"Hannah. Stay calm," Raymond said. "I am calm." "Your hand is on the door handle." She looked down. It was. A rider in a black Kings Riders jacket strolled to Raymond's window... About five minutes earlier, Raymond's car passed a battered sign that read Welcome to Love Valley. Someone had spray-painted a crown over the word Love, and someone else had crossed it out with a dragon. "Friend of yours?" Hannah asked when she saw the motorcycle behind them since the highway. "Kings Riders." Raymond didn't glance at the mirror. "He picked us up at the county line. Ignore him." "Do they always follow people?" "Only the ones they're curious about." Six years. Hannah had rehearsed this homecoming in motel rooms and her apartment and in every version Love Valley looked exactly as she had left it. The low thunder of engines was still there. Everything else had changed. She noticed a black banner with a gold crown hung from the old hardware store. Kings Riders. Two blocks later, red-and-green colors snapped over the pharmacy, a dragon coiled through the lettering. Men in leather stood under both, smoking, watching the car pass. "Since when does anyone else wear colors here?" Hannah asked. "Since your father stopped being around to forbid it." Your father. He said it gently, the way you handle something that might still be sharp. Fernando Montague was dead. She had read the message four times in a laundromat two states away, and her mind had refused to make it a fact. Her father had been a mountain. Mountains did not die. They stayed where they were, huge and difficult and impossible to forgive. She had braced for grief and for resentment. She had not braced for a trespasser's feeling in hometown. At the corner of Main and Third, two motorcycles swung across the road. Raymond braked hard such that the car rocked. Behind them, the headlight that had followed for forty miles finally drew close and stopped, and the engine cut off. The rain suddenly sounded very loud. "Hannah. Stay calm," Raymond said. "I am calm." "Your hand is on the door handle." She looked down. It was. A rider in a black Kings Riders jacket strolled to Raymond's window and rapped it twice with a knuckle. Raymond lowered the glass an inch. "Raymond Mills." The rider smiled. He had a gold tooth. "Heard you'd gone fishing. Looks like you caught something." "Move the bikes, Tully." "Is that her?" Tully bent and peered past him, and his smile widened. "Well. Mr. Ferdinand will be pleased. He's been wanting a word with the Montague girl." "Mr. Ferdinand can put it in writing." "He prefers conversation." "Then he can have one. After her father's funeral." "Funeral." Tully tasted the word. "Funny. I heard it keeps getting postponed." Hannah lowered her own window. Cold rain hit her face. "My name is Hannah Montague," she said. "I have been in a car for six hours. I would like to see my mother. Please move your motorcycle." Tully looked at her. For a moment, she thought he might laugh. Then something in her tone, or maybe just the name, made him glance at the other riders, and none of them met his eye. "Course, miss," he said, a half beat too slow. "Wouldn't want to keep family waiting." He waved a hand. The bikes rolled aside. Raymond pulled through without speaking. Only when they were two blocks clear did he let out a breath. "That was reckless." "It worked." "It worked once." But the corner of his mouth was lifting. "Remind me never to bet against you." "You found me," she said. "I would think you already knew." He laughed, short and surprised, and she turned her face to the window so he would not see how badly her hands were shaking. The car swung onto Cooper Street. Her breath caught. The Bull Riders' clubhouse sat at the end of the road exactly where it always had, long and brick, with a wide gravel lot. Above the double doors, the old emblem hung there: a bull in mid-charge, the paint peeling at its horns. Her second home. Her father's kingdom. Men stood under the awning. When the car pulled in, every head turned. She stepped out. Rain soaked through her jacket in seconds. It gave her something to feel besides the hammering in her chest. One of the men, gray-bearded and broad as a doorway, took off his cap. "Little Montague," he said, voice rough. "Well, I'll be damned." "Hello, Walt." "You got tall." "I was eighteen." "Still." His eyes were wet, and he scowled at the rain as if it had insulted him. Raymond touched her