Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Coin
The eggs are burning.
I can smell it before I see it—that sharp, acrid edge cutting through the kitchen—and I'm already reaching for the pan when Sadie Jo appears in the doorway behind me with her backpack half-zipped and her dark hair in a knot that looks like it lost a fight with a rubber band.
"Dad. The eggs."
"I see the eggs."
"They're burning."
"Sadie Jo. I see the eggs."
She slides into her chair at the kitchen table the way she always does—without a sound, without being asked, like a kid who learned a long time ago how to move around a distracted parent.
Thirteen years old and she's already got the routine memorized—backpack on the chair, lunchbox on the counter, juice from the fridge, wait for Dad to stop swearing at the stove.
I scrape the eggs onto a plate. They're not burned. Close, but not burned.
"Wrenleigh!" I call down the hallway. "Breakfast."
Nothing.
"Wrenleigh. Food. Now."
The thud-drag of crutches on hardwood answers me before she does.
It's been three weeks since the four-wheeler accident, and my oldest daughter has turned the simple act of walking on crutches into a full-body expression of rage.
Every step sounds like a personal fuck you against the universe for putting her in a cast.
She swings into the kitchen, blonde hair hanging in her face, and drops into her chair hard enough to rattle the table.
The crutches clatter against the wall where she throws them.
"I hate those things."
"Good morning to you too."
"There's nothing good about it. It's six forty-five in the morning, my leg itches inside the cast and I can't scratch it, and homecoming is in two weeks and I'm going to have to wear this with my dress and I want to die."
"You're not going to die."
"I might. From the itching alone."
Sadie Jo takes a bite of toast and watches this exchange with the calm detachment of a girl who's been living with her sister's meltdowns for thirteen years.
She catches my eye and gives me a look that's so much older than thirteen it makes something in my chest ache.
I set plates down in front of both of them.
Eggs, toast, sliced apple for Sadie Jo because she won't eat a full breakfast no matter how many times I try.
A glass of milk for Wrenleigh that she'll complain about and then drink anyway.
"Eat," I say. "We leave in twenty."
"I could drive if someone would let me get my license already—"
"Eat, Wrenleigh."
She stabs a forkful of eggs with more force than scrambled eggs have ever deserved and shoves it in her mouth.
Even furious, even in a cast, even at six forty-five in the morning with her hair in her face and fire in her blue eyes—she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
She's also the spitting image of her mother, which is a knife I've learned to take without flinching. Most days.
Sadie Jo eats quietly beside her.
My dark-haired girl. My mirror.
Blue-gray eyes that see too much and a mouth that says too little.
She worries about everything and tells me about none of it, and I know this because I do the exact same thing.
Ten years I've been doing this.
Ten years of alarm clocks at five-thirty, lunches packed the night before, permission slips signed on the dashboard of my truck, parent-teacher conferences where I'm the only man in the room.
Ten years of homework help and period talks I was not prepared for and arguments about screen time and curfews and boys—God, the boys are starting, and I am not ready for that conversation with either of them.
Ten years since I came home to a half-empty closet and no note.
I don't think about that.
I've gotten good at not thinking about it—the way you get good at anything you practice enough.
Some men go to the gym. Some men drink.
I perfected the art of compartmentalization somewhere between Wrenleigh's first day of kindergarten and Sadie Jo's first nightmare about a mother she couldn't remember.
The coin sits heavy in my front pocket.
Grandpa's coin—passed down through three generations of Adkins men, worn smooth on both sides from decades of fingers turning it over and over.
I flip it when I'm thinking.
The brothers started calling me Coin because of it, and it stuck.
Most people don't even know my real name anymore.
Colton. Colton Adkins. Father of two. Secretary of the Saint's Outlaws MC, Morgantown chapter. Divorced for ten years from a woman who chose Vegas slot machines over her own daughters.
But right now I'm just Dad. And Dad is running late.
"Sadie Jo, zip your backpack. Wrenleigh, crutches—and if you throw them again, you're hopping to school."
"You wouldn't."
"Try me."
She grabs the crutches off the wall with a huff that could power a wind turbine.
Sadie Jo zips her backpack without being told twice.
I grab my keys, do a mental sweep—lunches, water bottles, Wrenleigh's extra sock for the cast, Sadie Jo's math homework that she left on the counter—and we're out the door.
