Chapter One
JANIE
Five hours in, and the gas gauge is lying to me.
It has to be.
The tank was filled in Ocala two hours ago, topped right off, while Rose slept in the back, and I stood at the pump, watching every set of headlights that turned in.
The gauge is sitting a quarter lower than it should be, adding to the list of things wrong with Craig’s car.
The list is long. His backup, the one he keeps in the garage for what he calls ‘incidentals,’ which means I’ve never driven it and don’t know its quirks.
My car I know. The way my Civic pulls slightly left, the way the air conditioner takes three minutes to cool in summer.
I know nothing about this car except that it was available at two in the morning when I needed it most.
I don’t let myself think about what ‘incidentals’ cost me.
The radio stays off.
That one is easy to figure out.
Craig has trackers on everything, including both our regular cars and my phone, which I smashed in the driveway under the heel of my boot and felt something close to joy about.
This car is different—it’s his backup, the one that sits in the garage for months at a time, the one neither of us drives unless something else is in the shop.
He may never have thought it worth tracking.
Well, that’s the gamble I’m taking. Four years of living with Craig teach you that assumption keeps you safer than trust, and right now, I’m assuming this car slipped through the cracks of his need for control.
I took the long way for the same reason, west on I-10, then north on I-75 through Ocala, the route Craig wouldn’t expect from a woman heading for Georgia. He’d assume I-95 north. The obvious road, the fast road. So I took the other one.
The interstate is quiet. Me, the hum of the engine, the occasional semi pushing north with its running lights glowing amber in the dark.
Rose is in the back seat in her car seat, one arm around Mr. Rabbit, her head tipped sideways at the angle that always makes my neck ache in sympathy.
She fell asleep outside of Tampa, mid-sentence, the way small children do, one moment seriously explaining to me that Mr. Rabbit preferred the window seat, then nothing.
Out. Gone somewhere safe inside her own head.
I envy her for that.
I keep my eyes on the road.
Valdosta is four hours north, and Aunt Patty has no idea I’m coming.
I couldn’t risk calling ahead and leaving a digital trail Craig might find before I was gone, so I’m counting on the fact that when I show up on her doorstep, she’ll open the door.
Patty is my mother’s younger sister, the one who sent me a birthday card every year, even after Craig made it clear her calls weren’t welcome.
She’ll take one look at my face, and she won’t ask questions I’m not ready to answer.
At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself for two hundred and eighty miles.
The car shudders.
It’s subtle. A tremor through the steering wheel, gone before I can properly register it. I tighten my hands on the wheel, keep my speed steady, and watch the gauges.
Everything looks normal.
Maybe a rut in the road.
Maybe nothing.
But then it does it again.
This time there’s a sound with it, something low and intermittent, a cough from somewhere under the hood.
I know enough about cars to know that sound is not nothing.
I know enough to know I’m south of Gainesville with a sleeping three-year-old and an emergency bag in the trunk, running from a man who has friends in the kind of places that don’t appear on maps.
The car coughs again. Harder.
I ease off the gas. The engine responds by doing it a third time, a stutter that shakes the whole car.
Rose stirs in the backseat. “Mama?”
“It’s okay, baby.” My voice comes out steady, and I’m proud of that. “We need to stop for a minute.”
I pull onto the shoulder and, without thinking, put on the hazards before the car has fully stopped. Muscle memory from every roadside drill my dad put me through back on the farm—pull right, stay visible, stay calm, park.
The engine ticks.
Then it stops.
I sit for a moment with both hands on the wheel.
The hazards tick in the silence, orange light pulsing across the dashboard in a slow, patient rhythm.
Outside, the Florida night presses against the windows, warm and thick, the smell of something green reaching me even through the glass.
There’s palmetto scrub on both sides and a strip of star-scattered sky above, and no other cars.
I do not cry.
I made myself a promise at the end of the driveway back in Jacksonville, right after putting the bag in the trunk, buckling Rose in, and standing in the dark with my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my back teeth that there would be no crying in front of Rose.
Whatever happens, she doesn’t see me fall apart.
She has seen enough things she shouldn’t have seen. She will not see this.
I get out of the car.
