Chapter 3
Three days since the dealer stopped breathing, and Splinter still had dirt under his fingernails from the Millard shaft.
He scrubbed at them while the coffee went cold in front of him, sitting at the compound's bar while morning light crawled through windows that needed cleaning.
Prospect work meant dirty hands and early mornings and whatever else the brothers decided needed doing.
Today that meant a parts run to Lexington, two hours each way on mountain roads that would punish any rider who wasn't paying attention.
But first—breakfast.
He'd been thinking about those eggs from Caudill's Diner since the last time he'd stopped there. Good food, fair prices, the kind of place that survived on locals and reputation rather than flash and marketing. The woman behind the counter knew what she was doing.
The woman.
Splinter frowned at his coffee, remembering. Shadows under her eyes. A cracked window taped over like a wound that couldn't be stitched. The little girl watching the door instead of coloring.
Something had been wrong there. Something he'd filed away and hadn't examined since.
"You riding or staring?"
Grit's voice cut through his thoughts. The enforcer stood by the door, keys already in hand, ready to roll.
"Riding." Splinter abandoned the cold coffee. "Detour on the way, though. Need breakfast."
Grit's eyebrow lifted. "Compound kitchen not good enough for you?"
"Want eggs that don't taste like rubber."
A grunt that might have been agreement. Grit had eaten at Caudill's too—he knew the difference between diner food and whatever the prospects on kitchen duty managed to produce.
They rode out together, engines splitting the morning quiet as they wound through roads still damp with overnight fog.
The mountains rose around them like sleeping giants, green and ancient and indifferent to the machines cutting through their territory.
Splinter let the ride clear his head the way it always did, let the rumble of the Softail shake loose whatever thoughts weren't worth keeping.
Caudill's Diner appeared around the bend, and the wrongness hit him before he'd even parked.
The window was still cracked.
Not just taped now—cardboard covered most of it, the kind of patch job you did when you couldn't afford glass and couldn't leave a hole. The OPEN sign glowed in what remained of the window, but the parking lot held only two trucks instead of the half-dozen he'd seen last time.
Splinter cut his engine and sat for a moment, studying the building. The paint was peeling near the roofline. The gutters sagged on one side. Small things, the kind of deferred maintenance that happened when money got tight and stayed tight.
But the cardboard over the window wasn't deferred maintenance. That was damage. Recent damage.
Grit pulled in beside him, following his gaze to the patched glass. "Someone's been having trouble."
"Looks like."
They walked in together, and the bell announced them to a nearly empty room. Two old men at the counter nursing coffee. A young couple in a booth, focused on each other rather than their food. And in the corner—
The little girl.
She was in the same booth as before, but she wasn't coloring. She was sitting perfectly still, hands flat on the table, watching the door with an intensity that made Splinter's chest tight. When she saw them—saw him—something flickered across her face. Recognition, maybe. Or hope.
Then her mother appeared from the kitchen, and the girl's attention snapped to her like a compass finding north.
"Sit anywhere you like." The woman's voice was steady, professional, but her eyes told a different story. She was running on fumes and willpower, the kind of exhaustion that sank into bones and stayed. "Coffee?"
"Please." Splinter slid into a booth that gave him sightlines to both doors and the corner where the girl sat. Grit took the seat across from him, back to the wall.
She brought coffee without spilling a drop, same as last time. But her hands weren't as steady now. He could see the fine tremor when she set down the cups, could see the way she kept glancing toward her daughter like she expected something bad to happen if she looked away too long.
"What'll it be?"
"Eggs scrambled, bacon, biscuits." Splinter kept his voice easy, unthreatening. "She okay?"
The woman went still.
"Excuse me?"
"Your girl." He nodded toward the corner booth. "Last time I was here, she was coloring. Looked happy. Now she's watching that door like she's waiting for a monster to walk through it."
Something cracked behind the woman's professional mask. Just for a second—a flash of fear and exhaustion and desperate hope that disappeared as quickly as it came.
"She's fine. Just tired." The words came out flat, rehearsed. "Bacon crispy or regular?"
"Crispy."
She wrote it down and walked away without another word. Splinter watched her go, watched the way her shoulders stayed tense even with her back to them, watched her daughter's eyes track her across the room.
