Page 26 of Crash’s Secret

I pack the way I was raised to pack in situations like these—fast, essentials first.

Downstairs is controlled chaos. Shelby is directing traffic with a duffel bag over her shoulder. Violet has Leo on her hip and a suitcase in her free hand. Eden and Bree are helping organize. The other Old Ladies are managing kids or helping out where needed.

Jinx works his way down the line with a box of small black fobs, zip-tying one inside Leo’s backpack, handing one to each woman.

“Trackers,” he says when he gets to me, pressing one into my palm. “Everybody carries one. Pocket, not the bag. Extra precaution.”

“Precaution against what?”

“Pocket, Cass.”

I put it in my pocket.

We take cars, not bikes—too many people, too much luggage, and too many car seats. My sedan ends up third in the caravan, Bree riding shotgun in the car ahead of me, brothers on bikes bracketing the whole column like a moving fence.

Jinx and Trapper left to meet up with Saber.

Acorn is on the lead bike. Crash is nowhere in the line, and I don’t get to know where he is instead.

The clubhouse shrinks in my mirror.

The desert slides by.

We’re forty minutes out, on a two-lane stretch with nothing on either side, when the lead bikes brake hard.

Brake lights. Bree’s car is swerving. A truck where no truck should be comes off the shoulder fast.

It hits my passenger side like the world is ending.

There’s glass. The seatbelt cutting into me. The horizon rolling over itself, sky then dirt then sky.

Then nothing at all.

CHAPTER 10

CRASH

The county line marker leans the same way it’s leaned my whole life, green paint, half eaten by rust.

More than two dozen bikes idle here in the dark.

Trapper is one of them. Saber posted him on the clubhouse gate tonight, but he left another prospect holding it and rode straight here instead. Nobody sent for the prospect. Nobody sends him back, either.

Saber stands at the front with Joker’s tablet propped on Razor’s tank, drone footage frozen on the screen. Nitro’s compound is forty minutes north of this marker, deep in Warriors’ territory. Joker flew over it twice this week, but he’s been scoping it out for years.

Chain-link fence, two gates, a main building, a row of trailers along the east fence. We know where they sleep. We know where they keep the guns.

Tonight, we stop knowing things and start ending them.

Saber hasn’t said a word to me that isn’t an order since this morning. Fine. I’ll take orders. I’ll take the silence. I’ll take another punch if he’s got one left over, as long as he lets me ride at his shoulder when we go through that gate.

“Duke’s team takes the south gate,” Saber says. “Scar and his guys hold the north fence. Razor swings the trucks behind the trailers. Viper⁠—”

His phone lights up in his cut.

He’d never answer it here, this close to go-time, except the screen says Acorn, and he is leading the caravan to the safehouse.

Saber puts the phone to his ear. “Talk.”