The night air is warm on my arms. I go to the hood, find the release, and prop it open.
The engine sits there in the dark, looking back at me like it has nothing to say for itself.
The phone flashlight feels like lighting a flare, and here I am on the side of a highway at three in the morning, but I use it anyway. No choice.
I’m not a mechanic. I can check oil, change a tire, and jump a battery, but beyond that, my knowledge gets thin fast. I peer at the engine as if I can intimidate it into explaining itself. Oil looks okay. Nothing visibly broken or disconnected. Nothing on fire.
That last one feels like a low bar, but I’m taking my wins where I can find them tonight.
I lower the hood.
Leaning against the front of the car, looking up at the sky, I think very clearly and without any particular emotion. This is bad.
Not catastrophic or the worst thing that’s happened to me in the last four years, still it’s bad.
Aunt Patty doesn’t have a cell phone. At seventy-one, she considers them an imposition, which means I can’t call her. A tow truck, a cab, a dozen options that all involve using my phone to generate a location and give Craig exactly what he needs to find us before we’re safe. I can—
A single headlight appears in the distance behind me, coming from the south.
One light means a motorcycle. My whole body goes tight as I push off the hood and get back to the passenger door, putting the car between me and the road, an old habit from a life that made it necessary.
The hazards keep their patient orange pulse.
The bike doesn’t slow down.
It passes me at a steady speed, close enough that the car shakes with the displaced air, and I watch the single taillight shrink northward into the dark.
I let out a breath.
Then the taillight slows.
Stops.
For one hopeful second it stays there, then it turns around.
My hand goes to the door handle, my heart doing something loud and unhelpful behind my ribs as the headlight swings back toward me, steady and unhurried. It pulls in behind my car, the engine idles, then silence.
When he swings off the bike, the first thing I notice is his size. He’s big. The kind of guy that makes you instinctively calculate your chances of outrunning him and immediately coming up short.
The second thing is his cut,
visible even in the dark, the kind with patches on the back that I’ve learned to read since Craig started talking about his business associates.
My hand tightens on the door handle.
He stops about ten feet away. Not close. He is deliberate about it, keeping his distance the way you do when you understand that your size is a threat whether you intend it or not. His hands are held slightly away from his body.
“Car trouble?” His voice is low. Florida flat. It’s not the particular flatness of a man trying to sound easy, but the real kind, the kind that doesn’t need to perform anything because it already knows what it is.
“I’m fine,” I say. Force of habit. Craig trained that response into me so thoroughly that I say it before I finish assessing whether it’s true.
The man looks at the car. Looks at the position of it on the shoulder—hazards still going, hood slightly misaligned from when I closed it in a hurry—then he looks back at me.
He doesn’t argue.
That surprises me.
Most men argue with ‘I’m fine’ when the evidence is standing right in front of them.
He stands there in the dark with his hands now loose at his sides, and I realize I can see him better now that my eyes have adjusted—silver hair, close beard, a face that has some years on it, not young or trying to be.
He looks at me the way people look at problems they’re deciding whether to take on.
“I can look at the engine,” he says. “If you want.”
The orange light pulses between us.
I look at him. He looks at me. I am aware of my hair, the way I let it fall forward on the left side tonight, the way I have been letting it fall forward for eight months now—old habits.
The click of a car door handle spins me around.
Rose’s door. Already moving around the back of the car, reaching the passenger side in time to see her hit the asphalt at a run with Mr. Rabbit dragging from one fist, her hair a disaster of sleep tangles.
Thirty-one pounds of pure unfiltered momentum, and she has already identified the motorcycle. I reach for her and miss by six inches.
“Is that your bike?” She stops two feet from the man, craning her neck back to look up at him. “It’s big.”
“Rose.”
“It is,” he says to her directly, not over her head to me. Then he crouches down. The man goes from enormous to eye level with my daughter in one smooth movement, forearms resting on his knees. “You want to see it?”
Rose looks back at me with an expression that says the answer is obviously yes, and she cannot believe I need to be consulted on this.
I look at him crouched there in the dark. The way he waited. The way he asked her before he asked me, because she had asked first.
“Okay,” I say. I hear how cautious it sounds, and I mean it to.