"Don't," Grit said quietly.
Splinter looked at him. "Don't what?"
"Whatever you're thinking." Grit's voice was low enough that it wouldn't carry. "That's not club business."
"Didn't say it was."
"Didn't have to." Grit leaned back in the booth, arms crossed. "I've seen that look before. Brother spots a woman in trouble, starts thinking he can fix it. That road ends one of two ways—either you burn yourself out on someone else's fire, or you bring their trouble home to the club."
Splinter didn't answer. His eyes had drifted back to the corner booth, where the little girl had started coloring again—but she kept stopping, kept looking up, kept checking the door every few seconds like she couldn't help herself.
No five-year-old should know how to watch for danger like that.
The food came fast and good, same as before.
The woman moved through the service routine without wasted motion, delivering plates and refilling coffee and clearing tables with an economy that spoke to years of practice.
She didn't look at Splinter again, didn't acknowledge the question he'd asked or the crack he'd seen in her composure.
But when she dropped the check at their table, her hand brushed his for just a second. Accidental, probably. Except her eyes met his, and in that moment he saw everything she wasn't saying—the fear, the exhaustion, the desperate isolation of a woman fighting a battle she couldn't win alone.
Then the moment passed, and she was gone.
Splinter left double what the check said, tucking the bills under his plate where she'd find them after they left. It wasn't enough—he could feel that in his bones, the certainty that whatever was happening here required more than money—but it was what he had.
"Ready?" Grit was already standing.
"Yeah."
They rode out, leaving the diner and its haunted little girl behind.
The Lexington run demanded focus—mountain roads didn't forgive inattention—and Splinter gave himself over to the ride, let the curves and switchbacks occupy the part of his brain that wanted to circle back to that cracked window and those hollow eyes.
But the wrongness stayed with him. Sat in his gut like a stone he couldn't digest.
Compound came into view three hours later, the gates swinging open as brothers on watch recognized the bikes. Splinter pulled into the garage bay and killed his engine, rolling his shoulders against the stiffness that came from long rides on rough roads.
Timber was working on a carburetor at the far bench, hands black with grease, country music playing low from a radio that had seen better decades. He looked up when Splinter approached, then looked back at his work without comment.
The silence stretched. Splinter let it, taking his time pulling off his gloves, shrugging out of his jacket. Some conversations needed to find their own beginning.
Finally, Timber spoke. "Parts get where they needed to go?"
"Yeah."
"Any trouble?"
"No."
Timber grunted, attention still on the carburetor. But his hands had slowed, and Splinter could feel the older man's awareness like a physical thing.
"Stopped at Caudill's on the way out," Splinter said. "Diner east of here, maybe forty minutes."
"I know it."
"Someone's putting pressure on the woman who runs it. Don't know who, don't know why. But she's got a cracked window, empty tables, and a kid who's scared to take her eyes off the door."
Timber's hands went still.
"Pressure how?"
"Don't know yet." Splinter met the older brother's gaze, held it. "But something's wrong there. Wrong enough that a five-year-old's stopped acting like a kid."
Timber set down his tools. Wiped his hands on a rag that was already more grease than fabric. When he looked at Splinter again, there was something measuring in his expression—an assessment that went deeper than the surface.
"You planning to do something about it?"
The question hung in the air between them.
Splinter thought about the woman's trembling hands, the cardboard over the window, the little girl's eyes tracking every movement in the room. He thought about his own history—never having much, never expecting much, learning young that wanting led to disappointment.
But some things you couldn't unsee. Some wrongs you couldn't walk away from, even when walking away was the smart play.
"Not planning anything yet," he said finally. "Just... filing it away."
Timber nodded slowly, something like approval flickering behind his eyes. "Good instincts for a prospect. Knowing when to watch and when to move." He picked up his tools again, turning back to the carburetor. "Keep watching. Some problems sort themselves out. Others need handling."
Splinter understood the dismissal for what it was—conversation over, but not forgotten. He headed for the main building, mind still turning over the pieces of a puzzle he didn't have enough edges to solve.
The woman's face stayed with him.
The little girl's eyes stayed with him.
And somewhere in his chest, in a place he'd learned to ignore years ago, something that felt dangerously like caring had started to take root.
He filed that away too.
For now.