I nodded. “Yep.”
“I don’t know of anything that’s out here except—oh! Bender!”
She shrieked and clung to me even tighter as I took a sharp left and barreled through the desert. The deserted land between Twin Bays and the big cities it was squashed between were nothing but bone-dry soil. Dust kicked up around us as I made my way toward the shooting range my club had set up for ourselves. We blazed a trail between two massive, dried clay mountains before I stopped in the middle of the parched gorge that had been devoid of water for decades.
“All right,” I said as I put my kickstand down, “we’re here.”
The woman behind me slid her helmet off. “This doesn’t look like a shooting range.”
I shrugged. “Not my fault you can’t see it.”
Bullet holes littered the side of the mountain amidst hand-drawn targets. I left her to fix herself up as I swung my leg over my bike and pulled my helmet off. The sun beat down on us, causing sweat to break out across my brow. So, I hung my helmet on the handlebars of my bike before slipping out of my leather cut.
“So, here’s the deal,” I said as I tossed my vest over my bike, “I shoot and get a question that you have to answer, then I help you shoot and you get a question I have to answer. But Heist is completely off limits.”
She finally got herself steady on her feet and yanked the helmet off her head. “What the hell would I want to know outside of what happened at Heist?”
I shrugged. “Beats me. But those are the rules. You either agree, or I leave you out here.”
“Doesn’t really leave me much of a choice then, does it?” she asked as she set her helmet on the back seat of my bike.
I snickered as I pulled out my gun. “You didn’t leave me much of a choice. Why would I give you one?”
She walked up to my side. “Touché.”
“Now, watch my form while I take this shot, all right? And answer me this: what’s your name?”
I took a shot at the target in front of me about thirty yards away and shot straight through the red dot in the center.
“Wow,” the woman whispered.
I turned toward her. “Full name.”
She cleared her throat. “Aria Dunne.”
I nodded. “Take out your gun and mimic my stance.”
She backtracked toward her purse. “All right, my question now. Why join a motorcycle club?”
I chuckled. “Are you asking personally? Or is your journalistic side asking?”
She pulled the gun out of her purse. “Does it matter? Not like questions about your club are against the rules. Just questions about Heist.”
Fair enough.“I found them when I needed a family the most, and they became my family.”
She took her stance, but I had to quickly correct her.
“Try your feet shoulder-width apart. There you go, like that.”
Aria shook her head. “This doesn’t feel comfortable.”
I shrugged. “It’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to keep you grounded and safe. Not everything in life is there to make you comfortable.”
She side-eyed me. “Is that the lesson you learned during whatever happened that drove you into the arms of a bike club?”
I clenched my jaw. “Just take a shot at that target, would you? You’ve already asked your question.”
She cocked the gun, but it took her a few seconds to pull the trigger. When she did, she yelped, and because she practically dropped her gun into the sand beneath our feet the bullet fell with her. It slammed into the bottom of the mountain, nowhere near the fucking target she had been aiming toward.