elbow. "Inside. Graham's waiting." Graham. The name hit harder than the rain. She had not said it aloud in six years. She had trained herself not to think it, which was a lot like training yourself not to blink. The doors swung open. Leather air, coffee and cigarette smoke worked into the walls. The big room looked smaller than she remembered, the pool tables scarred, the same cracked stools lining the long bar. Dozens of riders filled the space, and conversation died in ripples as she crossed the threshold. She walked through it with her chin up. Her father had taught her that. Never let a room decide who you are before you do. Then the crowd parted, and she saw him. Graham Melville stood at the back with a folder in one hand, talking to two men who had stopped listening. He was taller than she remembered, broader, the boy's lean frame replaced by something heavier and more settled. Dark hair, a little too long. He looked up. The folder slipped from his fingers and hit the floor. Nobody laughed and nobody moved. Six years of rehearsed speeches vanished. She had planned to be composed. She had not planned for his eyes, still that same impossible gray, finding hers across the room as though no time had passed. And then she saw what had changed in them. The boy who had looked at her like she was the best thing he had ever seen was gone. The man looking at her now was guarded. A door had been closed, and it had been closed for a long time. That's my doing, she thought. I closed it. He crossed the room slowly, as though sudden movement might make her vanish. He stopped an arm's length away. Close enough that she could smell rain on his jacket and, underneath it, something she still knew by heart. "Hannah," he said. Just her name. His voice was lower than it used to be, rougher, and it undid something she had spent six years sealing shut. She had a dozen answers prepared. I'm sorry. I should have called. What came out was, "Where's my mother?" Something flickered across his face. Surprise, then hurt, then a stillness so complete it frightened her. He had waited six years, and she had spent her first breath asking about someone else. "Where is she?" Her voice sharpened. "Graham." Behind her, Raymond shifted. "Maybe we should sit down first." "Where is my mother?" Graham glanced once around the room, at the listening men, the open doors, the rain at her back. When he looked at her again, his voice dropped so low that only she could hear. "She's alive." Relief hit so hard her knees nearly gave. She pressed her fingers to her mouth. "But you need to understand something before you see her," he said. "Something you won't like." "Tell me." He held her gaze. There was no softness in it now, only the plain, tired honesty of a man who had buried too many people. "Your mother is the only reason this town hasn't buried another Montague."

Nobody in the room pretended not to listen. Hannah felt it on the back of her neck, forty pairs of eyes and not one of them blinking. Graham had kept his voice low, but this was a clubhouse. Quiet carried. "Not here," he said. "My office." "Graham-" "Please." It was the please that moved her. The boy she remembered never asked for anything twice, and he had never said a word as though it cost him. She followed. The crowd opened ahead of them and closed behind. Dee, the bartender, whose hair had been auburn when Hannah left and was now a fierce silver, reached over the counter and squeezed her hand hard enough to hurt. "Your daddy kept your chair, baby. Nobody's sat in it since." Hannah could not answer. "Six years," a voice called from the pool table. "Funeral's in three days, and she turns up like a late package." The man leaning on his cue was lean and red-bearded, young enough that Hannah half remembered him as a prospect who used to fetch her father's coffee. Cole Brandt. He had not been smiling then, either. "Maybe she's here for the keys," someone else muttered. "Heir has paperwork to collect." The murmur turned ugly. Where was she when we buried him? Where was she when everything went to hell? Hannah stopped walking. She felt Graham move to speak, and she lifted two fingers to stop him. If you let someone else answer for you, you have already lost the room. "You have questions, Cole. I would too." "Damn right." "Ask me when you have earned the answer. I won't lay my family's business on a pool table in front of forty people. My father is dead. I just