Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 12: What the MC Knows
He didn’t sleep that night.
He lay in his bed in the house on the edge of town — a real house, four bedrooms, more space than one man needed, which he’d bought because the club house wasn’t a place he wanted to spend every night at thirty-five — and stared at the ceiling and made himself breathe at a normal rate, which took more effort than it should have.
Derek. He turned the name over in his mind with the deliberate detachment of someone who knew better than to let the word have too much weight. Maya’s ex. Emma’s father. Four months pregnant and he’d hit her. Year and a half of that before she got out. Three hundred dollars and a running car and she’d driven until she needed gas.
He thought about the way she’d said I still check the exits when I walk into a room.
He thought about Emma — Emma, who had no fear of anything, who had walked into the world with open arms and named motorcycles and made friends with mechanics, and he thought about what it meant that this small, fearless person had been born into a situation that required her mother to check exits.
He breathed.
In the MC, you learned to put the feeling somewhere useful or it burned a hole in you. That was a lesson he’d learned early and the hard way. Rage without direction was just destruction; it ate the people who carried it. You had to aim it at something functional or you had to put it down.
He put it down.
He picked up his phone and called Reyes.
Carlos Reyes was the Iron Skulls’ sergeant-at-arms, which meant he was the person who knew things. Not the enforcer-with-no-brain version of the role that people who’d seen too many biker movies imagined; Reyes was meticulous, careful, thorough. He had contacts in law enforcement, contacts in the county system, contacts in places that didn’t get discussed at dinner. He ran background checks the way other men ran credit cards — fluently, without fuss.
He picked up on the second ring, which meant he was awake. Reyes was often awake.
“Got a name for you,” Reaper said. “Derek —” He stopped. He didn’t have a last name. He’d been so focused on not saying anything that unsettled Maya that he hadn’t asked.
“Derek who?”
“I’ll get you the rest tomorrow. Phoenix, Arizona origin. Restraining order, maybe two years old, from a woman named Maya Santos.” He paused. “I want everything.”
A brief silence. “Santos. The woman from the diner.”
“Yes.”
Another silence, and then Reyes, with the economy of someone who had known Reaper for a long time: “I’ll run it in the morning. Quietly.”
“Quiet is the word,” Reaper said. “She doesn’t know I’m doing this.”
“Should she?”
He thought about that for a moment — about Maya’s face when she’d said I want you to understand why I’m slow, and about the particular dignity she wore around not being helped more than she’d asked for.
“I’ll tell her if it turns up anything that matters,” he said. “If it’s clean, she doesn’t need to know.”
“And if it’s not clean?”
“Then I need to know before she does.”
Reyes digested this. “Alright.” A pause. “She know you’re —”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” The word carried something that wasn’t quite approval but was in the vicinity of it. Reyes had never said much about Reaper’s personal life; none of them did, directly, but he’d had the sense lately that the MC’s collective opinion of Maya Santos was somewhere between good and very good. “I’ll have something by tomorrow afternoon.”
He thanked him and hung up. Lay back on the bed.
He thought about the foster system — about being eight years old in a house with people who were paid to be responsible for him and the specific education you got in that environment about the way power worked, about what it meant when someone who was supposed to protect you used their size instead. He’d been lucky, relatively. He’d had a foster father in his last placement who’d been a decent man, who’d taught him the difference between a wrench and a socket and showed him what it looked like when a grown man kept his hands to himself.
Not everyone got that.
He thought about a woman driving through the night with a baby and three hundred dollars and no destination beyond away.
He thought: I am going to be very careful with her.
He’d been telling himself that for weeks. He meant it, still. He meant it more now.
He also thought, quietly and precisely: if Derek ever comes near them, that is a different kind of problem.
He put that away too.
Reyes had results by two the next afternoon.
Reaper read them in the office with the door closed. Derek Marsh, thirty-one, Phoenix, Arizona. Two prior DUIs. One assault charge, 2019, pleaded down to a fine. The restraining order was active, filed by Maya Santos in January of two years ago, one count of domestic violence sustained. There had been a second complaint two months after the first, logged as a violation of the restraining order — Derek had shown up at a Phoenix address, an address that was now empty.
He’d gone looking for her. He’d gone looking, and found she was already gone.
There was a warrant. A minor one, a failure-to-appear on the order violation. Not active enough to prompt a serious search, but enough that if anyone ran his name, it would come up.
He sat with the file for a long time.
Then he called Reyes back. “He’s got a warrant. FTA.”
“I saw.”
“He went looking for her after she left. Found the old address empty.”
“Yeah.” A pause. “You want me to put a watch on the exits from Phoenix? Anything that routes toward Yucca Flats?”
“Not yet.” He thought carefully. “But I want to know the minute he leaves that city. Any travel.”
“Done.” Reyes paused. “Reaper. You going to tell her?”
He looked at the file. At Derek Marsh’s record, the assault plea, the restraining order. At the violation that said he’d looked.
“Yes,” he said. “Not everything. But yes.”
He took her to the park Sunday morning — Emma at Mrs. Peralta’s for a few hours — just the two of them, coffee from the gas station, sitting on a bench with the desert morning still cool and the sky enormous and blue.
He told her that Reyes had run a background check. That the MC did it as a matter of course when someone new was in their orbit, which was true and also not entirely the reason. He watched her face move through something before it settled.
“What did you find?” she asked.
“Warrant,” he said. “Failure to appear on the restraining order violation.” He paused. “He went to your old address in Phoenix after you left.”
She looked straight ahead. A muscle worked in her jaw.
“He didn’t find you,” Reaper said. “You were already gone.”
“I know.” Her voice was controlled. Too controlled, the kind of controlled that was the surface of something else entirely. “I know he went. My neighbor called me.”
He looked at her profile. “You’ve known?”
“For two years.” She took a sip of her coffee. “I figured it meant he’d given up. That he’d decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.” She paused. “I hoped.”
“He’s still in Phoenix. As far as we can tell.”
“As far as you can tell.” She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were steady and shadowed. “You’re monitoring him.”
“Reyes is keeping an eye on anything that moves toward here. Yes.”
She was quiet for a long moment. He let the silence do what it needed to do, let her process it at her own pace, didn’t rush it.
“Thank you,” she said finally. Not warm — she wasn’t ready for warm — but real.
“You don’t have to deal with this alone,” he said.
She looked out across the park, at the empty swings and the long desert light. “I’ve been dealing with it alone for two years.”
“I know.” He set his coffee down. “That’s over now.”
She looked at him sharply, as though checking for something, and then the sharpness softened into something that might, eventually, become relief.
“Okay,” she said. Very quietly.
He picked up his coffee. They sat in the Sunday morning and watched the park and didn’t say anything more for a while, and it was enough. For now, everything he needed to do was sit beside her and let her know he was there.
He could do that. He’d do that as long as she needed him to.
He’d do it considerably longer than that.
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