“Just like the rest of us.”

“Yep.” I had to fight the urge to chug the beer down and order him to keep them coming.

“I’m Brite and this is my bar. I ended up with it when I got out and started spending more time in the bar than I did at home. I’ve been through three wives and one triple bypass, but the bar stays true.”

I lifted the eyebrow that had the scar above it and felt the corner of my mouth kick up in a grin.

“Brite?” The guy looked like Paul Bunyan or a Hells Angel; the name didn’t really fit.

A smile found its way through that massive beard and pearly-white teeth that were the only bright spot in the dim bar.

“Brighton Walker, Brite for short.” He extended a hand that I shook on reflex.

“Rome Archer.”

He dropped his head in a little nod and moved down the bar to help another customer.

“That’s a good name for a warrior.”

I closed my eyes briefly and tried to remember what it was like to feel like a warrior. It seemed like it was a million miles away from this bar stool. The music switched to AC/DC and I decided this was my new favorite place to hang out.

I was on my Harley, so I should probably cool it with the booze. A DUI would just be the icing on the crap cake I was currently being served on a daily basis, but as the beer mixed with the potent bourbon from earlier, none of that seemed to really matter anymore.

At some point I did another shot with Brite and the bar stool next to me was abandoned by the grizzled old man that had been complaining about his wife and his girlfriend for the last hour and quickly occupied by a redhead with too much makeup on and too little clothes. Had I been three less beers in, I would’ve seen her for the trouble she was. As it was, Brite told her to scram, advice she promptly ignored. She was cute, in that I’m a good time take me home kind of way, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had randomly picked anyone up from a bar. When I was overseas there had been a female intelligence officer who’d been down to be friends with benefits whenever we were in the same place at the same time, but it had been months since I had seen her. Maybe a quick, sleazy hookup was just what I needed to break through the black cloud that had been hovering over me since my return.

“What’s your name, sugar?”

Her voice was squeaky and hurt my head but I was loaded enough to ignore it.

“Rome.”

I saw her heavily made-up eyes dart back to someplace over my shoulder and that should have been my first clue that this wasn’t going to end up all fun and games.

“That’s a different name. I’m Abbie. Now that we’re friends, why don’t we get out of here and get better acquainted?” She ran a painted fingernail over the curve of my bicep and for some reason the bloodred color of it made other images of things that same color start to flash behind my already hazy vision.

I started to pull away, to get those hands that were making bad things happen in my foggy brain to let me go, when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder from behind. I was a trained soldier, but more than that, I was a man who had a brother born and bred into trouble. I knew what trouble looked like from a million miles away. I knew what trouble felt like, what it moved like, how it sounded, and yet I had kept right on drinking and ignored all the signs as it built up around me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Brite frown at whoever was standing behind me, and even in my stupor of bourbon and beer I knew this wasn’t going to be good.

Sighing under my breath, I shook off the talons that had me seeing blood spilling out of a young soldier’s throat onto the desert sand and turned around so that I was leaning back on the bar with my elbows. It shouldn’t have surprised me to see that almost the entire back poolroom of bikers was now gathered around me and the bar area. The guy with his paw on my shoulder was a scrawny little fella and I felt my boozy brain register that he wasn’t wearing the club’s colors, which meant he was either a hang-around or a prospect, and I was the lucky bastard he had picked to try and prove his worth with. Sometimes it sucked being a big-ass dude.

“Can I help you?”

The redhead was long gone and Brite was making his way around the end of the long bar. The old guys stayed posted up and ignored the brewing hurricane like only lifelong drunks were capable of doing.

“You trying to start something with my girl, GI Joe?”

It was boring and so predictable that I had to roll my eyes. I had been in enough shithole places in the world to know that a bar brawl was a bar brawl, but throw in a wannabe biker and it could get really foul.

“No. I was trying to get drunk, and she interrupted me.”

I don’t think they were expecting that because a couple of titters ran through the group. Scrawny puffed up his chest and reached out a finger to poke me in mine. Normally I could just walk away from this kind of thing. I was typically a levelheaded kind of guy. I didn’t fight unless it was in defense of something I really and truly believed in, or in defense of someone I loved, but today was the wrong day to goad a reaction out of me.

I swatted the guy’s hand away and did a quick survey of the room. I didn’t see any visible hardware, but bikers were known for stashing knives in hard-to-see places, and Brite seemed like a cool enough guy. I didn’t want to trash his place if I could help it.

“Look, dude, you don’t want to do this, and I really don’t want to do this. We both know you sent the chick over here to try and start shit, so just leave it at that. I’ll bounce, and you and your buddies can go back to smoking up and shooting pool. Nobody has to bleed or look stupid. Okay?”

In hindsight, trying to drunkenly reason with a bunch of bikers probably was bound to have a low success rate. Between one blink and the next I had a bottle broken over my head and found myself in a serious choke hold. Scrawny Guy looked like he wanted to kill me and the rest of his crew was just hanging back waiting to see what he could do. I didn’t really want to hurt the guy, but the bottle over the head had taken a nice chunk of skin off with it and a river of red was steadily flowing into my eyes. Just like with the red nail polish on the tramp’s fingers, the sight of my own blood took me to another place and time, and it wasn’t me struggling with a stupid, show-off biker, it was me battling for life, for freedom, for the security of my family and friends at home. Just like that, the poor kid had no idea what hit him.

I already had a distinct size advantage on the guy; throw in the fact that I was a soldier who’d been battle-hardened and trained by the country’s best, and it got nasty and bloody fast. It didn’t matter that the numbers were so obviously skewed in the biker’s favor, I was getting out of the bar in one piece no matter what I had to do to make that happen.

Bar stools were broken. Glasses went flying. Heads banged against the floor. I think at one point I heard someone crying, and somehow when it was all over I was hunched over with my hands on my knees, blood now dripping not only from my lacerated head but also my hands, and a nasty knife slice across my ribs. The bikers had scattered, for the most part, and I wasn’t surprised to see Brite holding a baseball bat and glaring at me.

“What the hell was that?”

I would have laughed, but I think the knife cut in my side was worse than I’d originally thought.

“A really shitty ‘thanks for your service’?” My humor was not appreciated, as the older man swore at me and pulled me painfully into a standing position.

“Doesn’t look like that little punk is gonna get patched in anytime soon.”

I got a critical once-over and was met with a sigh.

“You need a doctor.”

It wasn’t a question.

I tried to wipe the blood off my face with the back of my hand but just ended up smearing it all across my face while my side steadily leaked onto the floor.