She didn't argue. Didn't ask me to stay. Turned back to the taps and let me go, and that's worse than if she'd thrown a bottle at my head because at least a bottle means she expected something from me.
The phone buzzes in my jacket. I ignore it. The highway narrows through a construction zone, one lane, orange conesglowing in the rain like teeth. I thread through and open the throttle on the other side and the phone buzzes again.
Knox.
I pull over at a turnout three miles past the construction. The shoulder drops into darkness, trees and nothing, the Pacific somewhere below but invisible. Rain drums against my helmet, a steady roar that drowns out everything except the phone in my jacket. I kill the engine and the silence underneath is worse.
The phone buzzes a third time. I pull it out.
Knox calls once and if you don't pick up he calls again and if you still don't pick up he shows up in person, and I'm three hundred miles from anyone showing up in person. But it's Knox. The man who handed me a patch when I had nothing, not a name or a home or a reason to stop riding. I can dodge Finn. I can dodge the brothers' group chat. I can't dodge Knox, and he knows it.
I answer.
"Hello."
"Where are you riding to, brother?"
His voice comes through low and measured, the same low tone he drops into during Church when the room needs to shut up and listen.
I pull my helmet off and hold the phone against my ear. Rain hits my scalp and runs down the back of my neck into my jacket. "I don't know."
"You've been riding to nowhere for fifteen years, Rex. When does it stop?"
My teeth grind. Knox has a talent for asking questions that don't leave room for the answer you want to give.
"The scouts photographed the Anchor, Knox. The bar. Her bar. She works there six nights a week and lives upstairs. If they're connecting me to the club and the club to that building—"
"Garrett used that logic on Nina." Knox cuts in. Not sharp. Quiet."Told himself she'd be better off without him. Pushed her away. You remember how that ended?"
I remember. Garrett alone in his cabin for three days, pacing the floors until the boards groaned. Nina at the clubhouse with Sarah, not eating, not sleeping. Knox told me to check on him because he'd stopped answering his phone, and I drove out and found the minotaur sitting on his porch in the rain, staring at the tree line like he'd forgotten how to go inside.
"She's your mate, Rex."
The word lands in my chest and spreads.
"I can hear it in your voice. The bond changes how a man sounds." A pause. "I'd know. So would Finn."
My knuckles ache on the handlebars. I look down and realize I'm gripping them hard enough that the tendons stand up under the skin, white ridges in the dark.
"Knox—"
"When you figure out that the answer's behind you, turn around and come home, brother."
The line goes dead. Knox doesn't say goodbye. He says what he means and hangs up, and the silence he leaves behind has more weight than most men's speeches.
I sit on the shoulder with the phone in my hand and the rain running off my jaw and I don't move for a long time.
Fifty miles north of the turnout, I spot the tail.
Dark sedan, four car lengths back. I see it in my mirrors. My hands tighten on the grips before I even know what I'm looking at. The sedan matches my speed through a sweeping left curve. I drop five miles an hour. It drops five. I push back to seventy. It climbs with me.
My instinct takes over. The part of my brain that maps routes and reads traffic and calculates distances.
I take the next exit. A two-lane county road that cuts east through timber country, no streetlights, no houses, not on any GPS I've ever seen. The sedan follows. They're not even subtle about it, hanging back a quarter mile, their headlights bouncing off the wet pavement behind me.
I run them through a series of turns I've logged over six years of riding every back road between Brookings and Astoria. Left at the unmarked fork past the defunct lumber mill. Right onto the fire road that dead-ends at the ridge above Gold Beach unless you know about the switchback thirty yards before the gate. I take the switchback at forty, tires biting into gravel, the bike leaning hard enough that my knee guard scrapes the ground. The fire road spits me out on a logging access road that loops back to 101 two miles south.
I pull over on the logging road and kill my lights and wait. At forty-five seconds the sedan's headlights appear at the top of theswitchback and stop. They've hit the gate. The brake lights flare red through the trees and the sedan sits there for ten seconds before reversing back the way it came.
