Prologue
ROAM
Three in the morning, and the road is mine.
That’s the thing about this hour—the civilians are all tucked in somewhere, dreaming about mortgages, alarm clocks, or whatever it is people dream about when their lives run on schedule. The highway belongs to the ones who don’t—truckers, ghosts, and men like me.
I open the throttle and let the bike eat the asphalt.
The air off the Everglades hits differently at speed. It’s warm, thick, and threaded with something wild underneath like cypress, stagnant water, and things that don’t have names in polite conversation. Florida at night has teeth if you know where to look. I’ve always liked that about it.
The job is done.
I don’t think about jobs once they’re finished.
Thinking about them doesn’t change them, and it doesn’t undo them.
In this life, the things you spend too long turning over in your head are the things that eventually turn on you.
Three men were skimming from a gun shipment that passed through Tampa.
They’d been doing it for eight months, careful and incremental, figuring no one would notice the margins.
Someone noticed and Creed made a call.
I drove four hours and handled it and now I’m driving back.
That’s all it is.
The mile markers blur past. I don’t count them. I never did see the point in counting what’s already behind you.
My cut snaps at the edges in the wind, the leather worn so soft it moves like a second skin now, stiff only at the patches, and the ink of the Royal Bastards’ crest sits between my shoulder blades like a declaration.
I’ve worn it so long, I forget it’s there until someone’s eyes catch on it and change.
Fear, mostly. Occasionally, something else.
It doesn’t matter either way because the cut is what I am, and I took the road name to match.
Roam.
Winchester gave me that one back when I was twenty-six. I’d joined at twenty-one, spent two years as a prospect before I earned my patch. A few years later, after more jobs than I cared to count, Winchester started calling me Roam and the name stuck.
‘He’s always fucking gone,’ he said one night. ‘Just call him Roam and be done with it.’ Creed had laughed. We were brothers even then, long before he wore the president’s patch. I wasn’t there to hear it. I was somewhere in South Carolina, being gone. That was seventeen years ago.
I roll my right shoulder where the muscle has started to stiffen in the cold. Not old… older, there’s a difference, and I know exactly where the line sits because I’ve been watching for it.
My hands on the bars are steady. My eyes are sharp. I can still move quietly enough to be behind a man before he hears me coming and can still ride twelve hours without stopping if the road asks it of me.
The silver at my temples is just mileage. I’ve earned every strand of it.
A cluster of truck stop lights appears on the horizon, so I ease back on the throttle, letting the bike settle into something like patience.
The night sky out here is the real thing, with no city glow to wash it out.
It is black, stars, and the occasional smear of clouds.
Lyric would want to photograph it. Highway’s woman sees the world through a lens, always framing things, always looking for the shot.
I understand the impulse even if I don’t share it.
Some things you just let exist without trying to capture them.
I don’t stop at the truck stop. With nowhere I need to be and nothing waiting for me at the other end, the road becomes the reason to keep riding.
It always has been.
My room at the compound is exactly as I left it—a bed, chair, and spare jacket on a hook by the door. No photographs on the wall, no clutter on the dresser, nothing that would tell a stranger anything about the man who sleeps there.
Creed’s place is full of Devil—her color, warmth, and that particular brand of organized chaos that Australian women seem to carry with them everywhere.
Lucy has done the same to Reaper’s space, softening the edges whether he admits it or not.
Highway’s room smells like Lyric’s perfume and the worn leather of her camera bag, both lingering long after she’s gone.
Mine smells like leather and nothing.
And I don’t care.
The road is ahead of me, two lanes of pale asphalt cutting through the dark, straight as an arrow.
I know this stretch and the way the palmetto scrub gives way to open pasture about twelve miles north, the overpass where the paint is peeling on the guardrail, and the pull-off where I once sat for two hours waiting for a man who never showed up.
I know roads the way other men know their own houses.
Better, maybe. Houses have corners, but roads keep going.
This is the life.
I think it and mean it, and somewhere under the engine noise and the rush of warm air, it settles in me the way it always does, steady, clean, and sufficient.
I don’t need more than this.
The dog tags shift against my sternum. I don’t reach for it. Old habit, touching it when things go sideways, but I broke that habit years ago. Things only go sideways if you let yourself care which direction they’re pointing. I learned that early and hard, and it has served me well for a long time.
The road doesn’t ask anything of you except that you stay on it.
I can do that.
I’ve been doing it my whole life.
The bike eats another mile, the night thinning slightly at the edges in a way that says dawn is a rumor somewhere out east over the Atlantic.
I won’t see it. I’ll be back at the compound before first light, engine cooling in the yard, boots off at the door out of a habit so old I couldn’t tell you when it started.
Tomorrow there’ll be another job, or there won’t. Either way, the road will be here and I’ll be gone.
Somewhere north of Gainesville, where the highway stretches so flat and long it seems to reach the end of something, I catch the orange pulse of hazard lights on the shoulder ahead.
I almost don’t slow.
The road is full of other people’s problems, and I have never made a habit of collecting them.
My thumb doesn’t even move on the throttle.
I watch the lights approach, a car, pulled over tight to the shoulder, hood not quite flush, and a woman standing at the front of it, her hair falling forward on one side of her face.
I pass her.
I get maybe two hundred yards up the road.
I don’t know what it is—the hour, the emptiness of the highway in both directions, the way she was standing there, not flagging anyone down, not on her phone, simply standing like someone who has learned not to ask for help.
I ease off the throttle.
And turn around.
That’s what I do.