Chapter 1
Hawk
Cala Sirena hadn't changed, and that was the first thing that nearly took my knees out.
Same crooked church tower keeping watch over the harbor. Same peeling blue shutters on the bakery. Same smell of salt and espresso and diesel fuel that used to mean home before I'd made it mean something I had to run from.
I eased the bike down the switchback road above the town and let it idle a second at the overlook, because I needed a minute before I went any further. Below me, boats rocked in their slips like nothing in the world had ever gone wrong here. Like six years hadn't happened.
"You gonna sit there all day, or you gonna ride in like a man," I muttered to myself, and then I laughed, short and rough, because apparently six years of near-solitude had turned me into someone who talked to himself on cliffsides.
I twisted the throttle and rode down into my own past.
The garage looked exactly the same, down to the faded Coastline Kings banner someone had never bothered replacing. I parked out front and killed the engine, and the silence that followed felt enormous.
Diesel came out first, wiping his hands on a rag black with the same grease that probably never fully left that garage. He stopped dead in the doorway.
"No," he said.
"Hey, Diesel."
"No. Absolutely not. I'm not doing this again. Last time a ghost showed up in this parking lot it was Marco's runaway bride, and that took a month off my life."
"Good to see you too."
He crossed the lot in about four strides and hauled me into a hug that nearly cracked a rib, which was, I supposed, the actual welcome.
"Six years, Hawk." He pulled back, gripping my shoulders, looking at me like he was checking I was real. "Six years and not one word."
"Couldn't send word. That was the point."
"I know that was the point. Doesn't mean it didn't suck." He let me go, shaking his head, already grinning despite himself. "You look like hell, by the way."
"Thanks."
"I mean it in the nicest possible way."
Reaper came out next, slower, older around the eyes than I remembered, though the way he carried himself hadn't lost an inch of the authority that made him president in the first place.
He didn't hug me. He just looked at me for a long moment, taking my measure the way he always did, like he was reading a report only he could see.
"You're back," he said.
"I'm back."
"Alive."
"Mostly."
"Good enough." A small, rare smile cracked through. "We'll want the whole story. Tonight. Everyone."
"I figured."
"For now—" he tipped his chin toward the garage doors, "—go say hello to your bike bay. Nothing's touched it. Diesel wouldn't let anyone near it. Sentimental idiot."
"I heard that," Diesel called from somewhere inside.
"You were meant to."
I walked into the garage and felt something in my chest ease for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit.
My old bay was exactly where I'd left it — tools hung in the same order, my name still scrawled on faded masking tape above the bench.
Small thing. It shouldn't have mattered as much as it did.
"You kept it," I said.
"Course I kept it." Diesel leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. "Man doesn't come back from the dead to find his bay converted into storage for spare mufflers. Some things you don't do to a brother."
"Appreciate that."
"Don't get sentimental on me. I've had enough crying men in this garage to last a lifetime. Marco alone." He shuddered theatrically. "The stories I could tell you about Marco crying over a runaway bride and a kid's bicycle."
"I want to hear every single one."
"You will. Over beers. Tonight." He studied me a beat longer, and something more serious crept into his voice. "You good, man? Actually good?"
"Working on it."
"That's an honest answer, at least." He clapped my shoulder once, hard, then straightened up like he was shaking off the sentiment before it could get any worse.
"Come on. Let's get you fed before Reaper makes you do the full debrief on an empty stomach.
Man interrogates like the food's the reward for surviving it. "
We walked out of the garage into the afternoon light, and that's when I saw her.
Across the harbor, at the edge of the fish market, sunlight caught her hair the exact color it used to catch it — a kind of burnished gold that had haunted about a thousand different memories I'd spent six years trying not to have.
She was laughing at something, head tipped back, a woven bag of vegetables balanced on her hip.
Lena.
Every plan I had, every careful line I'd drawn between the man I used to be and the man I'd become in order to survive being gone — all of it turned to ash in about half a second.
"Hawk?" Diesel's voice, somewhere far off.
I didn't answer. I couldn't. I was watching her the way you watch weather rolling in, half in awe, half already bracing for what it's going to do to you.
She hadn't seen me yet. I had maybe five more seconds of that mercy before whatever came next.
