Part 1 of 6
Snow was already trying to kill Ava Wright when she saw the black skid marks cutting across Interstate 90.
They carved two violent lines through the white road before ending at a guardrail bent outward by something heavy.
Ava should have kept walking.
Everything life had taught her said the same thing.
Do not stop.
Do not ask questions.
Do not get involved.
At seventeen, Ava had already learned that getting noticed usually created problems.
Police meant questions.
Questions meant names.
And names could send her back toward a home where she had never truly felt safe.
Then she heard something below the highway.
Not the wind.
Not another truck grinding through the storm.
A human voice.
Weak.
Broken.
“Help.”
Ava stopped.
Her soaked sneakers were already buried in dirty snow.
The gloves on her hands were too thin to matter.
Cold had worked its way beneath her jacket and into her bones.
She had been walking for hours outside Billings, Montana.
Her stomach was empty.
Her phone battery was nearly dead.
And the backpack on her shoulders contained almost everything she still cared about.
A faded hoodie.
A photograph of her eight-year-old brother Danny, grinning with syrup on his chin.
And half of a bus ticket to Seattle that her stepfather had torn apart before throwing her out.
The road behind her led back toward shouting, locked doors and a man who had decided she was too much trouble to keep around.
The road ahead led nowhere certain.
She had no money.
No shelter waiting.
No one who would even know if she disappeared before morning.
That was why she almost ignored the voice.
Then it came again.
“Help.”
Ava closed her eyes.
For a second, she heard her stepfather instead.
You’re useless.
You’re nothing but trouble.
Nobody would care if you disappeared.
Then another voice rose in her memory.
Danny.
Her little brother.
Don’t let them make you think you’re trash, Ava.
She opened her eyes.
Then she stepped toward the guardrail.
The embankment dropped steeply into snow, brush and darkness.
At first she saw nothing.
Then moonlight caught a piece of chrome.
A motorcycle lay twisted in the ditch.
One wheel was still slowly turning.
Beside it was a man.
He was pinned beneath the bike, one leg trapped under the frame.
His leather vest was torn across the shoulder.
Ava leaned farther over the rail.
Then she saw the patches.
HELLS ANGELS.
MONTANA.
PRESIDENT.
Her stomach tightened.
She knew enough from television, news stories and whispered warnings to understand what those words meant.
Men wearing patches like that were supposed to be dangerous.
Men like him were not supposed to need help from girls like her.
The injured man groaned again.
His beard was crusted with ice.
His lips were beginning to turn blue.
Ava looked toward the highway.
Vehicles kept passing.
No one stopped.
She understood that better than anyone.
People were very good at seeing what they wanted to ignore.
Ava swung one leg over the guardrail.
A smarter person might have climbed back.
She jumped.
The snow-covered slope disappeared beneath her.
She slid hard, slammed into brush and hit a stump badly enough to knock the air out of her lungs.
But she got up.
Then she crawled toward the man.
His eyes opened.
Gray eyes.
Clear even through the pain.
For several seconds, they simply stared at each other.
A homeless seventeen-year-old girl with frozen hair beneath a cheap hood.
And a badly injured biker whose vest identified him as a president.
“Hang on,” Ava said.
Her voice shook.
“I’ve got you.”
The man almost smiled.
Ava looked at the motorcycle pinning his leg.
It was huge.
Heavy.
Half buried in the drift.
She knew moving wreckage could make an injury worse.
She also knew that leaving him beneath it in freezing temperatures might kill him.
She planted both feet.
Grabbed the handlebars.
And pulled.
Nothing happened.
The motorcycle might as well have been welded to the ground.
“Kid,” the man rasped.
Ava ignored him.
She changed her grip.
Pulled harder.
Her shoulders screamed.
Her shoes slipped through the snow.
She tried again.
For one impossible second, the motorcycle lifted.
Only slightly.
But enough.
“Move!” Ava gasped.
The man dragged his trapped leg free.
The motorcycle crashed back into the snow.
Ava dropped to her knees, breathing hard.
The man stared at her.
“You’re insane.”
A broken laugh escaped him.
“You’re heavy,” Ava muttered.
His hand moved weakly toward the inside of his vest.
Ava reached inside and found a phone.
The screen still worked.
