Chapter 12
By the time we’re a couple hours into the drive, the truck has settled into its own kind of rhythm.
The engine hums low beneath us, steady enough to disappear into the background if I let it.
The tires eat up mile after mile of dark highway while the headlights carve two pale lanes through the night.
Every now and then another car passes in the opposite direction, a brief wash of white across the windshield, then nothing but darkness again.
The road has mostly emptied out by now, which is exactly how I want it.
Fewer eyes. Fewer chances for somebody to remember a truck, a face, a woman in a bad wig.
Lexi is still asleep in the backseat.
That kid went down quick and stayed down, curled around that stuffed bunny like it’s the one thing in the world she trusts not to change on her.
Every now and then I glance in the mirror and catch the top of her head tilted toward the window, one small hand still locked around one floppy rabbit ear.
She hasn’t moved much except to tuck deeper into herself when we hit rough patches in the road.
The bunny stays right where it is every time. Security blanket, plain as day.
Makes sense.
Kids her age don’t have a lot of ways to make themselves feel safe. They latch onto routines, objects, sounds, people. Anything predictable. Anything that stays the same when the rest of the world won’t hold still.
That rabbit has probably been all four.
Beside me, Raven is talking more now.
Not a lot. Not enough to call it comfortable.
But the silence between us has eased into something less brittle.
We’ve gone from awkward strangers trapped in the same cab to something a little stranger than that.
There’s a weird intimacy that comes with being shut inside a moving vehicle with somebody for hours while the rest of the world drops away outside the windows.
No place to go. No clean escape from each other.
Just darkness, road, and whatever conversation manages to survive in the space between.
I’ve done long drives with brothers I’ve known half my life and still said less than I have with her over the last hour.
Not because she talks too much. Because when she does talk, she says just enough to make me want to hear the next thing.
That’s a problem.
She’s still wearing my sweatshirt. I told myself it was practical when I handed it over.
She was shivering. End of story. But every time I catch the sleeves swallowed over her hands or see the dark fabric hanging too loose over her frame, something in me goes tight in a way I don’t appreciate.
She looks too comfortable in it. Or maybe not comfortable exactly.
More like she’s let herself sink into it despite meaning not to.
That shouldn’t matter. It definitely shouldn’t matter this much.
The cap is still pulled low over that cheap blonde wig. The disguise does what it’s supposed to do. Makes her blurrier. Less striking at a glance.
It just doesn’t work well enough to hide the fact that there’s a whole lot of woman under all that trying to disappear.
She’s gotten a little less careful with her answers as the miles wear on, though I can still feel the restraint in them.
When I ask if she wants music, she tells me she doesn’t care.
When I tell her that’s not an answer, she surprises me by admitting she likes older country better than newer stuff because the newer stuff all sounds like it’s trying too hard to be cool.
That catches a laugh out of me before I can stop it, and she turns her head fast enough that I realize she didn’t expect that sound out of me.
I tell her she’s not wrong.
She tells me my road name is ridiculous.
I tell her hers probably isn’t much better.
She says she doesn’t have one. Then she looks out the window like she wishes she could pull that sentence back, and I leave it alone because there’s enough tension riding beside me already without poking at whatever nerves she’s trying to keep quiet.
Now the radio is low, turned down enough that it fills the truck without taking over the space, and she’s finally stopped sitting like she expects to bolt through the passenger door at any second.
Not relaxed, because that word doesn’t belong anywhere near her yet, but less locked up than she was when we pulled off Louisiana property.
Less locked up is not the same as calm.
I notice the difference because I notice too much.
That’s always been true. It’s part of what keeps me breathing. And right now it means I’m picking up on every little thing she probably wishes I wouldn’t.
She watches every passing cop car. Not openly.
She doesn’t turn in her seat or lean across the console to track them.
But her shoulders change every time. Go tighter.
Higher. Her breathing stalls for half a beat until the cruiser passes and disappears behind us.
The first couple times I think maybe I imagined it. By the fourth, I know better.
She twists the ring finger on her left hand every few minutes.
