In the first few seconds after Jacinda’s call, when Apollo stood at the side of the wrecker, racked with pummeling panic as he tried to comprehend the scope of the problem, his club cell rang. He recognized the number as the one Delaney was carrying. Shit.

He answered. “Yeah, D?”

“Get your ass back to the clubhouse right the fuck now!”

Apollo closed his eyes and forced his voice smooth. “What’s up?”

No response. Delaney had already ended the call. There was no question what the president was angry about, no other reason for it but the bombshell Jacinda had just dropped in his arms. This shit was fucking bad.

Apollo shoved his cellphone into his pocket and ran back to disconnect the broken-down Mazda. He’d been about to pull off with it when Jacinda had called. The owner had already driven off, her husband had come out and picked her up, so he couldn’t tell her that there’d been a sudden and urgent change of plans and he was abandoning her car on the side of the road.

But he didn’t fucking care about the damn Mazda. He needed to move like hell on wheels, and he couldn’t be dragging a fucking 626 behind him to do it. So he dropped the beater back to all four tires and retracted the winch, cursing the sedate pace of the automatic roller.

When it had finally retracted, he locked everything down, leapt back behind the wheel, started the engine, gunned it, and flew back onto the highway.

Driving as fast as he could, he tried to imagine what awaited him at the clubhouse. Durham had been found out somehow. Had he been caught red-handed? Shit, that was worst-case scenario. He must have been, though—otherwise Delaney wouldn’t know to be angry at Apollo. Yeah, that was it: somebody had caught Durham in the clubhouse, trying to spy on them. They had him, and they knew who he was. With Delaney angry, it was safe to assume they knew Durham was Jacinda’s father. That put a volcano’s worth of heat on her.

He got out his personal cell and called her. He needed to hear her voice, know she was okay. Because the Bulls would think she was in on this, and there was no one in more danger than someone who’d betrayed the club.

That included him, too, he imagined. His head pounded, and his belly rolled, but he pushed down harder on the gas while he waited for the call to connect.

“If it ain’t Loverboy. How ya doin’, asshole?”

“Eight?” Apollo’s skin turned to ice. It was too late; they had her. “Fuck, man. Don’t hurt her. This isn’t her.”

His piece of shit brother snickered. “No? But you already know the trouble, sounds like. So it must be you, then?”

“No, it’s not me, either.”

There was a thump and a rustle on the line, and then Rad said, “You better be pointed straight at the clubhouse, brother, no delay.” Rad had picked her up? Holy Jesus. He was their goddamn butcher.

“I’m on my way. Rad, don’t hurt her. Please. She might be pregnant!”

A beat of silence before Rad responded. “You son of a bitch. Bringin’ this shit into our house? Puttin’ us in this situation? Fuck you. Get your ass home, boy.”

“Let me talk to her.”

No response; Rad, too, had ended the call on an order to get home. Apollo gripped the wheel and headed to the clubhouse.

It was about half past one on a Wednesday afternoon, so traffic wasn’t terrible, but this was a two-lane highway, and the wrecker wasn’t a hotrod. Every time he got up some decent speed, he’d come up behind an asshole with nowhere in the world to be, doing five or ten under the limit, and no way to get around them. Apollo shouted and laid on the horn, and he pushed out into the oncoming lane at every slightest chance to pass the current asshole in his way.

The fifteen miles took about fifteen minutes, each one a bottomless chasm of unmoving time. A whole lot of trouble could happen in fifteen minutes.

When he squealed the wrecker into the Delaney’s parking lot, he saw that the service bays were all empty, and Gargoyle and a black-and-blue Caleb manned the station.

All the patches were in the clubhouse, then. With Jacinda’s father. And Jacinda.

He ran up the rise and across the alley, over the clubhouse’s patch of front lawn, and in through the front door.

Ox was right there, sitting at the foot of the staircase. The blast of afternoon light and summer heat through the open door made him blink, but he stood up, and as the door closed, his fist pistoned out and landed full on Apollo’s jaw. He flew back, slamming into the door he’d just shut, but he kept his feet under him and put out his hands as Ox cocked his arm back for another go.

“Ox! Brother, beat the shit out of me later. Where is she?”

