Retribution On Tap: A Crimson Universe Novella
"Some storms don't come to pass-they come to collect."
In a dying Oklahoma bar where the lights hum like old ghosts and the whiskey tastes like regret, two brothers rule the night. Billy and Hank Coffman-bull riders, thieves, and born trouble-have spent years running cons, cracking skulls, and drinking away the weight of their sins. To the locals, they're legends. To everyone else, they're a cautionary tale that never learned its lesson.
But tonight, the storm outside isn't the one to fear.
When a stranger walks in from the rain-calm, clean, and out of place-he turns the Coffman brothers' world upside down. He buys a round for the house, speaks with the easy charm of a preacher, and hides something cold behind his eyes. By the time the thunder rolls, it's clear he didn't come to drink. He came for retribution.
As the night unravels, secrets long buried claw their way back into the light: a broken preacher, a bloodstained church, and the ghosts of a woman and child who never got their justice. Trapped by the storm, every soul inside that smoke-choked bar becomes witness to a reckoning fifteen years in the making.
What begins as a night of beer and bravado turns into a brutal dance between guilt and vengeance. Hank, the older brother, carries the weight of the past like an anchor. Billy, volatile and wild, refuses to face the truth of what they've done. And Landon Ryker-the man they wronged-has spent a lifetime perfecting what comes next.
Justice here doesn't come in the daylight. It comes slow, deliberate, and personal.
Told with the haunting lyricism of Cormac McCarthy and the moral weight of James Lee Burke, Retribution on Tap is a neo-noir Southern thriller about the debts men can't escape and the violence that binds them. Every sentence drips with smoke, rain, and sin. Every page turns darker than the last.
This is a story of bad men who meet a worse one. Of the unrepentant tested against the unrelenting. Of what happens when a lifetime of cruelty finally comes home to collect.
Inside this bar, the line between the living and the damned is written in bourbon and blood.
Trigger Warning: Contains graphic violence, sexual assault, strong language, and mature themes. Intended for adult readers who appreciate dark realism and morally gray storytelling.
Fans of gritty Southern fiction, psychological vengeance tales, and slow-burn tension will find this novella impossible to put down. When the doors close and the storm begins, the only question that remains is:
How much blood does it take to wash a conscience clean?
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks® and the ThriftBooks® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
