Chapter 30
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— Colt —
Dutch was waiting for me the next morning. “Need your head in the game,” he said. “Got a run. Not Louisville—that’s still coming. Portland. Referral from the distribution network. One facility, day and a half. I want to see how you run it before we move on the big one.”
“Holden?”
“Already confirmed.” He looked at me the way he got when he was thinking something but waiting to see if I’d say it first. “She and the boys could stay here while you’re gone,” he said. “Easier to keep eyes on.”
I felt it land before I understood it—the shape of something I’d spent years not letting myself think about. A run. A compound. Coming back to nothing.
Dutch saw it. “We’re not them, brother.”
I knew that. My gut didn’t.
“Rotation at Betty’s,” I said. “Two at the house. Someone on school escort, both ways.”
He nodded once. “Done.”
“And you’ll check in?”
“I’ll check in.” He pushed off the doorframe. “Go see her before you leave.”
“I will.”
“Go.”
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Lilac took it better than I expected.
I told her that afternoon, standing in Betty’s kitchen while she was cutting vegetables for dinner and the boys were in the backyard. She didn’t stop cutting.
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s overnight. Holden’s coming. It’s a legitimate contract—security consulting, distribution facility. First assessment trip.”
“You don’t have to justify it.”
“I know. I just—” I leaned against the counter. “I didn’t want to disappear without explanation.”
She looked up then. Just for a second. “When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
She nodded and went back to the carrots. “The boys will ask.”
“I’ll tell them myself. Tonight.”
“Okay.” She was quiet for a moment. “Come back,” she said softly.
I looked at her. She wasn’t looking at me—eyes on the cutting board, jaw set, like she was irritated at herself for saying it.
“I’ll come back,” I said.
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We left before dawn—me and Holden and Handful, who’d invited himself without asking and argued that three was a better number than two. He wasn’t wrong.
Holden rode the primary route the way he always did, steady and unhurried, hitting the checkpoints in the margins of his notes without referring to them.
There was a dead zone through the coast range that took eight minutes at speed, comms dropping to static and then finding Glitch’s repeater signal like a lifeline.
Good? Holden said into the radio when we cleared it.
Good, Glitch confirmed from three hours back.
The contact’s facility was exactly what Holden had said: industrial park, off highway, quiet in the way that only came from money spent on perimeter, not personnel.
The site manager met us at the gate in a company polo with a company handshake, and within forty minutes I’d clocked six things wrong with his existing security setup.
The client had opinions, like Dutch said he would.
He wanted the cameras placed where they looked impressive.
I told him where they needed to be, and by the end of the first hour he’d stopped arguing with me.
By the end of the second hour he was asking follow-up questions.
By the end of the fourth, he was talking about a service contract and asking about the other two facilities.
Outside, Handful had made friends with the facility’s on-site security team—laughing at their jokes, making a few of his own, looking like exactly the kind of guy you could tell things to.
By the time I was done, he’d have learned more about this operation than the site manager knew I was looking for.
Holden stood by the door and said nothing.
“Good scope,” Holden said through the comms as we headed to the motel. Road noise behind it, his voice flat and close in my ear the way it always was when we were moving.
“It’s preliminary.”
“It’s good. You know what you’re doing in a room like that.”
“It’s not different from what we do for the club.”
“It’s completely different. You’re not intimidating anyone. You’re just—” He went quiet, the kind that meant he was watching the road and finishing the thought at the same time. “Smarter than they expect. So they listen.”
Handful cut in. “Same reason they talked to me. You play what you’ve got.”
He wasn’t wrong. Holden with his silence. Me with the scope. Handful making himself easy to trust until people couldn’t stop talking. The client had seen three bikers and gotten something else entirely.
Holden grunted into the earpiece. His version of agreement.
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I called the boys from the motel that night.
Knox told me about the card trick he’d been practicing. Luca told me about a book Bea had lent him. At the end of the call, Knox said, “Come home safe, Dad,” with the absolute casualness of someone who said it all the time, who expected it to be true, who couldn’t imagine a world where it wasn’t.
I sat on the edge of the motel bed for a while after I hung up.
Holden was already asleep. Handful was watching something on his phone with one earbud in. The room smelled like highway and fast food.
I thought about Betty’s kitchen. Vegetables on the cutting board. Come back.
I thought about how I’d spent seven years in motel rooms like this one, rooms that looked exactly like this one, and never once had anyone said come back.
We rode home the next afternoon with the preliminary scope written, two follow-up meetings scheduled, and a service contract in discussion. Legitimate work. The kind that built things instead of burning them.
I pulled up to Betty’s as the sun was going down and the boys came out of the front door at a dead run.
Luca hit me first, hard enough that I had to brace. Knox was half a step behind him, quieter about it, but he didn’t let go.
I held onto both of them for a second longer than I meant to.
When I looked up, Lilac was standing at the door, arms crossed, watching.
She didn’t say anything. Neither did I. She uncrossed her arms, turned, and went back inside. I followed, with a boy attached to each leg.