5. Thirteen Miles
THIRTEEN MILES
CALEB
Four hours earlier
The hospital room was wrong.
I knew it before I could name why. The overhead fluorescents buzzed louder than fluorescents should, the hum crawling into the walls and the floor until I felt it in my back teeth.
The ventilator stood beside Liam's bed doing what it always did, hiss-click, hiss-click, except the rhythm had stretched, the gaps between breaths widening until each one felt like the last.
Liam lay flat on his back, eyes closed, tube in his throat, the monitors ticking green beside him.
His face was thinner than the last time I'd stood here.
Cheekbones sharper. Brown curls matted to the pillow.
His hands rested at his sides on the white sheet, so still that my eyes kept dragging back to his chest to make sure it was rising.
I stood in the doorway. I could see the room and smell the antiseptic, the recycled air and the faint electrical heat the machines gave off.
I could feel the cold tile under my bare feet.
But I couldn't step through. My legs were locked in place.
My body wouldn't cross the frame, like the doorway had closed around my hips and pinned me there, made to watch and never reach.
Something moved at the far side of the bed.
He was bigger than the room should have allowed.
Standard hospital ceiling, and still he filled the space under it, shoulders so wide they blacked out the window behind him, his shadow climbing the wall.
A heavy, weathered face, the jaw thick and set.
His eyes sat small and dark and patient in all that bulk, and they were fixed on my brother.
Gravedigger raised one hand and laid it against Liam's face.
The first pass was gentle. The backs of his knuckles tracing the line of Liam's jaw, barely touching.
The second followed the same path, slower, his fingers curling along the cheek.
On the third he stopped with his palm flat against Liam's face, cradling it like something he hadn't yet decided whether to keep or crush, and turned his head toward me.
His eyes found mine across the room. The patience was the worst of it. No anger. No hurry. Just the calm, satisfied look of a man keeping a promise.
"I told you I'd come pay a visit."
His voice filled the room the way the hum did, shaking in the walls and the floor and the base of my skull. The ventilator hissed. The monitors ticked. His hand stayed on my brother's face.
Then Liam's eyes opened.
Wide. Snapped open to the whites, the pupils blown huge and black and locked on me with something that hit harder than anything the man's hands could do.
Liam's body didn't move. Arms flat. Legs flat.
The tube still down his throat, the machine still breathing for him.
But his eyes were awake and screaming and fixed on mine, and his mouth worked around the plastic, and the sound that came out wasn't his voice.
It was lower and louder and wrong, a whisper that bounced off every surface and landed on me like a fist.
"Help me!"
I sat up so fast the medical bay tilted.
Pain tore through me, every bruise lighting up at once, the muscles across my stomach cramped and the cuts across my torso pulled. The mattress shifted and the thin sheet sat under my legs and my hands were locked around the bed rails, knuckles white.
This was not the hospital. I was still in the bikers' makeshift infirmary. The Steel Phoenixes compound. The lights overhead were steady, no buzz. No ventilator. Nothing but my own breathing, tearing out of me in fast, shallow bursts that I couldn't slow down.
It was a dream. A fucking nightmare.
My pulse slammed in my wrists and the sides of my neck, everywhere at once. Sweat sheeted my face and chest. The gray blanket Ghost had given me was twisted around my legs.
I breathed. In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth.
The same breathing drill I'd learned at fifteen, when competition nerves used to lock me up before a bout, the same one I'd run in a hospital parking lot trying to make the math work on a cook's paycheck.
In. Hold. Out slowly. My hands loosened on the rails. My heartbeats came down.
The pain settled from a scream to an ache. My eye throbbed. The split in my lip stung. My stomach muscles burned when I shifted, the bruises complaining about the movement.
Those thugs had done a number on me in that corridor. Could have been worse. A lot worse, if not for the man with the ice-blue eyes who'd come out of nowhere and put one of them on the floor before I'd finished understanding what was happening.
Ghost. Even now, I could still feel the shape of his hand on my shoulder, hours later. The warmth of it. The way his voice had dropped low and steady while he looked at me like he was making a promise he meant to keep.
You're safe here.
I'd been close to believing it. Sitting on this bed, blanket around my shoulders, with the lean man named Kai working the cuts while the silver-eyed one watched from the wall.
