Chapter 13. The Patch

Rae POV

Birdie lent me a jacket for the ceremony. Black leather, soft as butter, a little long in the sleeves.

"It was mine before this," she said, patting her belly. "Now it's yours until you get your own."

"My own?"

She just smiled and handed me a flashlight.

The whole pack walked up the ridge at moonrise. Not on bikes. On foot, single file through the pines, nobody talking. Sixty or seventy people, kids too, carrying lanterns that swung and threw long shadows. It was the quietest I'd ever heard a crowd of bikers be.

The path came out in a clearing I'd never seen, a wide bowl of grass ringed by old ponderosas, with a flat boulder at one end like a stage. Judge stood on it. Wade stood below it, alone, in a plain white T-shirt with his cut folded over