“You better have a way to make right, Apollo. This is the deep black you’re swimming in. Her, too.”

“I can. I will. I need to see her.”

“Oh, you will.” Delaney walked up, fury digging a trench between his eyes. “They’re in the basement. Let’s go.”

The basement was where they did much of their darkest work. “The wet room? They’re in the wet room?”

Nobody answered. Ox grabbed the back of his uniform shirt—fuck, he’d left his kutte in the wrecker!—and shoved him back, toward the rear stairs.

A dolly lay on its side in the party room, a stack of beer cases scattered around it, oozing warm beer.

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

Every single patch was in that basement. Even those who hadn’t been on shift. Delaney had called in the whole club. Apollo didn’t know how he was going to get the Durhams out of this jam, but he had to find a way. And try to save himself, too, if he could.

One small mercy: they weren’t in the wet room. They were tied side by side to a pair of old metal-and-vinyl kitchen chairs—ankles bound to the legs of the chairs, arms bound behind. Bill was gagged; Jacinda was not.

Jacinda seemed unhurt, but Bill had obviously already had a trying afternoon. His nose was broken, and since he was gagged, he had no choice but to suck noisy, wet air through that mangled meat. His eyes were both swollen; the left one was a round ball so fucked that not even the slit between his eyelids was apparent. His head sagged at a tilt; he was barely conscious. Blood ran down his face and caked the collar of the grey coverall he wore, one with a Tulsa Liquor Wholesalers patch on the chest.

That was how he’d done it—today was liquor delivery day. But they’d had a quiet week, with no parties. Lately, with so many of the Bulls paired up, they only hung out together for an hour or two most nights and then went home. Apollo himself had called Tulsa Liquor yesterday to cancel this week’s order. They hadn’t needed to restock.

Tulsa Liquor had called this morning to confirm the cancellation.

And that was how Durham had gotten caught.

Apollo tried to run to Jacinda, but Ox held tight to his collar. “Baby, are you okay?”

“I’m okay. I’m scared.”

“I’m gonna fix this.” He turned and found Delaney’s furious face. “I can fix this, D.”

“And how do you think you’ll do that?”

Apollo didn’t know the answer. Not yet.

Delaney nodded like he hadn’t expected anything else. “Here’s what I see, and what I know. I got a spy right here who thought he had a right to listen in on private conversations. He walks right into our house like he owns the fuckin’ place, pushing a stack of beer he thinks we’re looking for. Simon calls him out on it, says we canceled that delivery. He tries to run. Si grabs him, subdues him, and we find some interesting things in the pockets of this beer deliveryman: a half dozen motherfuckin’ bugs and a .38 Special. Out in his rental truck, we find a wallet with a PI license. William Durham, it says. I think, hell, ain’t that a coincidence. Our own Apollo’s bangin’ a PI named Durham. She said she’d be no trouble. Apollo vouched. They can’t be any relation, can they? Nah, I think. Wouldn’t be no PI named Durham snooping around our house. Apollo fuckin’ vouched.”

He’d stalked around the room as he’d spoken, staring at the Durhams, and at Apollo’s brothers, and he’d finished standing right in front of Apollo, spitting the words at him. “Our new friend tells us Patrice’s mom hired him. She thinks the deaths in her family are related, and she wants answers. Now I find out you knew about this and said nothing. After all the shit we went through last year, losin’ Dane the way we did, all this same bullshit, you knew something that could get us hurt again and you said nothing. And that’s best case. Worst case is you were fuckin’ in on it.”

He drove his fist into Apollo’s belly. Not expecting the blow, Apollo barked out a gust of air and would have doubled over, but Ox still had a firm hold. His knees gave for a second, but then he stood tall. The only possible way he could fix this was to keep his feet and his head, to stand tall and take what was coming.

Take it all. That was the answer. He had to take it all on him.

“I vouched, D. Yeah, I did. I stand by that. I only found out Durham meant to do this an hour ago, I swear. Jacinda called me as soon as she found out.”

“But you knew this was a danger, didn’t you?”

