Chapter Two #2
I hang up and I'm already moving, grabbing keys off the hook by the door, cut off the back of a chair where it's hung untouched for two days because I haven't had anywhere to wear it.
My hands aren't quite steady pulling it on.
Ghost. Whoever did this knew to use my road name specifically, which means whoever did this knows things about me that strangers vandalizing a random shop wouldn't know, and there's exactly one direction my mind goes when I put that fact next to five months in Amarillo and a woman whose half-brother rides with an outfit that's spent three years trying to find a crack in Reaper territory wide enough to slide a knife into.
I should have seen this coming. I told myself the Blackthorn problem was Silas's business, something the club would handle through channels, and I let myself believe that because believing it meant not having to sit with what I'd actually handed a rival club when I let my guard down in a bar six hundred miles from home.
I told Reina things I had no business telling anyone outside church.
Supply run schedules, once. A couple names, in passing, nothing I thought mattered at the time because I wasn't thinking straight about much of anything by then.
I should call Preacher. That's the part of me that's still a patched member first and a husband second, some days, even now, the part that knows the second I confirm Blackthorn's behind this, it stops being a private mess between me and Rowan and becomes club business Silas needs to know about before it goes any further.
I grab my phone off the counter on my way out the door and fire off one line before I swing a leg over the bike: Trouble at Rowan's shop.
Might be Blackthorn. Might be on me. Explain in person.
He'll have questions. I don't have good answers yet, and I'm not going to pretend I do just to make the conversation easier on myself.
I'm on the bike two minutes later, engine loud enough in the quiet street to feel like an accusation, and I ride the eleven minutes into town faster than I should, running the four-way at Hensley without slowing because there's not a single truck out this early and because some animal part of my brain has already decided nothing matters more right now than getting to that shop.
I pass the garage, the diner with its lights just coming on, the courthouse square where Rowan and I got married six years ago on a Tuesday afternoon because neither of us wanted a production, just each other and a judge and her father standing up as witness two years before the cancer took him.
I remember exactly how she looked that day, hair down for once, laughing at something the judge said about the paperwork, looking at me like I was the safest bet she'd ever made.
Her father stood up beside her in his cut, Reaper patch bright against a white dress shirt he'd clearly bought special for the occasion, and he shook my hand afterward with a grip hard enough to leave a mark and told me, quiet, just between us, that he'd buried men he trusted less than he trusted me with his daughter.
I think about that handshake more than I let on.
I think about what he'd say to me now, if he were still around to say anything at all, and I already know the answer, and it isn't kind, and it shouldn't be.
I threw that away in a bar in Amarillo over the course of five careless months, and no amount of riding fast is going to change the math on that, no matter how bad I want it to right now.
The wind's cold enough this early that it stings through my jacket, and I let it, because feeling something sharp and physical is easier than sitting with the other thing crawling around under my ribs.
I take the back way past the old Baptist church, past the field where the club used to run charity poker rides before half the county decided helmets were optional and insurance said otherwise, and every landmark on this route has her fingerprints on it somewhere, some memory I haven't figured out how to file away yet and probably never will.
Marked comes into view and my stomach drops clean out from under me.
The front window's shattered, glass fanned across the sidewalk catching the early light, and there on the brick beside the door, six feet high in paint still wet enough to shine, is my own road name staring back at me like an accusation with a face.
GHOST OWES US.
Rowan's standing just inside the doorway, arms crossed tight over her chest, boots planted in broken glass she hasn't bothered clearing yet, and when her eyes find mine across that ruined window there's nothing soft in them at all, just a hard, exhausted kind of fury that tells me exactly how much worse this morning is about to get before it gets anywhere near better.
Deb's visible behind her, phone already pressed to her ear, throwing me a look through the broken glass that could strip paint off a tank.
I don't blame her for it. I'd look at me the same way if our positions were reversed, and there was a stretch of about six months where I did exactly that, in every mirror I passed, unable to hold my own reflection's eyes for longer than it took to shave.
Rowan doesn't look away from me now, though.
That's the thing about her I've always come back to, even at my worst, even now.
She doesn't flinch from hard things, doesn't dress them up smaller than they are to make them easier to carry.
She's standing in the wreckage of something that isn't her fault, wearing eight months of hard-won distance like armor, and she's still looking straight at me instead of past me, which is more than I deserve and exactly what I should have expected from the woman who never once, in nine years, took the easy way out of anything.
I cut the engine and swing off the bike, and for a second neither of us moves, just stand there taking the measure of each other across ten feet of broken glass and eight months of everything unsaid, and then I make myself walk toward her, because whatever this costs me, she didn't ask for any of it, and I'm the reason it landed on her door.