The rain had been coming down hard all evening, the kind of October downpour that turns small-town streets into rivers and makes anyone with sense stay home. Ethan Cross didn’t have the luxury of sense anymore. He never did. The Harley beneath him hummed like a living thing as he carved through the empty downtown streets of Riverside, California, a city that had seen better days and probably wouldn’t see them again.
He’d been riding for three hours straight, the kind of mindless riding that cleared his head. The Hell’s Angels Redwood Charter didn’t call meetings for him anymore—not officially, anyway. But there was always something. Always someone who needed the kind of help that didn’t involve lawyers or insurance companies. The kind that came from a different understanding of what loyalty meant.That’s when he saw it.
The badge. Silver. Twisted at an angle that made his stomach drop. It was spinning slowly in a puddle of dirty water, catching the sodium lights in stuttering flashes. Ethan had learned to read signs a long time ago, and this one screamed danger.His hands moved on pure instinct, squeezing the brakes hard enough to feel the back wheel slip. The bike fishtailed across the wet asphalt, a controlled slide that came from twenty years of riding these kinds of roads. He killed the engine and had his boots on the pavement before the bike even settled onto its kickstand.
Main Street was dead. Absolutely dead. The kind of dead that comes from something bad happening. All the storefronts were dark—the old diner that had been there since the seventies, the hardware store with the peeling paint, the closed-down movie rental shop that nobody had bothered to remove the sign from. The rain hammered down, cold and relentless, and somewhere in the distance, he heard the tick-tick-tick of an engine cooling down.