“Only for a couple of days.” Seeing a way to get all the heat off Jacinda, at least, he amended that. “A week, I’ve known that Patrice’s mom wanted to hire the Durhams for a week. That’s all. D, there’s no betrayal here, not for us. Jacinda told me right away. She told her father not to take the case. He agreed, and then went behind her back. That’s between them. Nobody betrayed the club.”

“Apollo, don’t!” Jacinda cried, in defense of her father, he was sure. But she was Apollo’s priority. Her father had made this bed; he could lie in it for a while.

Delaney turned sharply on his heel. “You got somethin’ to add, missy?”

“Apollo’s only known a couple days. I didn’t tell him right away. I was afraid you’d all be suspicious of me again. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to take this case. I don’t care about what happened last year. But don’t hurt my dad any more. He made a mistake. He won’t make it again. I swear. Please, please, don’t hurt my dad. Please.”

She started to cry. Apollo had only seen her cry once before. He yanked himself free of Ox and ran to her, dropping to his knees so he could hold her. She set her forehead on his shoulder and muttered I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry through her sobs.

“It’s okay, baby. I’m gonna get you out of this. I promise.”

Delaney cleared his throat. “That’s a sad sight, but the fact remains. We got a spy right here, looking to hurt us, and we don’t let that go unanswered. Period.”

“D, what are we doing?” Gunner must have moved to stand behind Apollo; his voice was right there.

Apollo looked over his shoulder and saw just that: Gunner had put himself between the club and the pathetic scene of him kneeling with two bound people. Gunner was facing Delaney, his arms at his sides. “This is not who we are, D. We’re not killing this girl’s father. Not without a vote.”

“This don’t rise to the level of a vote, and you know it. That asshole’s nothing to us but a threat.”

Maverick moved to stand beside Gunner. “He’s Apollo’s girl’s father. She might have his kid inside her.” Jacinda flinched in Apollo’s arms at hearing Maverick say it, and her father roused and tried to open his one half-working eye. Maverick added, “It needs a vote, D.”

Delaney shook his head; he’d been obstinate and surly for the last year; losing Dane had knocked him off his rails, and the club was starting to pay for it. “His girl, not his old lady. And the question of who we can trust is what we’re fighting over. How do we know she’s pregnant? Because they say so?”

“She is my old lady, and we don’t know if she’s pregnant yet. She could be.”

As Apollo watched over his shoulder, Becker, then Simon, then Ox came to stand between them and Delaney. Slick came. And Wally.

Then Rad turned to Delaney and said, “D, come on. That’s a vote right there, starin’ at you. We can’t do this if we’re not all on board. I’m not doin’ her, baby or not, and we make bigger problems than we solve if we do her father.”

Delaney scoffed. “Since when are you my advice man, Radical?”

Rad’s eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. “I’m your security man. I’m sayin’ we’re safer if we find another way.”

“Our house was attacked. That has to be paid back, or we weaken. Who the fuck else is gonna pay it?”

“Me.” Apollo stood up and walked around the shield his brothers had made. He loved those men with a fierce fire. He faced Delaney and stood tall. “Put it on me. I’ll pay what he owes.”

“No,” Jacinda said, but her voice was small with tears and hidden behind his brothers.

Delaney stared hard at Apollo. Apollo stood and let him, wanting him to see his resolve. He’d meant it: whatever he had to do to get Jacinda, and her shithead father, out of this basement, he would do it.

“You’ll pay his debt? You don’t know what the payment is.”

“Whatever it is, I’ll pay. I vouched, so I’ll pay. But then you can’t hurt them. It’s all on me.”

“Simon,” Delaney said, not shifting his eyes from Apollo.

Simon stepped up. “Yeah, Prez.”

“You and Slick—untie those two and put ‘em in my office. Get ‘em comfortable and get a prospect to hold ‘em there until I say. I want every patch in the chapel in five minutes.” He scowled at Apollo. “You want to pay their debt, kid, then you’re gonna sit while we decide on the payment.” To the rest of the Bulls, he said, “Come on, get moving. You wanted to vote, we’ll fuckin’ vote!”

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

The ponderous silence of the chapel throbbed against Apollo’s ears. Every patch sat quietly, their eyes on him. He didn’t want to show weakness or guilt and look away, but he didn’t know where to land his own gaze. So he turned to Delaney and held there.

