Chased by the Biker Shadow novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Exit Nine

Ronan steers her off the highway before the exit where Bronco's men wait, and they run the quarry road in the dark until her bike goes down. Bronco texts a photo of her father's ashes beside a gas can and a midnight deadline.

I did not lower the wrench.

"Why would I believe a word you say?" I asked. "You've said maybe ten words to me in fourteen months."

Ronan looked at the highway behind us.

"Because I'm not on his side."

He said it flat, with no heat in it at all.

"Then whose side are you on?"

"Yours."

A truck roared past on the road, and its lights ran over his face.

He wasn't lying.

I had spent fourteen months watching men lie to my face, so I knew what it looked like, and he wasn't doing it.

I still didn't trust him.

"Why?" I said.

"Later."

He pulled his helmet back on.

"Ride with me. Stay on my left rear and do exactly what I do."

"I don't take orders from the club anymore."

"This isn't the club."

He started the Road King and rolled out onto the highway without waiting.

I stood there for a moment with a wrench in my hand and my own heartbeat in my ears.

Then I swore and got back on my bike.

We rode north in the dark with the wind pulling at my jacket.

His taillight stayed a little ahead of me, steady, and I hated how much I leaned on it.

At the Exit Nine sign he didn't signal.

He just kept going straight, and I followed.

A mile later I saw them in my mirror.

Two headlights came off the ramp behind us, fast.

Then two more.

Bronco hadn't sent two men.

He had sent four.

Ronan's brake light blinked twice, then once.

I didn't know what that meant, so I did what he'd said and copied him.

He swung hard onto a gravel road with no sign at all.

I went in behind him, and the back of my bike slid out in the loose stone.

I caught it with my foot and kept the throttle open.

Dust rolled up around us.

The road dropped between two rock walls, and I knew where we were.

An old county gravel pit, one of the places the club rode out to on Sunday runs.

Everyone in the club knew its one road in and one road out.

"They'll cut us off at the far end," I shouted into my helmet, though he couldn't hear it.

Ronan never slowed.

At the first curve he pulled the Road King sideways across the track and stopped it, headlight pointed back the way we'd come.

"Keep going," he said into the radio clipped on his collar.

I hadn't known the road captain's radio could reach me.

"I'm not leaving you."

"Roz."

It was the first time he had ever said my name.

I felt it all the way down my back.

"Go."

I went.

Behind me I heard engines slam into the rock walls, and a man shouting, and a crash that I hoped was not Ronan.

I took the next curve too fast.

The gravel turned to sand, and my front wheel washed out.

The Sportster went down on her side, and I went with her.

I slid across the dirt on my forearm and my hip and stopped against a boulder, with the bike on top of my leg.

For a second everything was white.

Then the engine ticked.

Somewhere above me, a bike came down the track, slow.

I got my fingers around a rock the size of my fist.

The headlight stopped, and the Road King shut off.

Ronan stepped over the bike and went to one knee.

He took the Sportster by the frame and lifted it off my leg in one pull.

"Can you move your toes?"

I wiggled them.

"Can you stand?"

"I think so."

He held out a hand.

I looked at it for a long moment.

Then I took it, and he pulled me up so smoothly that my boots barely touched the ground.

His hand was warm and rough and very careful.

The skin on my forearm was torn open, and he saw it before I did.

His mouth went tight.

"The men?" I said.

"One bike is in the ditch. The others turned around."

"How?"

"I told them the pit road floods in spring."

"It isn't spring."

"They didn't check."

For the first time that night, I almost laughed.

My phone buzzed in my jacket.

I pulled it out with a shaking hand, and the screen was cracked from the fall.

Bronco.

I almost didn't open it.

Then I did, because I had to know how far he'd go.

It was a photo.

On the clubhouse bar, in the yellow light, stood a steel urn with my father's dates engraved on the side.

Next to it sat a red plastic gas can with the cap off.

Under the picture he'd written one line.

Back by midnight, or your daddy goes in the dumpster fire. Your choice, babe.

I read it three times.

My father had been dead two years.

He had been a Saint for thirty of them, and he'd made me promise to keep his ashes with me.

I had left them on that shelf after his funeral because Bronco said it was safer, and the club would take care of him.

I hadn't thought about it once since.

The phone slipped out of my hand.

Ronan caught it before it hit the dirt.

He read the screen.

He did not say anything, and he did not have to.

His whole face had gone still and hard.

"It's eleven-fifteen," he said.

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