got here." "That's not an answer." "It's the only one you're getting." The silence creaked. "Cole," Raymond said, strolling up with a clean towel he had apparently produced from thin air, "she has been in the building ninety seconds. Even the Inquisition let people take their coats off first." Someone laughed. Then someone else, relief rattling through the room like loose change. Even Cole's mouth twitched before he scowled it away. "Anyone who wants to ask Hannah something," Graham said, and the room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with courtesy, "asks me first." No one argued. No one even shifted their weight. So that is what it looks like, Hannah thought. A man people obey. The office door shut behind them, and Raymond's voice carried through it: "I'll keep the wolves off." The room was plainer than she remembered. A battered steel desk, a map of Love Valley and against the far wall, her father's old oak desk, polished and completely empty. "You don't use it," she said. "It isn't mine." She dried her face with the towel and studied the map. Red pins north and east. Green pins south. A thin band of blue in the middle, shrunk almost to nothing. "That's us," Graham said. "That's what's left." "Left of what?" "Everything." He leaned on the desk. "After your father died, the club needed a president. Nobody could agree. It should have been a fight over votes. Instead it became a fight over your mother." "My mother?" "Some of the old guard believed whoever Mariam stood beside would carry the club. They treated her like the deed to the building." His mouth flattened. "Arguments. Threats. Then they killed one another, man by man, until there was no old guard left. Their sons inherited the grudges." "Which sons?" "Romeo Ferdinand. Jackson Bolton." He nodded at the red pins, then the green. "Kings Riders. Dragon Riders. Each took a piece of the territory and half the membership. Each swears Mariam is the reason his father is in the ground." "Is she?" "No." Flat. Certain. "They need someone to blame, and she's the one still breathing. Romeo mails her black roses. Jackson's men park outside the house at night with their engines running, so she can hear. The only reason nobody has touched her is that I have riders on every door." An engine turned over outside, and Hannah flinched before she could stop herself. She had pictured grief, and quarrels over a will. She had never pictured her mother lying awake, listening to engines in the dark. "Why?" she asked. "Half your club probably wishes you'd hand her over. She has cost you men." "She has." "Then why?" A shadow crossed his face, quick and old, and Hannah had the sense of standing at a door he had no intention of opening. "Because I won't punish her for what dead men did," he said. "Their crimes aren't hers. If I hand her over, I become the thing I'm trying to stop." The engine outside revved. Once. Twice. Then it held, a long, deliberate snarl, as if someone wanted them to know exactly how close he was. Graham was at the window before she had finished turning. "Walt. Gate." A radio crackled somewhere. Boots pounded in the corridor. Hannah crossed to stand behind his shoulder and saw headlights through the rain, a single rider idling at the end of the lot, red-and-green colors black in the dark. "Dragon Rider," Graham said. "He wants us watching." "Then why is he here?" "To deliver something." The rider tossed an envelope onto the gravel, thumbed his throttle until the engine screamed, and was gone. "Take me to my mother," Hannah said. "Not tonight." "Graham." "Romeo has men on the north road. Jackson watches the south. If you leave in the dark, in a car they've never seen-" He stopped, then started again, quieter. "She's safe. I'll take you myself at first light. I'm not telling you when you can see your mother. I'm asking you to still be alive when you do." The old anger flared and died just as fast. He was right. She hated that he was right. "First light," she said. A rider brought in the envelope, soaked, holding it at arm's length as though it might bite. The paper was heavy and cream-colored. His name was not on it. Hers was. Miss Hannah Montague. She opened it herself. The handwriting was neat, deliberate, almost elegant, and the message beneath was only two lines. The Montague heiress is home. Tell her the debt her father left behind has finally come due. Below it, a single signature in red ink: J. Bolton.

