Chapter 5. Kincaid

Rae POV

He put the tarp back himself. Corner by corner, smoothing the canvas over the tank like he was tucking someone in.

I didn't say anything else about restoring it. Some things you don't push. I'd learned that from Grandpa Walt, who kept my grandmother's reading glasses on the kitchen windowsill for six years after she died and dusted around them every Sunday.

When we walked back toward the fire, Atlas said, without looking at me, "I shouldn't have barked at you."

"You didn't bark. You said no. It's your father's bike."

He was quiet for a few steps. "Wade," he said. "My name's Wade. Atlas is for the club."

"Okay, Wade."

I swear the corner of his mouth moved.

Every seat at the long table by the fire was taken. Brick had his feet on the last free chair and was pretending he didn't. Wade looked at the bench, then at me.

"Sit with me?" he asked.

"Bench is full."

"I'm not."

It was so ridiculous, and so plainly a question, that I laughed for the first time in a week. He sat on the end of the bench, solid as a stump, and I perched on his knee like it was the most normal thing in the world.

The whole table stopped talking.

Brick dropped a set of tongs into the potato salad. Birdie pressed a hand to her mouth, but her eyes were dancing. Across the fire, Eli lifted his beer at his brother in a slow, wordless salute.

Wade ignored all of them. He kept one big hand flat against the back of my jacket, not holding, just there, like a wall I could lean on if I wanted to.

I wanted to.

"So," he said. "The Shovelhead."

"Gus told you."

"Gus tells me everything. He's worse than Birdie."

"I heard that," Birdie said.

I gave him the short version. The barn, the rebuild, the bow. The office door. My sister in my sweater. He listened without interrupting, which almost no one does. When I finished, he didn't tell me I'd dodged a bullet. He didn't tell me everything happens for a reason.

He said, "His loss," and he said it like a fact about torque specs.

"Why do they call you Atlas?" I asked.

"Because I carry things."

"That's it? Not because you held up a truck on Route 9 with one hand? Because I heard that one twice today."

He thought about it. "It was a small truck."

I laughed so hard I nearly slid off his knee, and his hand on my back steadied me without pulling me closer. When I glanced up, Birdie was watching the two of us with her chin in her hand and an expression I couldn't read at all. Not disapproval. Something more like worry, wrapped in a lot of hope.

The sound of more bikes rolled up the gravel road. Six riders from out of town, mud to their knees, cuts with a larch tree on the back. Wade lifted a hand to them. The one in front, lean and sun-browned with a crooked grin, peeled off his helmet and walked straight to my Sportster, parked under the floodlight.

"Who did these pinstripes?" he called. "Are those pine needles?"

"Me," I said. "And yes."

He whistled, long and low, and looked at me like he'd just found twenty dollars in an old coat. "Jesse Navarro. I build custom bikes for people with more money than sense, and you just made me feel very bad about my brushwork."

Wade's hand on my back went still.

Then my phone buzzed against my hip. Once. Twice. Four times.

BRETT: where are you

BRETT: your dad opened the safe

BRETT: Rae he's calling the sheriff

BRETT: just bring it back and this all goes away ok?? for the baby

I read it twice. Wade read it over my shoulder once, which was apparently all he needed.

Headlights swung across the pines at the end of the road.

A tow truck I'd driven a hundred times pulled up to the gate, DEMPSEY AUTO & TOW in peeling red across the door. Behind it, a county sheriff's cruiser with its light bar dark.

My father climbed out of the truck. My mother didn't come; she never came to anything unpleasant. Brett got out of the passenger side looking like he wanted to be anywhere else. Kaylee was already holding her phone up, recording.

Eli met them at the gate. Somebody turned the music off again.

By the time I'd crossed the yard, half the club was behind me. I didn't ask them to be. They just were.

The deputy was Kyle Hollister, who'd gone to high school with Kaylee and had the decency to look embarrassed. "Rae. Your dad says you took some money and family jewelry out of his safe."

"Eight thousand four hundred dollars," Dad said. "And my mother-in-law's jewelry. Family heirlooms."

"They're mine."

"Nothing in that safe is yours." my father said.

Kaylee swung the phone around so it caught my face, the bikers, the fire. Her voice went sweet and loud, for an audience. "Say hi, everybody. This is my little sister. She followed my fiancé around like a lost puppy for four years, and when he finally picked someone else, she robbed our parents and ran off to live with a biker gang."

Somebody behind me growled. Actually growled.

"Grandma June left that jewelry to me," I said, to Hollister, not to her. "Grandpa Walt left me that cash."

"Your grandmother didn't leave you a damn thing," Dad said, and something moved under his face, something I'd seen once or twice in my life and never had a name for. "You're confused. You're upset about Brett. Get in the truck, and we'll sort it out at home."

"I'm not going anywhere with you."

Grandma's paper was forty feet behind me, folded in the bottom of a walnut box in my saddlebag. One minute, and I could end this. I took a step back toward my bike.

He stepped forward and closed his hand around my arm.

His grip was hard, practiced, and I knew it well. I knew where the bruise would sit tomorrow. Grandpa's tin dug into my ribs through my jacket, and his note flashed through my head: they finally pushed you out. I learned how to break that hold when I was eleven, and I was already turning my wrist to do it.

I didn't need to.

A hand came over my shoulder and closed around my father's wrist. Scarred knuckles. Fingers long enough to wrap all the way around.

Wade had stepped in so close behind me that his beard brushed my temple.

"Let go of her," he said. Very quietly.

My father looked up at him and lost every drop of color.

He breathed one word, too low for anyone but me: "Kincaid."

And the eyes an inch from mine had gone gold.