, she called back. Her voice was broken. “They’re gone. The officers… they’re dead, Jake. Throats slit. The kids are gone.”

I dropped the phone. The pavement rushed up to meet me, but I didn’t fall. I stood there, vibrating with a rage so pure it felt like a religious experience.

They took Sophia. They killed cops. They burned our home.

They wanted a fight? They just started a massacre.

“Viper,” I said. “Pull the backup files from the cloud. The ones you didn’t tell anyone about.”

Viper grinned, his teeth white in his soot-covered face. “Already done, boss. And I tracked the call.”

“Where?”

“It bounced through three towers, but it originated from a private airfield outside of Phoenix. A hanger owned by ‘Global Logistics Solutions.’ Another Blackwell shell company.”

“How far?”

“Forty minutes if we drive like sane people.”

“We aren’t sane people,” I said.

We rallied the chapter. Twenty bikes. Thirty men. We didn’t bring bats and chains. We brought assault rifles. We brought flashbangs. We brought the wrath of God on two wheels.

We hit the airfield at 4:00 a.m.

The hanger was massive, lit by floodlights. A private jet was idling on the runway, engines whining. A black SUV was pulling up to the stairs.

I saw a man in a suit dragging a girl by her hair toward the plane. Sophia.

“Breach!” I screamed over the radio.

We crashed through the chain-link fence, bikes roaring. The security guards at the perimeter opened fire. Bullets sparked off the pavement and pinged against my fuel tank.

I didn’t slow down. I aimed my bike straight at the SUV.

I bailed at the last second, letting the 800-pound motorcycle become a missile. It slammed into the side of the SUV, caving in the door and blocking the path to the jet.

The impact threw me into the dirt. I rolled, coming up with my Glock leveled.

The man in the suit—Blackwell himself—was scrambling up the stairs of the jet, dragging Sophia. She was fighting him, kicking and biting.

“Let her go!” I yelled, sprinting across the tarmac.

Blackwell turned, pulling a silver pistol from his jacket. He fired wildly. A bullet grazed my shoulder, stinging like a wasp, but adrenaline masked the pain.

I reached the bottom of the stairs just as he reached the top. He shoved Sophia inside and turned to kick the door shut.

I lunged, grabbing the handle of the door, ripping it back open.

Blackwell looked at me, his eyes wide with shock. He wasn’t used to men who didn’t fear him. He was used to victims.

“Do you know who I am?” he screamed.

“Yeah,” I said, grabbing him by his expensive silk tie. “You’re the guy who made a mistake.”

I yanked him down the stairs. He tumbled, hitting the tarmac hard. Before he could rise, I was on top of him. My fist connected with his jaw. Once. Twice.

“That’s for Mason,” I grunted. Smack. “That’s for the warehouse.” Smack. “That’s for Sophia.”

“Jake! Enough!”

It was Miguel Santos, an FBI agent I knew from the old days. He had arrived with the cavalry—black vans screeching onto the runway, agents swarming the hanger.

“He’s done, Jake! Don’t kill him! We need him to testify!”

I held my fist cocked back, staring at Blackwell’s bloody, ruined face. He looked pathetic. Small.

I let him go. I stood up, spitting blood on the ground next to him.

“He’s all yours, Miguel.”

I turned and ran up the stairs of the jet. Sophia was huddled in a leather seat, sobbing.

“Sophia?”

She looked up. Her eyes found mine.

“Uncle Jake?”

“I got you,” I said, scooping her up. “I promised, didn’t I? Nobody gets left behind.”

We walked out of that plane into the dawn. The sun was rising over the desert, painting the sky in violent shades of orange and red. The airfield was filled with FBI agents, police, and bikers.

Blackwell was being shoved into a federal van. He looked at me as he passed. The arrogance was gone. He looked like what he was: a man who had lost everything.

Miguel walked up to me. “You know you broke about fifty federal laws tonight, Morrison.”

“Send me the bill,” I said.

“The warehouse… the evidence…” Miguel started.

“We have copies,” I said. “Viper sent everything to your secure server ten minutes ago. Names. Dates. Bank accounts. You have the whole network.”

Miguel smiled. “Then I guess I didn’t see you break through that fence.”

“See what fence?” I asked.

Epilogue: The Foundation

The trial was the media event of the decade. With Blackwell singing like a canary to avoid the death penalty, the dominoes fell fast. Senators resigned. CEOs were arrested. The network crumbled.

But for us, the victory wasn’t in the courtroom.

It was six months later, at the new clubhouse. We rebuilt it bigger. Better. And we added a new wing.

“The Iron Brotherhood Foundation.”

It was a Saturday. The yard was filled with laughter.

Mason was there, running around with a dog we’d adopted for the center. He looked healthy. Strong. He was laughing—a sound that was foreign to him six months ago.

Elena was sitting on Animal’s lap, putting flower stickers on his biker helmet. The biggest, meanest biker in Arizona was sitting there, letting a four-year-old decorate his gear, smiling like a fool.

I watched them from the porch. My shoulder still ached when it rained, a reminder of the airfield.

“Thinking about the past?” Viper asked, handing me a beer.

“No,” I said, looking at the kids. “Thinking about the future.”

We realized something that day in the desert. The system is broken. It moves too slow. It requires too much paperwork.

Sometimes, you don’t need a lawyer. Sometimes, you don’t need a social worker.

Sometimes, you need a bunch of guys who aren’t afraid of the dark, who have fast bikes and hard fists, and who are willing to walk through hell to bring a child back.

Mason saw me and ran over. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, breathless.

“Uncle Jake! Look!”

He held up a drawing. It was crayon, just like the first one. But this time, there were no cages.

It showed a house. A big sun. And stick figures standing in front of it. Some were small. Some were big, with beards and motorcycles.

“It’s us,” he said.

“Yeah, buddy,” I said, tucking the drawing into my vest, right over my heart. “It’s us.”

We aren’t just a club anymore. We’re a family. And God help anyone who tries to hurt us again.