Chapter 3. The Man at the Gate

Rae POV

By Saturday I'd heard eleven different explanations of who Atlas was, and none of them agreed.

He was Judge's enforcer. He was Judge's nephew. He'd been gone eight months helping another club rebuild after a fire. He'd broken a man's jaw in Missoula with one punch. He'd carried a stranger's Harley out of a ditch on his back. He didn't drink. He didn't dance. He didn't talk.

"He talks," Hook said, wiping his hands on a rag. "Just not to you, probably."

"Great. Very welcoming."

"I mean it nice." Hook frowned like he'd stepped on something. "Forget it. Ask Tasha what she's wearing."

Tasha was wearing a red dress and the expression of a woman with a plan. Our friends Jo and Amira squeezed into her backseat, and I rode ahead on my own bike, a 2009 Sportster I'd painted midnight blue with pinstripes so fine you had to get close to see the pine needles in them.

The Black Pine compound sat at the end of a gravel road off Route 9, behind a chain-link gate and a strip of old lodgepole pines. I'd towed bikes to that gate for years. I'd never been past it.

I'd also never noticed the second gate, a hundred yards before it, half-swallowed by brush on the ridge side of the road: tall, iron, rusted shut. I slowed without meaning to. A wolf's head inside a pine tree was worked into its center.

The same gate as the photograph in Grandpa's tin, which was zipped inside my jacket right now.

My hands went cold on the grips. I made myself keep riding.

A rider stepped out of the guard shack as I rolled up. Thirties, lean, dark hair falling in his eyes, a laptop bag still slung over one shoulder like he'd been interrupted mid-email. A long pale scar ran from his wrist to his elbow.

He leaned down to my helmet. Then he went still, nostrils flaring once, like a dog catching something on the wind.

"You're Gus's mechanic," he said slowly.

"Rae. Brick invited us."

"I know." He was still looking at me, head tilted. "I'm Eli. Huh."

"Huh what?"

"Nothing." He glanced at the car behind me, counted the women in it, and waved us through. "Bonfire's straight ahead. Stay off the back lot."

"Everyone keeps saying that."

"Everyone's right." He was already pulling his phone out of his pocket, and typing fast.

***

I'd expected a biker party to look like a biker party on TV. Smashed bottles, loud music, girls on tables.

There was loud music. That part was accurate.

But there were also kids running between picnic tables with glow sticks, at least until nine o'clock, when a wave of mothers collected them like laundry. There was a smoker the size of a pickup truck and a woman in a Black Pine cut basting brisket with a paintbrush. There were old men arguing about the Grizzlies. There was a pregnant redhead with her feet up on a cooler, holding court like a queen.

"That's Birdie," Brick told me, appearing at my elbow with two beers. "Judge's wife. If she asks you to do anything, just do it. It's faster."

"Rae!" Birdie waved me over with her whole arm. "Gus's girl. Come here, honey. Let me look at you."

She looked. Hard. Then she smiled, slowly, the way Eli had said huh.

"Well," she said. "Aren't you something."

I didn't know what that meant, so I asked her when she was due, and that kept her busy for twenty minutes. Tasha disappeared toward the bar and Hook. Jo and Amira were adopted by a table of women playing a vicious game of cards. Somebody put a plate of brisket in my hands. Somebody else asked if I was the one who'd rebuilt the Shovelhead, and when I said yes, three riders pulled up chairs to hear how I'd done the bottom end.

For almost an hour, I forgot to be sad.

It was strange, though. All night the world had felt turned up a notch. The fire snapped louder than fire should. I could hear the bass from the speaker in my back teeth, and somewhere past the shop, much too far away to hear, two men were arguing about a carburetor. I could make out every word.

I rubbed my ear and decided it was the beer. I hadn't eaten properly in days. I hadn't taken those vitamins in eleven days, because a dead man had told me not to, and I was listening.

Tasha came back from the bar flushed and glowing, Hook trailing her with two drinks like a very large, very hopeful retriever.

"He asked me to dance," she hissed in my ear. "There isn't even dancing."

"There is now," Hook said, and somebody, God bless them, put on Waylon Jennings.

Then the music cut out.

Somebody turned the speaker down, and conversations thinned one by one, and heads turned toward the dark beyond the bonfire, toward the back lot everyone told me to stay away from.

A man was walking out of it.

I'm five-eight in work boots. I'm used to looking most men in the eye. I had to tip my head back to look at this one, and keep tipping. Six-eight, at least. Shoulders that blocked out the stars behind him. A black T-shirt, a worn Black Pine cut, a short dark beard. Scars on both hands, pale against the tan, the knuckles thick from years of something I didn't want to think about.

He moved quietly for someone that size. That was the first thing that unsettled me.

The second was that every person around that fire straightened slightly as he passed, the way you sit up when your teacher walks in.

"Atlas," Brick murmured beside me, almost reverent.

Atlas stopped at the edge of the firelight. He didn't look at the crowd. He didn't look at Birdie, or Brick, or the cooler of beer someone was already holding out to him.

He looked at me.

Not a glance. He looked at me the way I look at an engine that's making a sound it shouldn't, every part of his attention narrowing down to one point.

I held his gaze, because I'd been stared at by worse. My whole family had perfected the art.

But nobody had ever stared at me like this.

"Who's this?" he asked.

His voice was the deepest I'd ever heard. It went through my ribs like the idle of a big V-twin.

Nobody answered him either.

He took one slow breath in through his nose, like a man surfacing from deep water.

And the bottle in his hand cracked straight down the middle.