Chapter 4:The Year He Stopped Riding

There's a rule about crying in front of insurance adjusters. I broke it.

His name was Pete Hendricks, mid-fifties, the kind of tired, decent-looking man who'd clearly spent thirty years delivering bad news in a calm, practiced voice designed to keep people from doing exactly what I was about to do. He sat across my kitchen table — the one piece of furniture from the garage office that hadn't burned, salvaged because I'd taken the ledgers home the week before, some instinct I still don't understand — and told me, gently, that my policy wouldn't pay out.

"Not fully, at least," he said. "Arson exclusions are a nightmare, Rae. If there's any suspicion of a targeted fire — and given what the fire marshal's preliminary report is flagging — the payout's going to be tied up in review for months. Maybe longer."

"I don't have months," I said. "I have a mortgage on a building that doesn't exist anymore and a payroll for two guys I haven't been able to pay since Tuesday."

"I know." He did look like he knew. That was almost worse. "If you had a police report naming a suspect, it'd move faster. Insurance likes a name to point at."

"I have a name," I said, before I could stop myself. "I just don't have anything that'll hold up as proof."

Pete's pen stopped moving. "What name."

I thought about the burner phone still sitting in a ziplock bag in my glovebox, because some paranoid part of me hadn't wanted it in the house another night. I thought about six words with no signature. I thought about a man named Ronan Vale going rigid under my hand at one in the morning, and I found, for the first time in this whole miserable conversation, that I didn't actually want to say it out loud.

"Nothing solid," I said instead. "Forget it."

Pete didn't forget it, not really — he left with the careful, unsatisfied look of a man who knows he's being handed half a story — but he left, at least, and that was one small mercy in a day that hadn't handed out many.

I was still sitting at the table when I heard the bike outside. Not one I recognized by sound, though I'd know a Reapers engine anywhere by now, apparently, some new and unwelcome skill I'd acquired in the last twelve hours.

Killian Vale let himself onto my porch like he owned it, which, I would learn, was very close to how Killian Vale approached most rooms he walked into.

"You're the mechanic," he said, by way of greeting, grinning like we were already old friends. "Rae Calloway. My brother's been in a genuinely delightful mood since you rode up to our gate at one in the morning and threatened the whole club single-handed."

"I didn't threaten anyone," I said. "I asked a question."

"Sure. And I'm an altar boy." He dropped uninvited onto my porch step, stretching out like he had nowhere else on earth to be. He was younger than Ronan, looser in the shoulders, with the kind of easy, dangerous charm that made you like him before you'd decided whether you should. "So. Insurance guy give you good news or bad news?"

"How do you know about the insurance guy?"

"Small town. Loud car in your driveway for forty minutes." He shrugged like this explained everything, and maybe it did. "Bad news, then. Figured. Ronan's been chewing through the whole club since you left, trying to figure out how much to tell you and how much to bury."

Something in my chest went very still. "Bury what?"

Killian's grin faltered — just barely, just enough that I caught it, the exact same tell his brother had shown me the night before, that flicker of a stutter under the surface calm. "Ask him about the year your dad quit riding with us," he said. "That's the real question. Not the fire. The fire's just — that's just the thing that finally lit."

"What does that mean?"

"It means—"

He didn't get to finish. A second bike roared up the drive so fast gravel sprayed off the tires, and Ronan Vale was off it and across my yard before the engine had even fully cut, moving with a kind of controlled fury that made every hair on my arms stand up at once.

"Killian." One word. It landed like a slap.

"Relax, brother, we're just talking—"

"Get up." Ronan's voice had dropped into that same rough register I'd heard the night before, the one that didn't sound entirely human, and I watched — genuinely watched, disbelieving — Killian's whole body respond to it before his mind seemed to catch up, rising off my porch step like a puppet on a string he hadn't agreed to.

"Jesus, alright, I'm up, I'm up—"

Ronan grabbed his brother by the collar hard enough to make the leather creak and hauled him toward the bikes without another word, without so much as glancing at me, and I stood on my own porch with my heart going too fast and a half-finished sentence hanging in the air that I was going to spend the rest of the week unable to stop turning over.

Ask him about the year your dad quit riding with us. That's the real question.

I stood there on my own porch for a long time after the dust from their bikes had settled, staring down the empty road like it might still hold some answer if I looked hard enough. My coffee had gone cold in my hand. I hadn't even noticed.

Nadia found me there twenty minutes later, back from her shift at the diner, still in her apron, take-out container of something she'd clearly grabbed on the way over swinging from one hand.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," she said, dropping onto the step beside me.

"Worse," I said. "I think I've seen the outline of one, and nobody will tell me what it actually looked like."

I told her about Killian — the offhand mention of the year my father quit riding with them, the way Ronan had hauled his own brother away like a misbehaving dog before he could say anything else. Nadia's face did something complicated while I talked, a flicker of recognition crossing it that she tried, badly, to smooth over before I caught it.

"You know something," I said. "Nadia. You know something and you haven't told me."

"I know rumors," she said carefully. "Rumors aren't facts, Rae, and I wasn't about to hand you half a story on the worst week of your life."

"Tell me the rumor, then."

She was quiet for a moment, picking at the edge of her take-out container like it might give her permission to keep stalling. "People used to say your dad walked away from something bad with that club. Something that happened before you were born. Nobody ever said what. Just that one day he was in deep with them, and the next he wasn't, and he never once explained it to anybody, not even to your mom, not that she was around long enough to ask."

That last part landed strange, a small stone dropped into still water, ripples spreading out further than the size of the stone should have allowed. My mother had died when I was too young to remember her — a car accident, that was the story I'd grown up with, tragic and simple and never once questioned because there'd never been a reason to question it.

"What does my mom have to do with any of this?" I asked.

Nadia's face did the complicated thing again, faster this time, like she was trying to outrun her own hesitation. "Probably nothing," she said. "I told you, it's just rumors. Small towns turn every silence into a story eventually, whether there's anything underneath it or not."

I wanted to believe her. I wanted, badly, for this to be nothing more than a town's habit of filling quiet with speculation. But I'd spent my whole life reading the difference between an engine that ran clean and one that only sounded fine until you dug deep enough to find the crack, and something about the careful, over-rehearsed calm in Nadia's voice told me there was a crack here too, buried

somewhere I hadn't learned to look yet.