Iron coven

## CHAPTER ELEVEN: Civil War

The trouble started at four in the afternoon, three hours before the ride to the fire road was scheduled to leave, and it started exactly where Marcus should have expected it to — with Ortiz.

He found the younger patch in the garage, geared up, saddlebags packed heavier than a simple supply run required, checking a rifle with the too-careful focus of a man trying not to think about what he was actually doing.

"Going somewhere?" Marcus asked.

Ortiz didn't look up. "Taking my piece of this club and getting my family somewhere the Ledger can't find us. I got an aunt two states over. She doesn't know what we are. Doesn't need to."

"You know that's not how this works. Selene told you—"

"Selene told me a lot of things," Ortiz said, finally looking up, eyes red-rimmed with a fear he'd clearly been carrying alone all day. "She told me nobody gets to vote on Reyes's choice. Fine. I'm not voting on his choice. I'm making mine. I didn't patch into this club to gamble my daughter's father on somebody else's science experiment with something that erased a man off a fire road like he was never solid."

"Running didn't work for Danny."

"Danny ran alone, with no plan, panicking. I've been planning this for six months, ever since I started actually understanding what this club really was underneath the bikes." Ortiz slung the rifle, shouldered a bag. "I love this club, Marcus. I love Selene. God knows I respect Reyes more than almost anybody I've ever patched under. But I am not staying to watch whatever happens tonight, in case the wrong name gets written down because of it. I'm sorry. I really am. But I'm going."

Marcus didn't stop him. Some part of him, watching Ortiz roll his bike out of the garage bay into the gray afternoon light, understood the impulse too well to fight it — the same impulse that had kept him away from Ashgrave for three years, the same promise he'd made himself in a visitation room and broken the second a text message found him. He just hoped, watching Ortiz's taillight disappear down Route 9, that running actually worked for somebody, eventually, even if it hadn't worked yet for anyone Marcus had known.

He wasn't the only one running.

By five o'clock, four more bikes were gone from the yard — not deserters exactly, Selene said grimly when Marcus reported it, just people making the same calculation Ortiz had made, weighing loyalty against survival and landing somewhere Marcus couldn't entirely blame them for. But the fracture didn't stop at people leaving. It curdled, in some corners of the clubhouse, into something uglier.

Marcus heard the shouting before he saw it — Walsh's voice, raised in the main hall, squared off against two younger patches who'd apparently decided that if the club was going to gamble everyone's safety on Reyes's rewrite, then somebody needed to stop it by force if necessary.

"You're not putting hands on him," Walsh was saying, planted between the two men and the hallway that led toward the ritual room, arms crossed, immovable despite being outnumbered and easily twenty years older than both of them combined. "I don't care how scared you are. He's earned the right to choose his own ending."

"He's going to get us all killed," one of the younger men shot back — Danvers, Marcus placed the name after a second, a patch who'd come up under Reyes's direct sponsorship and clearly felt the betrayal of that mentorship curdling into something closer to rage than grief. "You want to let him try some backroom magic trick on a debt that's kept this whole club breathing for forty years? What happens when he gets it wrong, Walsh? What happens when the thing under that road decides we all owe extra for the insult?"

"Then that's a price I'm willing to let him try to avoid instead of just rolling over for it," Walsh said. "Same as I'd want tried for you, if your name got written down instead of his."

Marcus stepped into the hallway before it could go further, positioning himself beside Walsh without quite deciding to, some old instinct from enforcer days recognizing a standoff about to tip into something that couldn't be walked back.

"Nobody's laying hands on anybody," Marcus said. "Not tonight. You've got a problem with how this club's choosing to handle its own business, that's a conversation for after sundown, when we all find out together whether this works. Right now, you're just scared, and scared people who go looking for a fight usually find one that costs more than the thing they were afraid of in the first place."

Danvers looked like he wanted to push it further — jaw tight, hands flexing at his sides — but something in Marcus's stillness, or maybe just the accumulated exhaustion of the whole terrible day, made him step back instead.

"This is on you if it goes wrong," Danvers said, to nobody in particular, and stalked off toward the yard, his companion trailing after him with a last, uneasy glance back.

Walsh let out a breath he'd clearly been holding for longer than the standoff itself. "Been thirty years since I had to draw a line like that inside these walls," he said quietly. "Didn't think I'd live to see the day this club turned on itself over whether to *save* somebody instead of over turf or money."

"Maybe that's the difference between a club and whatever this actually is," Marcus said. "Turf and money, people fight over rationally. This—" he gestured vaguely at the whole building, the whole impossible weight of it. "This asks people to bet their families on faith in something none of us fully understand. Faith fractures people different than greed does."

Selene found them a few minutes later, having heard enough of the aftermath from a prospect who'd come running, and her face, when she took in the empty spaces in the garage where five bikes used to sit, was carefully, deliberately blank in the way Marcus now recognized as her holding something enormous together by main force.

"We lost people," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Five bikes," Walsh confirmed. "Ortiz first, then four more after word spread. Almost had a sixth situation just now, but Marcus talked Danvers back off the ledge before it got physical."

Selene absorbed that, nodded once, filed it away in whatever internal ledger of her own she was keeping alongside the literal one. "Then we ride out tonight with fewer than I'd have liked, and we do it anyway. Reyes doesn't get less deserving of a chance just because some of our own got too scared to stand behind him."

"You don't blame them," Marcus said. "The ones who left."

"No," Selene said, and something in her voice cracked just slightly, just once, the way it had in the ritual room the night before. "I don't blame anybody for being afraid of this. I've been afraid of it my whole life. I just don't have the luxury of running from it the way they do. Somebody in this club has to be the one who stays and tries, or none of us ever find out if there was ever a way out at all."

Outside, the afternoon light had started its long slide toward evening — not the wrongness of the purple dusk yet, just ordinary gold turning ordinary amber, the sun tracking down toward a horizon that would, in a handful of hours, decide whether Reyes lived to see another one.

"Get the bikes ready," Selene said. "We ride for the fire road in two hours. Whoever's still standing with us by then — that's who we've got. It'll have to be enough."