Prologue
Leah
In a few minutes, I’ll be dead.
It won’t actually matter, though, since I haven’t ever truly lived. At eighteen years old, my life has narrowed to the point of utter meaninglessness. I’m not talking about sitting up here on the town’s water tower, so high up I’m nothing more than a speck watching over the twinkling golden lights. I’m not talking about how small you feel sitting under the immense star-studded velvet blanket of the universe.
I’m talking about the moment when your life narrows to the point of nothing.
I tilt my face to the sky so hard that my head thumps against the cold metal at my back. I blink up at the stars. The night’s warm, even in November, and the sky is alive. It shifts, blanketing Helena, tucking the small town of ten thousand into bed for the night. The silence is so loud that it almost freezes my mind. My eyes are so dry, too, as if I’ll never be able to cry again.
The next hour of my life that’ll never come.
And the world goes on as if nothing happened. As if my little brother, the only person in the world who truly saw me, wasn’t buried in the cold earth. If life hadn’t been so cruel he’d be tucked up in bed like the other children in those houses below me.
I stand on shaky legs, then take a swaying step to the railing. I clutch the metal and lean over, inhaling the air that rushes up to greet me. My other hand slips into the pocket of my jeans, where I grab a tiny plastic bag. Before I tore out of the house, a house racked with my mom’s sobs and echoing with myfather’s scorn for both of us, I stole an entire bottle of my mom’s anti-depressants from the bathroom cabinet.
The water tower is high, but I can’t take the chance that I’ll fall wrong and survive. I don’t want that. This isn’t a fucking cry for help. I have been crying for help since I was a four-year-old kid, and I knew what that meant. No—I want this to be a decided end with irrevocable finality, not just another thing I manage to somehow fuck up.
It seems fitting that this is the place I should do it. This used to beourplace. Liam’s and mine. We would come up here because it was the one place no one ever came looking for us. It was our secret. We’d climb those outdated rungs, right to the top, and sit for hours. Just sit in the stillness and watch the world go on below us.
Sometimes we would see the sweep of headlights. Sometimes we’d hear distant voices, arguing, shouting, laughing. Often, if it wasn’t too late, the smells of people’s dinner cooking, backyard grills or windows cranked open to let out the stifling heat of having the stove on, would drift up to us and we’d guess what was laid out on the table that night. Liam was always good at that—making up stories. My parents wanted him to take over the company one day. He wanted to be a writer. He had a great imagination.
And now…
Now all his stories are gone too. Faded from the night like a breath expelled, a breath wasted—since no one knows when that breath will be their last.
The plastic bag is hot and sticky in my hand. I realize that I’ve forgotten a bottle of water, an oversight, but it’s not the end of the world. I almost laugh at the bitterness.
It’s the end of my world.
When I drag a breath into my burning lungs, it’s not shuddery. It goes in clean, an inhale that hits me like that first drag of pot or nicotine. It buzzes through my veins in an adrenaline-fueled rush, and I find it the ultimate irony that the time I feel most alive is at the exact moment I plan to swallow this handful of pills and throw myself about a hundred and fifty feet to the dirt and grass below.
My fingers don’t tremble as I crack the top of the bag open. It splits the night with a sharpzingthat slowly fades away. I stare at the little yellow capsules. There must be close to fifty. I tilt the bag and pour the pills into my palm.
I raise my hand to my lips. They’re chapped—something else that would horrify my mother because appearances are everything. My blistering mouth is flooded with a rush of saliva, as though I can taste the end already and I’m salivating for that black oblivion and the peace that I’ve been trying so hard to find for so long.
My left hand tightens on the rail, my fingers curling around so that I don’t slip before I want to. I plan to climb up on the tiny little railing and pitch forward, headfirst.
The railing trembles, confusing me. My eyes fly open and scan the distance for the source. It’s as if it was born from the earth itself, the vibration traveling up the huge metal structure. My ears pick up the roar of thunder, coming not from the sky but of the ground.
Men who fill the darkness like ravens, men who exude violence and power, robed in leather and metal and danger. My heart thunders, echoing the roar of those great chrome beasts tearing through the night, getting closer, every second bringing them nearer to me like an army of avenging angels. And Iknow.
My hand drops down to my waist, the pills clutched so tightly in my fist that they bite into the skin of my palm. This night will change my life forever, but perhaps not the way I thought it would.
It’s only a minute before the roar of their engines grows so loud that it’s another entity entirely in the night, alive and menacing. A few seconds pass, and then I spot them, bursting out between two tall buildings that line the road, their hair whipping out in the wind behind them, great chrome beasts gleaming in the moonlight.
I don’t know how they see me, or how they know I’m up there, but the bikes don’t continue past the base of the tower. They veer off the road and stop at the edge of the grass. One by one, the rumble dies away, and the night is again filled with silence.
They stand there, their voices muffled together after they’ve dismounted and removed their helmets. They don’t need to look up to see me. It’s almost like they have some uncanny sense to my presence. They’re small below me, but still, they look like leather-clad knights. I have always had a fascination for the motorcycle club in town, those glorious, dangerous men with their bikes and wickedness, but most of all, the freedom they exude.
Despite Steel Riders’ reputation the town has grown comfortable with a bunch of bikers living and thriving in their community among them, raising families of their own. They keep the town safe, and in return, the town turns a blind eye to the grow operations the club has going on all over the place. They don’t move their product in town. Ever. Or allow anyone else to. They keep the town’s youth safe from that shit, and so people, in an odd way, rely on them the way they can’t always rely on cops.
My fingers relax on the pills. I let them spill back into my pocket as I wait, watching. The biggest man, the one with a shocking head of raven-black hair, the one I know to be their leader—because I’ve spent my whole life in Helena and there isn’t a soul who doesn’t know who Steven ‘Steel’ Vanderbilt is—says something to the others.
I take a step back from the railing. Amazingly enough, even though I can’t see him move—since I’m hidden in the shadows—I feel the tower tremble beneath me as he climbs up the steps. His steel-toed boots echoing through the metal framework.
He’s coming for me. He’s coming up the tower, scaling those rusted rungs like he isn’t a brutal beast who could easily slip and fall to his death. Those massive hands, hands scarred with time and violence, climb surely, steadily, until he reaches the top and swings himself over to land with athudnot more than three feet away from me.