I'd been so close to believing it. The compound had cameras, gates, and armed men who somehow rode kinder than their road names.
But Liam didn't have gates or bikers for bodyguards. Liam had a tube in his throat and a machine breathing for him in a public hospital, and the man on the mezzanine had said his name out loud, the name of the hospital, and smiled while he did it.
Or we go check on Liam at UMC.
Why did I say no? I could have fought that broken man.
Pulled the hits, made it look real without doing real damage.
Liam would never have known. The crowd would never have known.
I could have walked out of that ring with my four grand and my brother's name still safe in my own mouth instead of hanging out of a stranger's.
Because Liam wouldn't have wanted it. Not even the fake version of the beating. Not even the one where nobody actually got hurt. He'd have looked at me from that bed with those brown eyes and he'd have known, and something between us would have cracked.
My brother didn't climb boulders because it was easy. He climbed them because the hard line was the only one that meant anything, and the day I stopped believing that was the day I lost the right to sit in the chair beside his bed.
But what was my code worth if he died while I held onto it?
I shook my head. Focus. Done is done. I couldn't un-say it. All I could do now was put myself between him and the man who'd promised to visit.
The clock on the wall read 4:12. It was dark outside the windows.
Thirteen miles, give or take. We'd come in past Henderson, and I'd driven that stretch to the pit every Thursday for four months. I knew about where this place sat between the highway exits and the hospital. And there was no lock on his door and nobody standing on the other side of it. Hopefully.
I swung my legs off the bed. My feet hit cold floor. The bruises across my torso protested. But I'd fought through worse.
I didn't trust these bikers to just let me walk out. They'd been decent, more than decent. But I was an asset now, a man who'd seen this Gravedigger's operation from the inside, and people don't let assets leave. Not in my experience.
My shorts were on the chair. The wraps were still on my hands, stiff with dried blood. No shoes. No shirt. No phone, no wallet, no cash.
I opened the door slowly. The gravel lot lay dark and quiet. One flood lamp at the gate, another at the main building. A watchtower near the fence, a faint glow inside it. Security.
The October cold hit me the second I was outside, and I moved fast toward the gate, gravel biting my soles, the air sharp enough to sting my eyes.
At the gate I found a smaller door built into the steel frame, a personnel cut-through.
Unlocked from the inside, probably the only side it could open from. If I left, there'd be no turning back.
I slipped through, eased it shut behind me, and ran.
GHOST
I came out the door of Church at a dead sprint and the October air punched the breath out of me.
My bike sat in the second row. The Harley I'd spent two winters tearing down and building back meaner, stripped light, tuned until it ran angry, the fastest thing I'd ever thrown a leg over. I ripped my helmet off the bar and jammed it on, the strap fumbling in fingers that wouldn't hold still.
My brain was doing the thing it does in a crisis, firing off in twelve directions at once, except every direction kept bending back to the same place and the same face.
Gravedigger had people. A year or more of building in the dark. How many had he pulled out of that circuit? How many fighters he'd turned into muscle were out there right now wearing no colors and answering to a man who ran a pit? If he gave the order… If he'd already given it…
I twisted the ignition. The engine cracked awake, hard and mechanical, rolling off the buildings and across the gravel.
"Open the gate!" I screamed at the watchtower. The guard's head came up in the window. "Gate! Now!"
The motor caught. The steel started rolling.
"Ghost! Wait!"
I turned in the seat. Reaper crossed the lot at that pace of his that wasn't a jog and wasn't a sprint, ground disappearing under him without any effort showing.
Behind him, Tank, the shotgun across his back catching the light.
And behind Tank was Irish, tugging his helmet on as he walked, visor up, grinning, because the bastard grinned at everything.
"I need to go, Axel. Now."
"Not stopping you." Reaper reached me and his hand came down on my bar. His silver-gray eyes held steady. "Kai asked me to ride with you. Tank and Irish are coming too. Whoever this Caleb is, whatever his line to Gravedigger turns out to be, you'll be standing in the blast radius by default."
"Kai asked you to…?"
"Kai asked, I agreed, and Tank and Irish didn't need asking. You're not doing this alone, Jake."