Chapter 8
Rex
Three hundred miles north of Nightfall Cove and the rain gets harder.
She didn't argue. Didn't ask me to stay. Turned back to the taps and let me go, and that's worse than if she'd thrown a bottle at my head because at least a bottle means she expected something from me.
The phone buzzes in my jacket. I ignore it. The highway narrows through a construction zone, one lane, orange cones glowing in the rain like teeth. I thread through and open the throttle on the other side and the phone buzzes again.
Knox.
I pull over at a turnout three miles past the construction.
The shoulder drops into darkness, trees and nothing, the Pacific somewhere below but invisible.
Rain drums against my helmet, a steady roar that drowns out everything except the phone in my jacket.
I kill the engine and the silence underneath is worse.
The phone buzzes a third time. I pull it out.
Knox calls once and if you don't pick up he calls again and if you still don't pick up he shows up in person, and I'm three hundred miles from anyone showing up in person.
But it's Knox. The man who handed me a patch when I had nothing, not a name or a home or a reason to stop riding.
I can dodge Finn. I can dodge the brothers' group chat. I can't dodge Knox, and he knows it.
I answer.
"Hello."
"Where are you riding to, brother?"
His voice comes through low and measured, the same low tone he drops into during Church when the room needs to shut up and listen.
I pull my helmet off and hold the phone against my ear. Rain hits my scalp and runs down the back of my neck into my jacket. "I don't know."
"You've been riding to nowhere for fifteen years, Rex. When does it stop?"
My teeth grind. Knox has a talent for asking questions that don't leave room for the answer you want to give.
"The scouts photographed the Anchor, Knox. The bar. Her bar. She works there six nights a week and lives upstairs. If they're connecting me to the club and the club to that building—"
"Garrett used that logic on Nina." Knox cuts in. Not sharp. Quiet. "Told himself she'd be better off without him. Pushed her away. You remember how that ended?"
I remember. Garrett alone in his cabin for three days, pacing the floors until the boards groaned.
Nina at the clubhouse with Sarah, not eating, not sleeping.
Knox told me to check on him because he'd stopped answering his phone, and I drove out and found the minotaur sitting on his porch in the rain, staring at the tree line like he'd forgotten how to go inside.
"She's your mate, Rex."
The word lands in my chest and spreads.
"I can hear it in your voice. The bond changes how a man sounds." A pause. "I'd know. So would Finn."
My knuckles ache on the handlebars. I look down and realize I'm gripping them hard enough that the tendons stand up under the skin, white ridges in the dark.
"Knox—"
"When you figure out that the answer's behind you, turn around and come home, brother."
The line goes dead. Knox doesn't say goodbye. He says what he means and hangs up, and the silence he leaves behind has more weight than most men's speeches.
I sit on the shoulder with the phone in my hand and the rain running off my jaw and I don't move for a long time.
Fifty miles north of the turnout, I spot the tail.
Dark sedan, four car lengths back. I see it in my mirrors. My hands tighten on the grips before I even know what I'm looking at. The sedan matches my speed through a sweeping left curve. I drop five miles an hour. It drops five. I push back to seventy. It climbs with me.
My instinct takes over. The part of my brain that maps routes and reads traffic and calculates distances.
I take the next exit. A two-lane county road that cuts east through timber country, no streetlights, no houses, not on any GPS I've ever seen. The sedan follows. They're not even subtle about it, hanging back a quarter mile, their headlights bouncing off the wet pavement behind me.
I run them through a series of turns I've logged over six years of riding every back road between Brookings and Astoria.
Left at the unmarked fork past the defunct lumber mill.
Right onto the fire road that dead-ends at the ridge above Gold Beach unless you know about the switchback thirty yards before the gate.
I take the switchback at forty, tires biting into gravel, the bike leaning hard enough that my knee guard scrapes the ground.
The fire road spits me out on a logging access road that loops back to 101 two miles south.
I pull over on the logging road and kill my lights and wait. At forty-five seconds the sedan's headlights appear at the top of the switchback and stop. They've hit the gate. The brake lights flare red through the trees and the sedan sits there for ten seconds before reversing back the way it came.
I pull my phone and zoom the camera. The plates catch the glow of their own brake lights. I photograph them twice, check the shots. Grainy but readable. Oregon plates, not the bare frame I've been tracking on the SUVs in town.
I watch the sedan's taillights disappear up the fire road and I text Knox. Scouts aren't just watching the town. They're tracking members on the road. One followed me north on 101. Lost them on the fire road switchback near Gold Beach. Oregon plates. I attach the photos. They know our routes.
Knox's reply comes ninety seconds later. One line. Come home, Brother.
