The floodlights are still blazing over the east fence line.
Someone will deal with them.
The club will sweep the property.
Ghost will pull the video.
Sin will make calls.
The machinery of it all moves without me, and I am grateful for that tonight. I look down at the folder on my lap. My father’s documents, the reason I was there, the reason any of this happened tonight, are sitting in a manila folder with a rubber band around them and my father’s handwriting on the tab.
I haven’t opened it.
I promised myself I wouldn’t open it.
It wasn’t my business until my father decided it was, and for the last few weeks, I’ve been forcing myself to respect that line, even while the weight of it pressed harder on me every single day. But those two men with their phones and their photographs and their patient, methodical survey of the McClane Miningproperty weren’t a coincidence. They weren’t curious. They were preparing for something, and whatever it was was connected to something, and I think the answer to why they were there is sitting in my lap.
I stare out through the windshield while the highway tears out ahead of us beneath the headlights, endless dark desert broken only by the glow of passing signs and the low growl of the engine beneath my feet. Beside me, Will drives with that same grounded steadiness that seems wired into him. One hand loose on the wheel, his eyes sharp and completely locked in. Just a solid, dependable presence that makes everything around him feel a little less likely to fall apart.
Tonight, I let the mine disappear into the darkness behind us while I sit in the warmth of the truck cab, trying to breathe around the weight of everything sitting in my lap. The unanswered questions, the documents, the fear—all of it.
Tomorrow will come soon enough.
And for the first time tonight, I stop trying to outrun it.
Chapter Two
WILL
The Next Morning
Heavy thoughts don’t let me sleep for shit.
I wake before my alarm with that familiar pressure already sitting in my chest, the kind that makes real rest impossible, no matter how exhausted I am.
The number hits me first, before my feet touch the floor, before traffic noise starts bleeding through the window and reminds me I’m still in the city instead of out on the road where my head works better.
Twenty-onedays.
Three weeks from now, I’ll stand in front of my brothers and receive the thing I have been building toward for two years.
My patch.
The fact of it pulses through me like a second heartbeat, low, constant, and impossible to ignore. I reach up and press the heel of my palm flat against my sternum, feeling it thump. That ticking pressure, the weight of everything I still have to get right before then.
I shower, dress, and make it out into the club room earlier than usual, expecting the place to feel still half-asleep.
It doesn’t.
The air inside carries that low, restless energy that sets my nerves on edge before I even figure out why. Voices murmur near the kitchen, coffee brews somewhere, and boots move across hard concrete with more purpose than a normal morning deserves.
I head for the side entrance and push the door open. The cold Nevada air hits me first, then the sight of the lot. Bikes sitclustered in uneven lines, dust still clinging to chrome from last night’s run. A couple of the brothers move between the garage and the yard, coffee in hand, shoulders tight, conversations cut short beneath the tension hanging between them.
No one is laughing.
No one is busting balls.
Church ran long after we got back from the mine. Long enough that sleep became optional. Long enough that whatever those two men were doing out there at that mine hasn’t left anyone’s mind yet. And now Church is picking back up again. The whole place feels as if it’s braced for impact, as if we’re waiting for something to make the next move.