"Oh," Diesel said, following my line of sight, understanding dawning slow and then all at once. "Oh, man."
"Yeah."
"You never—" He stopped. Started again. "In six years, you never once—"
"No."
"Does she know you're—"
"No."
"Okay." Diesel exhaled long through his teeth, the sound of a man recalculating an entire evening's plans. "Okay, so. This is happening. Right now. In the parking lot. No warm-up."
"I don't need warm-up."
"You look like you need a paramedic, is what you look like."
He wasn't wrong. My pulse was doing something violent and unhelpful, hammering against my ribs like it had somewhere urgent to be. I'd faced down men with guns pointed at my chest with a steadier heartbeat than I had standing in that parking lot watching Lena laugh at a fish vendor.
Then she turned. Just slightly. Just enough that the sun caught the side of her face, and for one suspended second I saw her exactly as she used to be, unguarded, easy, mine.
Then her eyes found me across the harbor, and the laugh died on her face like a light going out.
She went very still.
I didn't move either. Couldn't. We stood there, the whole harbor between us, boats and fishermen and tourists carrying on their ordinary afternoon completely oblivious to the fact that time had just stopped for the two of us.
"Hawk." Diesel's voice again, quieter now, careful. "You want me to give you two some room, or you want backup?"
"Give me a minute."
"Take all the minutes you need, brother. I'll be inside pretending very hard not to watch through the window."
He wasn't lying. I heard the garage door not quite close all the way behind him.
I started walking. Lena didn't run — I want to say that for her, because six years ago I'd left in a way that would've given anyone the right to run, and she didn't. She stood her ground at the edge of the fish market with her bag of vegetables and her chin lifted in that stubborn way I used to love more than I probably should have, and she waited for me to close the distance.
By the time I reached her, my mouth had gone completely dry.
"Lena."
"You're alive." Her voice came out flat, careful, like she was testing whether the words were true by saying them out loud.
"I'm alive."
"Six years." She said it the way Diesel had said it, except it landed different coming from her, landed somewhere under my sternum and stayed there. "Six years, Tomas."
Nobody but her ever called me that. Hearing it now nearly broke something loose in my chest.
"I know."
"Do you?" A flicker of anger cracked through the shock, and honestly, I welcomed it — anger I could work with, anger meant she still felt something. "Because from where I stood, it looked a lot like you just vanished. No call. No letter. No word to anyone, not even Reaper, not for—"
"I couldn't."
"You keep saying that like it fixes something."
"It doesn't fix anything. I know that." I stepped closer, close enough to see the fine lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn't been there before, six years' worth of something I hadn't been around to see happen. "I'm not here to fix it in thirty seconds in a fish market, Lena. I'm just here."
"Why?" The question came out rough, almost a whisper, like she was afraid of what answer she might get. "Why now? Why at all?"
"Because it's done. Whatever I left to handle — it's done. I'm not looking over my shoulder anymore." I held her gaze, steady as I could manage with my pulse still going haywire. "I came home."
Something moved behind her eyes — hope, maybe, or its more cautious cousin, the kind that's been burned once and isn't in a hurry to trust the fire again.
"That's convenient," she said. "Home. After six years."
"I know how it sounds."
"Do you?" She shifted her bag higher on her hip, a small defensive motion, putting a basket of tomatoes between us like it might actually help. "Because it sounds like a man who thinks he can just ride back in and pick up exactly where he left off."
"I don't think that."
"Good. Because you can't."
"I know that too."
We stood there another moment, the harbor noise washing around us — gulls, a boat engine, someone haggling loudly over the price of octopus a few stalls down, absurdly ordinary sounds for what felt like the least ordinary moment of my life.
"How long are you staying?" she asked finally, and there was something careful in the question, something that made me look at her harder.
"For good, if the club will have me back."
"They'll have you back. Reaper's been keeping your bay clean for six years like a shrine. You could've robbed a bank and he'd probably still—" She caught herself, some instinct closing the sentence off before it went somewhere she didn't want it to go.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Lena."
"I have to get home." She said it too fast, the woven bag suddenly very interesting to her, her eyes anywhere but on me. "I've got — someone waiting on me."
That landed like a blow I hadn't braced for. "Someone."