He stands, glances at me once, a look that isn’t asking for anything, only checking, then takes Rose the three steps to the bike.
She immediately puts both hands on the tank.
He lets her. Doesn’t hover or redirect. He crouches down again so he can see what she’s seeing and answers whatever she asks, which is everything, because Rose has never met a question she didn’t ask.
Standing at the car door, I watch them and feel something strange happening in my chest. Not attraction, but something quieter than that. The specific ache of watching someone treat your child as if she’s worth their full attention when you’ve spent two years watching the opposite.
I shut the feeling down.
I’m good at that.
He straightens up and looks at me across the hood of the car. The dog tags at his throat catch the hazard light when he moves.
“Pop the hood?” he says.
I do. He looks at the engine with his phone light for about forty-five seconds, then stands back.
“Fuel pump,” he says. “It’s not going anywhere tonight.”
The words land flat and factual. He doesn’t soften them, and I find that I appreciate him not softening them. I’ve had enough of men who manage how information reaches me.
“Okay,” I say.
“You got someone to call?”
I think about Aunt Patty and her absent cell phone, preferring the old landline in her kitchen.
I think about the location trail. I think about the fifty-seven dollars in cash in my jacket pocket, which is every dollar I managed to extract from places Craig didn’t monitor, saved in increments of five and ten over six months.
“I’m working on it,” I say.
He looks at me for a moment, but not the way men usually look at women on the side of a highway at three in the morning. He looks at me the way no one has looked at me in a long time, as though he’s reading everything I’m trying to hide instead of the version of myself I show the world.
His eyes briefly drop. To the left side of my face, where I know, because I checked in the visor mirror outside of Tampa, the bruising along my jaw has gone the particular yellow-green that means old enough to be fading, recent enough to still be there.
He looks back up.
His expression doesn’t change. Whatever he logs, he does it internally and keeps it there.
“I’m Roam,” he says. “Royal Bastards MC, Jacksonville.”
I wait for the fear. Two years of Craig’s business associates taught me the Royal Bastards patch means something specific, and none of it is good for women on the side of a highway.
My heart rate should be climbing.
It doesn’t.
I don’t know what to do with that, so I set it aside.
“Janie,” I say. Then, because she’s pulling on my jacket, “This is Rose.”
“Hi, Roam,” Rose says, very seriously. “Our car is broken.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I heard.” He looks at me. “How far are you going?”
“Valdosta.”
“Georgia.” He says it like he’s placing it on a map. “That’s a ways.”
“I know.”
“I’ve got a place,” he says. “If you need somewhere to be while you figure out next steps.” He pauses. “A club compound. Jacksonville, forty minutes back the way I came.” Another pause. “My president’s wife is there. Good woman. She’ll see you right.”
I study him. He lets me. He doesn’t fill the silence, press the offer, or explain why I should trust him. Instead, he stands there in the warm dark, waiting. I’ve spent two years learning to read men, and what I’m reading right now is someone who has decided this is my call.
Rose tugs my jacket again. “Mama, can we see the clubhouse?”
I look at my broken car, the empty highway, this silver-haired man with his steady eyes and hands that have stayed exactly where I can see them since the moment he pulled over.
“How far did you say?” I ask.
“Forty minutes.”
I look down at Rose. She looks up at me with absolute confidence because she is three years old, and the world has not yet taught her to be afraid of it.
I’m going to keep it that way.
“Okay,” I say.
Relief hits so hard that my knees nearly give out under me, and for the length of two breaths I let myself feel it, let it loosen something that has been clenched in my chest since we left.
Then I remember who I’m running from, and the relief drains away as fast as it arrived, because Craig is not the kind of man who lets people leave, he is the kind who follows, who waits, who turns a closed door into something you pay for later.
Roam, oblivious to all of it, reaches for Rose’s overnight bag as though helping stranded women on the side of the road at three in the morning is simply a thing he does, one more ordinary errand in an ordinary night, and watching the easy competence of it, I catch myself thinking one ridiculous, treacherous thought, that for the first time since I pointed the car north and left Jacksonville behind, Rose and I are not alone.
And that, I understand even as the warmth of it spreads through my chest, may be the most dangerous thing of all.