After Wally did a scan of the room—Delaney didn’t trust Apollo to do it—and sat back down, Delaney lit an unfiltered Camel and took a long drag. He faced Apollo and blew it out.

“You say you didn’t know. You say you didn’t betray your brothers. I believe you. I do. And I think the rest of us do, too.” Nods around the table confirmed it. Eight Ball was the last to nod, but he eventually managed a tip of his head.

Delaney knocked the ash from his Camel into the black plastic ashtray near his arm. “But you brought that girl close, and intentional or not, she brought trouble into our house. Not once, but twice. In two months. What happened last year, that was a tear straight through the heart of us, and it can’t happen ever again. And yet here we are.”

“It’s not Jacinda who brought the trouble, D. Patrice’s mom asking questions has nothing to do with Jacinda and me. The exact same thing could have happened if I’d never met her. You see that, right? I got a heads-up because I’m with her. We wouldn’t’ve had that.”

“A heads-up you didn’t use,” Rad piped up. “You kept it to yourself.”

“I did use it. I doubled up my scans. I would’ve found those bugs tomorrow morning.”

Ox shook his head. “You said nothing. You knew something that could compromise us, and you held onto it. You learned nothing from last year.”

“I hadn’t said anything yet. I wanted to find a way to say it without throwing unfair suspicion on Jacinda.”

“Choosing a piece of ass over your brothers, you mean.” Eight Ball sneered. “Again.”

Apollo clenched his hands around his knees. “She’s not a piece of ass. I was trying to keep everybody safe.”

“That didn’t work out so great, did it, bro?” Gunner asked, a twist of dark humor in his tone.

Apollo couldn’t find humor, dark or otherwise. He met and held Delaney’s eyes. “There’s something festering in the middle of this club if we’re willing to kill women for the mere thought that we don’t know if they’re on our side. Women. That’s what happened to Patrice, and I know I’m not the only one who thinks it. We let her down. Griffin went off the rails, and the minute he killed Dane, he deserved what he got, but he was right about Patrice. It’s our fault she’s dead.” He shifted his attention to Ox. “You say I’ve learned nothing from that, but if what I’m supposed to learn is that it’s okay to kill somebody just because we’re not totally sure they’re on our team, without any more cause than that, then I’m glad I missed that class, and I have to ask—is that who we want to be? I know we’re not the good guys, but aren’t we even trying to be decent human beings anymore?”

Not one face at the table was aimed at his. Every Bull stared at the scarred wood between his own hands.

Sensing that his words made an impact, Apollo went on. “I fight off guilt for what happened last year every day. I see my responsibility for what happened, and I’m sorry I let the club down. I shouldn’t have named the school as our target. I’m sorry for everything that happened because of it. Something’s been wrong at this table since, and I guess I got between the club and Jacinda because I was scared. But I know that secrets are for shit. I know they blow up. I didn’t mean to keep this one. I was trying to protect everybody. I’m sorry.”

“And now you pay,” Delaney said. “I heard what you said, and you make some sense. We’re all carrying wounds from last year, and maybe some of them are still open. But the reality for today is that there was a spy in our house—that’s not suspicion, that’s fact, and there has to be an accounting. Taking on her father’s debt is admirable, and it went a ways to getting me to believe you. But you gotta know that they’re not leaving here unless I’m assured Durham is neutralized as a threat. You understand that.”

He did understand. In fact, as his mind whirled through all the shit going down right now, right here, Apollo thought he saw the source of the infection: the club’s guilt for Patrice’s death, and her uncle’s, and Sam Wesson’s, and for the hurt and trauma laid on so many others—that guilt was a debt that remained owing. But how could they make it right?

Fuck. That was what Apollo was being asked to do. Whether they realized it or not, the Bulls were laying their own debt on him as well. He was the scapegoat.

If so, then he wanted the whole fucking thing marked paid in full. “If I pay, then the debt’s paid. You can’t hurt them. You gotta find another way.”

“We will, brother,” Maverick assured him. “They won’t get hurt.”

Realization flowered in Apollo’s mind: he was laying his life down on this table, for this table. He took a breath. “Okay. Then I’m ready.”

