Preacher speaks quietly: "She's going to need protection. Whoever planted those bombs knows she saw them."
"Yeah."
"So, what's the play?"
"We watch. We wait. When they come for her, we're there."
Diesel spits. "We're bikers, not babysitters."
Reaper turns, looks at him hard. "We're men who'd be dead if not for a 10-year-old girl. That means something."
Diesel looks away.
"Motion to protect the Williams family," Preacher says. "Who's in?"
Hands go up one by one. Not all, but enough.
"Motion carries," Reaper says.
They mount their bikes. Engines roar. The sound echoes off the warehouse walls, loud and defiant.
Across the city, in an apartment that smells like mold and fear, Zara closes her notebook. She doesn't know that thirty men just voted to protect her. She doesn't know that the war has only just begun. She only knows what she wrote: *They erased me. But I know what I saw.*
And somewhere in that simple sentence, in that refusal to be silenced, lies the seed of everything that will come next.
Lieutenant Owen Castellano sits in an unmarked office three miles from the bombing site. The room has no windows, no nameplates. This is where the Chicago Police Department's special task force operates: off the books, off the record.
Castellano is 45, decorated, white, with the kind of face that photographs well at press conferences. He's received four commendations for bravery. The mayor shook his hand last year. His daughter plays soccer; his wife teaches second grade. He's also ordered the execution of three people in the last eighteen months.
Four men sit across from him—the same four who planted the bombs. They're out of tactical gear now, dressed in plain clothes. Officer Marcus Trent, the youngest at 32, speaks first: "The bombing failed. The Preacher's alive. All of them are."
Castellano doesn't blink. "I'm aware."