Chapter 1

The gas station attendant outside Ridgemont acted like directions cost him something personal. I asked him twice. He didn’t answer until I slid a five across the counter next to my water bottle. Five dollars I couldn’t spare.

Then he opened his mouth. Past the scrapyard. Past the diner that had been closed since before I was born, apparently. Follow the gravel until it stops looking like a road.

I’d been walking maybe twenty minutes before the clubhouse came into view. My first thought wasn’t fear. It was that the place looked smaller than I’d pictured.

Three years building this up in my head. Iron Vale, the name on the receipt my investigator sold me for four hundred dollars I also didn’t have. And here it was. A low building the color of rust, bikes lined up out front like something out of a movie about places like this.

Men were outside smoking. One of them noticed me first and elbowed the guy beside him without looking away, and the whole group went quiet, though nobody had said a word yet.

“You’re on private property.”

His beard was down to his collarbone. His eyes moved over me twice, slowly, already deciding what kind of trouble I might turn out to be.

“I need somebody who’s been part of this club a long time,” I told him. “Somebody who knew Daniel Voss.”

I watched the name land on him. It weighed something. It had to, because the guy next to him younger, shaved head, looked barely old enough to be standing there took a step back like I’d said a curse word in church.

Nobody spoke. Somebody near the door repeated the name to someone else inside, quieter, like they didn’t want me to hear it get repeated. Then a man walked out who didn’t belong in the same category as the others.

I noticed that before I noticed anything else about him. The way he moved, like the space around him had already been assigned to him before he got there. He had dark hair. Scar through one eyebrow, thin, old. He stopped a few feet away and looked at me the way you would look at a bill that finally showed up after months of being told it didn’t exist.

“Say that again.”

“Mara Voss.”

His expression barely changed. That stillness unsettled me more than anger would have. I had expected anger. What I got instead was quiet, and quiet from a man built like that felt heavier than shouting.

“That’s bold,” he said, “saying that name out loud like it doesn’t carry weight in this yard.”

“I don’t know what it carries. That’s the whole reason I came.”

“It means your father sold this club out and vanished before anyone could make him pay for it.”

“That’s the story somebody told you.”

“It’s the only story that matters.”

“You don’t actually know that. You are repeating it.”

His jaw twitched, once. I thought for a second he might walk away rather than keep talking to me. After three years of knocking on doors nobody wanted to open, part of me had expected that. He stayed anyway, arms crossed, waiting for my next move.

“You weren’t even in the room when it happened,” he said. “So don’t stand here defending a man you barely knew.”

“I remember him.”

“Enough to know he ran?”

“Enough to know he wouldn’t. Not without a reason.”

Somebody behind him laughed, short and ugly. He didn’t turn around. Just lifted two fingers up, and the laughing stopped like it had been switched off.

“You should leave,” he told me.

“Not until ”

I didn’t get to finish. The front window came apart before the sound of the shot caught up to it. I’d think about that later how the glass moved first and my brain lagged a full second behind it. Then everyone was on the ground and a second shot struck a bike close enough that gravel sprayed against my leg.

A hand closed around the back of my jacket. I didn’t see who it was. It didn’t matter. It yanked me sideways behind an overturned barrel hard enough to knock the air out of my chest, and when I got my eyes open it was him. One arm braced against the metal, the other flat across my back. He was not looking at me at all but watching the tree line like it owed him something.

“Don’t move.”

More shots were fired. Somebody near the door firing back now, and it went on longer than I expected these things to go on. Less like gunfire in movies. More like something mechanical malfunctioning over and over. Then it stopped. An engine somewhere down the road, tires spitting rock, gone.

He took his time getting up. He stayed down a moment longer than necessary, eyes still looking toward the trees. When he finally looked at me again, his expression had shifted into something I couldn’t quite understand.

“That wasn’t random.”

“How do you know?”

He stood, pulled me up with him, harder than he needed to.

“Nobody’s touched this place in two years.” A pause, like he didn’t love saying the next part. “You show up asking about your father. Now there’s a bullet hole in my front window.”

He looked at me too long before he said the rest of it.

“Maybe it wasn’t the club they were aiming at.”