“Step out, boy. Don’t go far. We’ll call you in when we vote the price.”

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

Apollo leaned against the wall just outside the closed doors of the chapel. The party room was utterly empty; Delaney would have cleared the place when the trouble started. The upended beer cases lay forlornly on the patterned concrete floor. The place smelled of beer even more than usual.

He didn’t watch the time, but it felt like the ten longest minutes in history when the door opened, and Becker leaned out. He was pale and solemn, and Apollo figured they’d voted to put him down.

“Come on back, brother.”

Apollo followed him in and took his seat. He still didn’t have his kutte on; he’d never had a chance to go back to the wrecker and get it. It was an offense to be in the clubhouse at all without it. To sit at this table without it was sacrilege.

But it was lying on the table in front of Delaney. He didn’t understand how it had gotten there without him knowing it, but there it was. Delaney’s hands were folded on top of it.

“I’ll make this quick, Apollo. You are paying for one of the worst offenses there is—a material threat to the club. The payment we voted is steep, but we also voted to give you a choice.”

He nodded; that was more than he could have asked for. “Thank you.”

Delaney tipped his head. “The Brazen Bulls are named for a certain kind of punishment. I know you know what it is.”

Apollo’s blood fell to the bottom of his body. He felt sick and woozy in a rush. Yes, he knew what a brazen bull was. Knowing club history was part of earning a patch. He managed another nod, but he couldn’t speak.

A brazen bull was an immense, hollow, usually bronze statue of a bull with a door in its belly and a tube from its belly to its mouth. In the Middle Ages, the condemned would be stuffed inside and sealed in. Fire would be stoked underneath, and the person inside would be roasted to death, their screams sounding through the bull’s mouth.

Their grill on the back patio was a small replica of a brazen bull. It wasn’t big enough to hold him or any man. They didn’t have any such contraption of that size. But they meant to roast him nonetheless.

Jesus Christ. He looked around the table at the serious, silent faces of the men he called brothers. They’d all voted for this? They must have; a vote like this, an action against a brother, could only be unanimous.

Every one of them had made this vote.

“Only once before in the history of the club have we taken justice this way. In that case, it was a death sentence carried out on a traitor. Today, it’s a punishment for dangerous judgment tantamount to betrayal. We don’t mean to kill you, Apollo, but the threat to the club today was great, and the payment will be as well. You will be brazed. Five minutes over fire. But we’re offering you a choice. Take the brazing, or give up your patch.” He pushed the kutte at him.

Apollo set his hands on the big, embroidered patch—the fierce, snarling bull, the gold ring through his nose. The flames rising up behind him.

As a mechanic, he’d taken dozens of minor burns on his hands and arms over the years. A few years back, when there’d been a big pileup on I-44, he’d gotten a pretty bad burn, second degree, on his forearm, helping pull somebody from the wreckage. He’d carried the nasty reminder of it since. He knew the pain of a burn, and those had all been fast touches of heat, only a second before he’d jerked away. The pain, though, it lasted. The worst pain he knew.

Five minutes over fire. Five minutes. Could he even survive that?

Or he could walk away. They’d given him that out—he could stand up, leave his kutte where it was, walk back to Delaney’s office and collect Jacinda and her old man, and stroll out the front door with them. Cover up his club ink. Find another job as a mechanic. Or use his savings to open his own shop, maybe. A safer life for him and Jacinda, and their kids. Maybe one she had in her right now.

Again, he scanned the faces of his brothers. There wasn’t any one he was closer to than any other; he felt close to them all. They’d been a big part of his family for six years. He’d seen their kids born. He’d celebrated holidays and weddings with them. He’d fought a war with them. This was the life he’d left his family’s scrubby little farm to lead. He loved these men, this club, this life, even now, when it was dark and wounded. Neil had become Apollo in this clubhouse, and in his heart, he was now only Apollo.

His brothers were asking him to cleanse their sins, and to do it with fire. If he turned his back on this and walked away, he left the club’s debt, and his own, owing, and left the club, and himself, to fester in darkness.

He picked up the kutte and put it on. “My patch isn’t up for grabs. I’ll take the fire.”