The clubhouse is an old jail.
Of course it is.
I have spent years trying to get out of one kind of cage, and now I’m sitting in front of another with my sleeping child beside me and a dead man’s name in my mouth.
The thought is unfair. I know that.
But fear isn’t fair. Fear only recognizes bars.
I almost laugh. Not because it’s funny. Because if I don’t laugh, I might throw up.
I’ve brought my child to an outlaw motorcycle club in a town named Hell because a dead wrestler might be my father.
This is either the bravest thing I’ve ever done or the stupidest.
Maybe both.
Derby slows near the gate. Two bikers step out from the shadows, and Wildcat’s foot eases onto the brake. The tow rig gives a heavy little lurch. August snuffles in his sleep but doesn’t wake.
The men wear leather cuts. One has a beard thick enough to hide half his face. The other is oversized, tattooed, and built like a brick wall that learned how to glare. Their eyes slide from Derby to me, then to the truck strapped down behind us with my boxes and trash bags.
I know what I look like.
A mess.
A woman with swollen eyes, dirty jeans, and shame sitting beside her like another passenger.
That’s what bothers me most. Not the danger. Not the bikers. Not even the iron bars. The mess.
I’ve spent years smoothing myself into a shape Jeremy approved of. Hair neat. Voice calm. Face made up enough to look like I’d not been crying but not enough to make him ask who I was trying to impress. Clothes nice enough to reflect well on him and plain enough not to invite suspicion. I learned how to look composed while shrinking inside my own skin.
Tonight, there is no composing this.
The huge one says something to Derby I can’t hear. Derby answers, then jerks his thumb back toward me. Both men look again.
This time, their gazes are sharper.
Not lustful. Not mocking.
Assessing.
That should make me feel better.
It doesn’t.
I’ve been assessed by men before. Jeremy assessed my clothes, my tone, my spending, my friends, my parenting, the way I folded towels, the way I held my mouth when he talked. Men can measure you for all kinds of cages.
The gate opens.
Derby rides through.
I sit there for one second too long, hands locked around August’s backpack.
I can still ask Wildcat to stop.
The thought comes fast and stupid.
Stop and go where? Back to Jeremy? To some motel I can’t afford because he controls our money? To a shelter where he will find me because his cousin works dispatch and his best friend drinks with half the county deputies? To my mother’s old place, empty now, with the roof leaking and the neighbors still thinking Jeremy is such a nice young man?