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“Not this food. Nick, drinks. Dion, get your feet down before Sparrow learns that from you.”

Both of them moved.

Sparrow got passed around all of them while I finished dinner. She always does. Robin to Nick to Dion to Simon, and then Moff took her and settled her against his chest with one hand flat on her back. He sat with her for twenty minutes, silent and completely at peace.

They spoiled her shamelessly, but they never forgot I was her mom. Hands got washed before anyone picked her up, nobody kissed her face, and nobody took her anywhere without asking me. Not even Robin. I’d set the rules once. They followed them.

As we ate, I thought about the phone call that had brought me here. I’d been in a gas station lot outside Fennimore at four in the morning, crying so hard I could barely speak. Robin picked up on the second ring and said, Tell me where you are. Then he came. He took me back to his house, put food in front of me and gave me a bed. He made sure I was safe. He didn’t ask what had happened. He waited until I was ready to tell him.

I put Sparrow down at eight. She fought it for six minutes and lost, and I stood over the travel crib watching her chest go up and down for longer than I needed to.

Downstairs, Nick said something and Dion started laughing. I heard Robin tell them both to get out of his kitchen.

A year ago, I’d thought the life I’d planned was gone. I’d been right. Seb, the clubhouse, the women I loved—I’d lost all of it in one night. Some days I still missed it so badly it hurt.

But Sparrow was asleep beside my bed, and there were five men downstairs who loved us. I had a home, work I loved and tomorrow night’s set ready to go. I had built a good life.

I still wished Seb had believed me.

Downstairs, Dion laughed again. I went to find out what was so funny.

Chapter 6

❧

— Glitch —

The fog was the first thing I noticed about Kettlewell Cold Bay. The highway came down out of the hills and the temperature dropped eleven degrees inside a mile.

I hadn’t ridden any distance in a year. My bike had sat under a cover behind the clubhouse, but Holden checked it every few days. Our road captain hated seeing a bike sit unused, and he’d made it his personal mission to keep mine in perfect condition while all my attention was somewhere else. I’d walked past it every day and ignored it until this morning, when I’d pulled the cover off, gotten on it and left.

Dutch is going to take a strip off me for it. I read a filing at ten past two in the morning and I was on the road before six. I didn’t ask. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even leave a note. A laptop open on a table with the underwriters’ page still up didn’t count.

Hell, if I’d woken one brother, the whole clubhouse would have been awake and half of them would have offered to ride before I finished explaining. I knew they would. I left without them anyway.

I came into town on the harbor road. I found the pier and stopped the bike three streets back, and then I sat on it.

Engine off. Feet down. Helmet still on.

I sat there for ten minutes. I know because I’d started a clock without meaning to, the way I start a clock on everything. Ten minutes, and I couldn’t get off a bike.

A year. Three hundred and sixty-five days of not sleeping, not eating, not stopping. Every hour of it aimed at getting to a place I could stand and see her.

And I got there and I couldn’t get off the bike.

JW Security sat at the far end of the pier. I stood across the road with my hands in my pockets and read the building the way I read everything.

One approach. Forty feet of open planks between the road and the door. Nothing stacked outside that could provide cover. One camera on the corner of the roof, and a second I only found because I looked where I would have put it.

The place had been set up by people who wanted to know exactly what was happening around them. I’d worked that out within four minutes. Then a truck backed up to the doors and two men came out to load it.

I knew them.

Not their names, not at first. Faces come to me before names do. I knew I’d seen both men before.

Then it landed.

When Wren and I got serious I ran her brother.