Hannah had been home for twenty minutes. Someone already wanted to collect. Graham read Jackson's note three times without letting his face change. Hannah had grown up around men who shouted when angry and men who went quiet. She knew which was worse. "A debt," she said. "What debt?" "I don't know." He folded the paper and slid it inside his jacket. "Your father never mentioned one." "Would he have?" Graham did not answer, and that was an answer. He gave orders in the doorway, low and fast. Double the gate. Two on the roof. Nobody answers a Dragon Rider's engine. Raymond squeezed Hannah's shoulder on his way out and promised real coffee, and the door clicked shut, and the office went very quiet. "Friday," Graham said. "Noon, Ridge Cemetery, beside your grandfather. Pastor Hale will officiate. Harlan's needs your word on the casket." "Closed." "I assumed." "Who's coming?" "Everyone. Romeo and Jackson both. For one day, nobody draws." He shrugged. "They like how it looks." She wrapped her arms around herself. The question had been in her throat since the car. "How did he die?" "His heart. The doctor said." "Said." "Said." He held her eyes. "I'll tell you everything I know. Tomorrow, after you've seen your mother. Tonight you've taken enough." She might have argued, if she had had anything left to argue with. "Why didn't you tell me?" he asked. No warning. No softening. It landed like a dropped weight. "Graham." "I'm not asking about your father. I'm asking about me." He pushed off the desk. "Six years. I called until your number died. I drove to every town you ever mentioned. You never sent a word. Why?" "I needed to get out of Love Valley." "Fine. But you could have left without leaving everyone who loved you." "That isn't fair." "No," he said. "It isn't." Her chest burned. "You don't know what I found." "Then tell me." "What I found about my father." Her voice cracked, and she hated it. "What did you find?" She could have said it. He shot Tommy on a cliff, plus some unbelievably cruel things he did. The sentence was right there, unbearably ugly, the weighty secrets she had carried in her shoe for six years. But if she said it aloud, she would have to watch Graham's face while he decided whether to believe her. "Not tonight." "Hannah." "I can't. Not yet." He let out a slow breath. The anger drained out of him, and what remained was worse. "I was going to ask you," he said. "When you turned nineteen. I had it planned. Where, when, what I'd say. I had a ring picked out." A tired laugh. "Not bought. Picked. I couldn't afford it yet." "Don't." He stepped closer, careful, like a man approaching a horse that had been hurt before. His hand lifted toward hers. She pulled away before she knew she was doing it. It was barely an inch. It hung between them, enormous. She watched the understanding cross his face and settle there. He slid his hand into his pocket as if that had been his plan all along. "Get some sleep," he said gently. "First light." He was gone before she could say anything else. . Behind the clubhouse, the rain had stopped, and the gravel glowed orange under the security lamp. Graham sat on the back steps with his elbows on his knees, soaked through. He had been there twenty minutes. He had not noticed. The screen door creaked. Raymond dropped down beside him with two paper cups. "Real coffee. You owe me four dollars and a medal." Graham took one and did not drink. "Maybe I shouldn't have brought her back." "Hey." "I wanted her for the club. A name people would follow." He stared at the lot. "I never thought about standing beside her and not saying-" He stopped. "She flinched, Ray." Raymond nudged Graham's boot with his own. "She walked into a room full of men who want something from her, told Cole Brandt to sit down, and didn't blink. Give the woman a day." "And if a day isn't enough?" "Then two. You're patient. It's your worst quality." Raymond grinned, and Graham huffed something close to a laugh. "The club needs her. So do you, apparently. Neither is a crime." Graham nodded and drank. It was terrible but he finished it anyway. . Raymond found her an hour later. He had not been looking. He was checking window locks, and the guest room door stood half open, lamplight spilling into the hall. Hannah sat on the edge of the bed with damp hair around her shoulders and a mug cooling in her hands, staring at nothing. She did not see him. She looked tired and impossibly steady, both at once, as if she had decided long ago that falling apart was a thing you did in private. Lamplight caught the line of her jaw. Six hours in a car beside her, and he had not really seen her until now. She's Graham's, he told himself. The thought arrived unasked, and he did not like what it implied. He walked away more quietly than he needed to. . Sleep never came for Hannah. By midnight the house had gone silent, and all Hannah could see was Graham's hand sliding into his pocket. She went downstairs to do the only useful thing left: read Jackson's note again. The office was unlocked and empty. The note was gone. But his keys lay by the lamp, forgotten. A heavy ring. A dozen keys. A bottle opener. And knotted through it, so worn the leather had gone soft as cloth, a short braided cord with a single brass bull charm no bigger than her thumbnail. Hannah stopped breathing. She had braided it herself at twelve, at the lake, in the long summer her father still smiled. Three strands of leather stolen from Miller's Garage, a charm from a gumball machine, a promise she had been too embarrassed to say aloud. She had pushed it into Graham's palm and run before he could laugh. For six years, she had told herself he had thrown it away. That he had forgotten her, and the forgetting was a mercy. The cord was frayed nearly through. It had been worn, every day, for a very long time. Hannah closed her hand around it and did not let go. At first light, Hannah put his keys back exactly where she had found them. She did not mention the braided cord. Graham closed his fist around the ring, said only, "Ready?" and she nodded. It was a lie, but a quiet one.