This wasn’t an accident.This was a message.
Ethan pulled off his leather jacket—the one with the Hell’s Angels colors sewn across the back, the one that identified him as someone who lived by a different code than the one written in law books. He folded it carefully and slipped it under her head, as gentle as he could manage with hands that had spent most of their life doing things that required real strength.“Hey,” he whispered, though she couldn’t hear him. “You’re gonna be okay, Bluebird. Just stay with me.”
The name came out without him thinking about it, which was strange, but he’d learned to trust instincts like that. They’d kept him alive when plenty of people younger and smarter than him had ended up six feet under.His hand went to his phone. Calling 911 was the normal thing to do. The civilian thing. The thing that someone who lived by mainstream society’s rules would do. But Ethan wasn’t that person. He’d stopped being that person about twenty years ago, and he’d never really looked back.
Response times out here. Jurisdictional bullshit that meant calls bounced around like pinballs before anyone actually did something. Questions asked in the wrong order. And worse—worse than all of that—whoever had done this knew these streets. Knew the patrol patterns. Knew enough to position themselves exactly right.They might still be close.
He tapped a number he knew by heart. No name in his phone. Just a symbol. The call picked up on the second ring.“Confirm,” the voice said. Calm. Measured. Professional in a way that had nothing to do with the mainstream world.
“One down,” Ethan said. “Law enforcement. Female. Critical condition. Main and Jefferson. Staged accident. I’m holding position.”“Copy. Help is en route. Do not engage.”
He ended the call and sat back on his heels, watching the rain fall on a woman he didn’t know but was now responsible for keeping alive.Fifty Engines in the Rain
The vibration came first.
It wasn’t loud enough to hear with his ears—it was something he felt in his bones, a thrumming that started in the distance and grew steadily closer. Ethan had heard that sound countless times before, but it never stopped being something primal. Something that made you understand why people were afraid of motorcycles.One engine. Then another. Then the sound of five, ten, twenty bikes approaching from different directions. The rain scattered in their wake as they tore through Riverside, and within ninety seconds, Main Street had transformed from an empty wasteland into a fortress.
The bikers cut their engines and formed a perimeter around the crash site, fifty Harleys arranged in a pattern that was neither accidental nor random. Rafe Delgado—Ethan’s road captain and the closest thing he had to a real friend in a world where friendship was often a luxury—pulled up beside him and killed his engine.
“Fifty bikes in the rain at,” Rafe checked his watch, “2:47 AM. This is either the most noble thing we’ve ever done or the dumbest.”
