Not the way you watch me.
I didn't watch him any differently than I watched anyone else. I paid attention—that was my job, had been my job since I'd patched in six years ago. I noticed things. Details. Patterns. It was how I'd stayed alive this long.
Tyler was new. Complicated. A former fed with a dangerous past who'd embedded himself in ourworld. Of course I watched him closely. Anyone would.
I stayed in the garage another hour, working on the Shovelhead until my hands ached and my mind finally quieted. By the time I made it back to my room, the clubhouse was dark and silent, everyone either asleep or pretending to be.
My room was sparse. Always had been.
A bed, neatly made. A dresser with three drawers, none of them full. A nightstand with a lamp and a clock and a single photograph face-down in the top drawer—my brother Danny, dead six years now, smiling at a camera he'd never see again.
I didn't keep things. Didn't accumulate possessions or mementos or any of the small personal touches that most people used to make a space feel like home. This room was where I slept. That was all it needed to be.
I sat on the edge of the bed, boots still on, and stared at the wall.
Cross. The Iron Wolves. Federal backing and territorial pressure and a war we hadn't asked for, rolling toward us like a storm we couldn't outrun.
And Tyler.
Not the way you watch me.
I closed my eyes and saw him in the church, going pale at Cross's name. The tremor in his hands.The way he'd seemed to shrink under the weight of old pain.
I saw him in the garage, moving through my space, asking questions about engines, looking at me like I was something stable he could lean against.
Sleep came slowly. My thoughts kept drifting—to the church meeting, to the Wolves, to the war that was coming whether we wanted it or not. And underneath all of it, Tyler's voice in the darkness.
Not the way you watch me.
My dreams were restless when they finally came, full of shadows and engines and something just out of reach, hovering at the edge of recognition.
I woke before dawn, tired and unsettled.
There was a war coming. I didn't have time for questions without answers.
I got up and went to find something useful to do with my hands.
2
FIRST GEAR
TANK
Iwas in the garage before sunrise, hands deep in the Shovelhead's guts, trying to outwork the strange restlessness that had followed me out of sleep.
The clubhouse was quiet at this hour—that particular stillness that only existed in the space between night and morning, when even the most dedicated insomniacs had finally surrendered to exhaustion. Irish wouldn't surface until someone made coffee. Ghost was probably still unconscious, sprawled across his bed the way only twenty-three-year-olds could manage. Even the birds hadn't started yet—just the soft tick of cooling metal from the bikes outside and the distant hum of the highway, carrying early truckers toward destinations that had nothing to do with us.
I liked this time. The stillness before the world remembered to be complicated.
The transmission was giving me trouble. I'd sourced the parts from a guy in Nevada who swore they were period-correct, but something wasn't seating right, a misalignment I could feel more than see. I adjusted my grip on the shaft, rotated it a quarter-turn, felt the gears resist and then finally catch with a satisfying click.
Small victories. Some days, that was all you got.
"You're here early."
Tyler stood in the garage doorway, two cups of coffee in his hands, steam curling into the cool morning air. He was dressed simply—jeans, a gray henley with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows—and his hair was still damp from a shower, darker than usual, almost black in the low light.
"Could say the same about you."