There was no lock.
The recent contacts had names that sounded less like people and more like warnings.
Tank.
Rabbit.
Bones.
Clubhouse.
Emergency.
Ava pressed the last one.
The phone rang once.
A low male voice answered.
“Yeah?”
“There’s been a wreck,” Ava said quickly.
“Interstate 90 eastbound, just past the Billings Motorsports Park exit.”
She looked down at the injured man.
“Your guy went off the road. He’s alive, but he’s bad.”
Silence.
Then:
“Who is this?”
“Just a kid.”
Ava swallowed.
“But if you don’t get here soon, your president is going to freeze to death in a ditch.”
The silence became heavier.
Then the voice returned.
“Stay with him.”
“Don’t let him sleep.”
“We’re coming.”
The call ended.
Ava stared at the screen.
Then at the word on the injured man’s vest.
President.
She had not just called a few friends.
She had summoned his family.
Then the night began to tremble.
At first, Ava thought the storm was changing.
Then she heard an engine.
Then three.
Then ten.
Then so many that the sound became a single enormous growl.
Headlights appeared over the rise.
One after another.
Motorcycles filled the interstate.
They came through the snow in formation, chrome flashing beneath the highway lights.
They did not send a car.
They brought an army.
Bikes lined the shoulder around the broken guardrail.
Men in leather dismounted.
Hard faces.
Beards.
Scars.
Patches everywhere.
Ava stood below them beside their injured president and suddenly understood how the situation might look.
A stranger.
A runaway.
A girl standing beside their nearly dead leader.
A broad-shouldered man with a gray beard climbed over the guardrail.
His name patch read BULL.
Others followed him.
A biker called Bones immediately dropped beside the injured man and began checking his breathing and injuries.
“That’s Reaper,” somebody shouted from above.
Bull knelt beside him.
“Brother.”
Reaper’s eyes opened weakly.
He looked at Bull.
Then Ava.
“Kid,” he whispered.
“Told you they’d come.”
Then his head rolled sideways.
Ava backed away.
Sirens arrived moments later.
Paramedics rushed down the slope.
They stabilized Reaper, lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him toward the ambulance.
Then he was gone.
The flashing lights disappeared into the snow.
Ava looked around.
The bikers had not left.
Hundreds remained along the highway.
Bull climbed onto the road and extended a gloved hand toward her.
“Come on.”
Ava hesitated.
“Stay if you want,” he said. “But the cops will be here in a few minutes.”
That was enough.
Ava grabbed his wrist.
He pulled her up.
On the shoulder, the size of the gathering became overwhelming.
Rows of motorcycles stretched into the darkness.
Every rider seemed to be looking at her.
Then a state trooper arrived.
His eyes moved from the bikers to Ava and finally to the destroyed guardrail.
“And you are?” he asked.
Ava opened her mouth.
Bull answered first.
“She found Reaper.”
He pointed toward the ditch.
“Climbed down there, pulled the bike off him, called us and saved his life.”
The trooper looked at Ava differently.
“You have somewhere warm to stay tonight?”
Ava thought about the underpass.
The closed shelter.
The house she could not return to.
“No.”
Bull looked at the trooper.
“She can give her statement at the hospital.”
The trooper hesitated.
Then nodded.
A younger biker brought Ava a spare helmet.
She stared at it.
She had never ridden a motorcycle.
She had also never had hundreds of bikers waiting to see what she would do next.
Bull walked her toward a matte-black Harley.
“Helmet on.”
Her frozen fingers struggled with the strap.
Bull fastened it for her.
“Get on.”
Ava climbed behind him.
The engine came alive beneath her.
Bull raised two fingers.
All around them, engines answered.
The highway shook.
Then the entire formation began moving toward Billings.
Ava wrapped both arms tightly around Bull as snow whipped past her helmet.
Cars slowed.
Drivers stared.
People lifted phones as the motorcycles rolled through the city with one skinny teenage girl riding near the front.
She had started the night alone, freezing and homeless beside an interstate.
Now hundreds of strangers were carrying her toward a hospital.
But Ava had no idea that the injured man she had pulled from the snow already knew her family name.
And before that night was over, she would learn that her father had once saved Reaper’s life—and that everything she had been told about why he disappeared was wrong.