I stare at the screen. The cursor blinks. I lock the phone and put it in my pocket and sit on the bike in the dark and listen to the rain hit the canopy above me.
The shoulder of a logging road at midnight smells like wet pine and diesel. No bourbon. No dark cherries. No warmth underneath like sun on leather. Just cold air, my own scent and the memory of every shoulder I've pulled onto in fifteen years of riding.
I think about the Franklins.
Eight months. The longest any family kept me.
Mrs. Franklin had a sewing room she converted into a bedroom, blue walls, a window that faced the backyard.
I unpacked my bag the second week. Put my clothes in the dresser drawers.
Hung my jacket on the hook behind the door instead of keeping it on top of my bag where I could grab it fast.
Eight months of dinners at the table, a woman who packed my lunch for school and wrote my name on the brown bag in green marker.
Mr. Franklin coached my Little League team for one season.
I hit three home runs that spring and he put the game balls on a shelf in the living room beside his own son's trophies.
Mrs. Franklin got pregnant in July. By August the sewing room needed to be a nursery.
The social worker's car in the driveway, engine running.
My clothes back in the bag. The game balls stayed on the shelf.
I didn't ask for them. I stood by the car and watched Mr. Franklin carry a crib box through the front door, and the social worker said something about a nice family in Bend, and I got in the back seat and didn't look out the window.
The next home lasted three months. The one after that, six weeks.
Then the group home in Salem where an older kid stole my shoes.
Then the last placement—the one with the locked basement door and the broken dish and the paperclip I used to pick the lock at two in the morning.
I stole that man's motorcycle and rode nine hours straight.
Every placement started the same way. A human family, a spare room, the conversation about why I looked different from their kids.
Some tried harder than others. The Franklins tried.
Mrs. Franklin wrote my name on the lunch bag even though the other kids at school called me tusk-face, green-skin and worse.
But nobody keeps the kid who reminds them every morning that the world isn't what it used to be.
Then Knox found me. The clubhouse, the patch, the only family that never packed my bag.
I stay on the bike, boots on the gravel, and I think about Holly's apartment.
The drawer she emptied for me. The flannel on the bathroom hook.
The stool at the Anchor, third from the end, where she kept a bottle of Elijah Craig on the shelf below the bar because she knew what I drank and she never let it run out.
Holly didn't send me away. She kept the door unlocked and the bourbon stocked and the stool open, but I left.
Every single time, I left. I put my boots on in the dark and slipped out before dawn and rode north because staying felt like unpacking a bag in a blue room, and the last time I unpacked a bag a woman needed the room for someone who mattered more.
My phone buzzes. Finn.
I open the text. No words. Just a photo. Black and white, the grainy profile of a face and a fist curled under a chin. Jess's ultrasound. Finn's kid, fully formed and real, growing inside a woman who loves him, in a town where the brothers live and work and build things that last.
Below the photo, two lines.
She's worth more than your fear, brother. I would know.
Then: Come home. We can't work it out as a family without you.
Family. Finn chose that word on purpose.
He knows what it does to me. He grew up in a mountain fortress with a war chief father and orc royalty blood, and he still walked away from all of it to follow Knox.
He knows what the word means when it's a choice instead of an accident, and he knows I've never had it be either.
I look at the ultrasound one more time. A kid who'll grow up with a father who loves him, in a club that doesn't pack bags.
I'm not that kid on the social worker's back seat anymore.
I'm twenty-nine years old. I've got a patch and brothers and a woman in Nightfall Cove who emptied a drawer for me, and I'm sitting on the shoulder of a logging road hundreds of miles in the wrong direction because I'm terrified of unpacking a bag.
Bloodstone has escalated from watching the town to following individual riders. They know our routes. Knox needs his Road Captain. The club needs eyes and intel and the rider who knows every fire road and switchback between here and the California border.
But that's not why I kick the starter.
I kick the starter because Holly is in Nightfall Cove, and the scouts are watching the Anchor, and I left her there.
I left my mate alone with crosshairs on her building, and every mile I've ridden north is a mile between me and the only person who matters.
I'm not the kid who got sent back. I'm the man who left, and there's a difference, and the difference is that I can turn around.
The engine catches. The headlight cuts its corridor through the rain. I pull off the shoulder and point the bike south.
Three hundred miles. Five hours. Dawn on the other side if the rain breaks.
I don't open the throttle. I ride the speed limit, both hands on the grips, my headlight aimed at the road home.
For the first time in fifteen years, I'm not riding away from something.
I'm riding toward it. And the word that's been detonating behind my eyes for six months doesn't feel like a grenade anymore.
Mate.
It feels like a direction.