I drive them to school because I've been driving them to school for the past three weeks.
Ever since the four-wheeler, I can't seem to let them get on that bus.
I tell myself it's because the crutches make the bus steps difficult, and that's true, but it's not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that I saw my daughter on a hospital gurney with her bone breaking through her skin, and something in the wiring of my brain hasn't fully reset since.
I pull into the drop-off lane at Morgantown High.
Wrenleigh unbuckles before I've fully stopped, already reaching for her crutches in the back seat.
She's out the door in seconds—no goodbye, no backward glance, because she's sixteen and being seen getting dropped off by her father is a fate worse than a compound fracture.
I get Sadie Jo over to Suncrest Middle, go in the drop-off line and instead of getting out, she lingers. "Dad?"
"Yeah, baby."
She's looking at me with those blue-gray eyes, her backpack straps clutched in both hands, and for a second she looks exactly like she did at three years old, standing in the hallway asking me where Mommy went.
"Are you okay?"
The question lands somewhere between my ribs. "I'm fine, Sadie Jo. Why?"
She shrugs. Too casual. Practiced. "You've been checking the windows a lot. At night. And you keep looking at your phone like you're waiting for something bad."
Thirteen years old and she reads me like I'm made of glass.
"I'm fine," I say again, and I put enough steady into my voice that she accepts it.
She nods, slides out of the truck, and heads toward the school entrance.
I watch her until she’s inside and I don't pull away from the curb until I can't see her anymore.
Then I check the rearview.
The car is there again. Dark sedan, tinted windows, parked on the cross street with a clear sightline to the school entrance.
Nevada plates.
I noticed it the first time four days ago—same car, same spot, different time of day. Twice near my house. Now here. That's three times, and I stopped believing in coincidence a long time ago.
I take my phone out and type the plate number into my notes.
I've already got the other two sightings logged—dates, times, locations.
It's what I do. It's why they made me Secretary. I notice things. I file them. I remember.
The car pulls away before I do.
Heads south on Baldwin Street toward the main road. I watch it go and I don't follow—not yet.
I don't have enough, and tipping my hand before I know what I'm dealing with gets people hurt.
But I feel the weight of it settle into my chest like a stone dropped into still water.
The clubhouse smells like coffee, Aunt Ellie’s famous blueberry muffins, and the faint ghost of last night's whiskey.
I push through the front door and the familiar chaos of a Wednesday morning folds around me—the clink of tools from the garage where Bloodhound is already elbow-deep in some Sportster's engine, the low thud of music from the back, the hiss of the coffee maker that's been running since before dawn.
Maddox is at the bar eating what I’d bet to be his third bowl of cereal.
The man is a mountain—six-something, tattooed from his neck to his knuckles, built like someone stacked two normal humans on top of each other—and he eats like he's trying to fuel all of them.
He nods at me without looking up. I nod back. We've never needed more than that.
I pour myself a coffee—black, because I stopped having the energy for cream and sugar somewhere around year four of single parenting—and settle into the chair by the window.
My chair. The one that gives me a line of sight to the front door, the hallway to Church, and the back exit.
I didn't choose it on purpose the first time. Now it's the only place I sit.
Bloodhound comes in from the garage wiping his hands on a rag, grease streaked up both forearms.
Six-foot-two, leather, ink, and silence.
He's got that look he gets when his hands have been in an engine for a while—steadier. Calmer.
The garage is therapy for Bloodhound, and I'm not one to judge a man's coping mechanisms.
"Wrenleigh doing all right?" he asks, pouring his own coffee.
"She's plotting the murder of whoever invented plaster casts, but she'll survive."
The corner of his mouth twitches. That's as close to a laugh as Bloodhound gets. "Leah said the follow-up looked good. Healing clean."
Leah.
Her name lands in my chest the way it has no business landing.
I think about the hospital—the way she crouched down to Sadie Jo's level, her voice going soft in a room full of stress and fear.
The way she looked at me at the nurses' station with those steady eyes.
The scar through her eyebrow that mirrors mine.
I push it down. Lock the box.
I don't have room for that—not now, not with Nevada plates showing up outside my daughters’ schools.
"Good," I say. "Tell her I appreciate it."
Bloodhound studies me for a beat longer than is comfortable.
Those watchful eyes—the ones that don't miss a damn thing—narrow slightly, and I can see him deciding whether to push.