There’s no ring there now, but the habit is. Her thumb slides over the spot like she still feels the metal. Like maybe her hand doesn’t know yet that it’s gone.
She startles at sudden noise. Not every noise.
Not engines. Not trucks changing lanes. But sharp sounds, unexpected ones.
A motorcycle roaring past us too fast. The crackle of static when the radio signal slips wrong for a second.
Little things. Quick things. Things that shouldn’t hit that hard if your nerves haven’t been taught to go hunting for danger in stupid places.
And maybe the biggest one of all, she never fully relaxes. Not once. Not when the road is empty. Not when Lexi sleeps. Not when I tell her we’ve put enough distance behind us to breathe a little.
She tries. I can tell she tries. But some part of her stays pulled tight all the time, like she doesn’t trust what happens if she loosens her grip too much.
I don’t need her full story to know enough.
Connected ex. Chapter president father. Kid dragged into the middle of it. A wig. A night run. A woman who treats silence like a loaded weapon and safety like something temporary. That paints a pretty ugly picture all by itself.
Whatever happened, it wasn’t a couple screaming matches and a messy split. This has gone deeper than that. Meaner. Controlled enough that a woman like Raven learned how to make herself smaller instead of louder.
The thought pisses me off more than it should.
Probably because I can already see pieces of what the man did without hearing the full details, and I know exactly the kind of bastard who works that way. Not sloppy. Not explosive all the time. Smart enough to erode instead of just destroy. Smart enough to make the damage harder to explain.
I’ve known men like that. Most of them deserved worse than they got.
Beside me, Raven shifts in the seat and tucks her hands into the sleeves of the sweatshirt. “How much farther?”
“Few more hours.”
She nods slowly, looking out the window again. “Lexi usually wakes up if the truck stops.”
“You want me to keep rolling?”
“If you can.”
“I can.”
That’s the thing about this drive. Most of what we say isn’t particularly personal.
It’s logistics, observations, small pieces of conversation that don’t ask too much.
But something about the restraint itself has started feeling intimate.
The fact that neither of us is pushing harder than the other can handle means every little answer matters more.
I’ve driven with women before. Plenty. Usually with less clothing involved and more obvious motives on the table. This feels nothing like that. There’s no flirtation I can trust, no easy tension, no rules I recognize.
It’s just me, a woman running from something ugly, and her sleeping kid in the backseat while the dark presses in around the truck. And somehow that combination has my nerves a hell of a lot less settled than a bar fight ever does.
Raven surprises me again when she asks what part of Alabama the chapter sits near.
I tell her enough to orient her, not enough to hand over a map to the whole town. She doesn’t seem offended by that. If anything, she understands the limit immediately, which tells me she’s grown up around enough club business to know when details stop being casual.
“My dad said your chapter helped with the Savage Knights situation,” she says after a minute.
I glance at her. “That what he told you?”
Her mouth tightens slightly. “He doesn’t tell me much.”
That answer says more than the words do.
Not because Grinder doesn’t trust her, but because he’s trying to protect her now by limiting what she carries.
There’s history in that kind of decision.
Complication too. Fathers and daughters don’t usually wind up on this side of club protection without a lot of regrets piled up between the lines.
“We handled what needed handling,” I say.
She studies my profile for a second, and I can feel it without looking. “That sounds like a very biker answer.”
“It is.”
“I’m noticing a theme.”
That almost gets another laugh out of me. “You noticing a lot over there?”
“I have to entertain myself somehow.”
“Brutal.”
“You’ll survive.”
I risk a glance at her and catch the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth before she looks away again.
There it is.
The woman under all the fear. Sharp. Dry. Not nearly as fragile as she looks. That should make this easier somehow. Instead, it just makes me more aware of how much I don’t know.
We ride in silence for a few more miles, but it doesn’t feel as loaded now. The radio murmurs low. Lexi breathes softly in the backseat. Raven’s fingers tap once against her thigh, then go still. Outside, the road stretches and bends and opens into longer, emptier black.
Then a state trooper passes in the opposite lane.