Chapter 1
Cleo
“Mom?”
I blinked hard, dragging my attention back to the rain-soaked highway stretching endlessly ahead of us.
“Yeah, baby?” I asked softly.
“Are we almost there?”
Tommy’s sleepy voice drifted from the backseat. I glanced at him in the rearview mirror and felt the familiar ache spread through my chest. His dark blond hair stuck up in every direction from sleeping against the car door, his little face still puffy from his nap.
Wade’s face. Sometimes looking at Tommy hurt so badly it stole the air from my lungs.
“Almost,” I lied gently. “Another thirty minutes.”
Beside him, Skylar snorted quietly.
“You said that like an hour ago.”
I smiled despite myself.
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
Tommy groaned dramatically. “I’m starving.”
“There’s a diner coming up soon,” I promised. “We’ll stop there.”
That seemed to satisfy him enough for another few minutes.
Rain tapped steadily against the windshield while the wipers squeaked back and forth in a rhythm that had been driving me insane for the last two hours. My fingers tightened around the steering wheel as another sign appeared through the fog.
Creek Wood – Population 4,312
Small town. Fresh start. New life.
At least, that’s what I kept telling myself. The truth was, I had no idea what I was doing. Three months ago, I still had a house. A husband. Stability. Bills that were paid on time and a future that felt safe, even if life had never been perfect.
Now everything we owned was crammed into my dying Honda, I had ten thousand dollars in debt hanging over my head, and my children were depending on me to somehow hold us together when I felt like I was barely breathing most days.
Life could fall apart terrifyingly fast. I swallowed hard against the sudden burn in my throat.
Wade had been gone for four months, and some mornings I still woke up reaching for him.
Still expected him beside me. Still heard his laugh in my head.
People liked acting like grief became easier once they found out someone wasn’t perfect. Like discovering Wade had a gambling problem somehow erased fifteen years of love.
It didn’t. It just made everything messier because Wade wasn’t a bad man. He was my best friend.
We met when we were fourteen years old. I’d just been dumped into my sixth foster home carrying everything I owned in two trash bags, angry at the world and exhausted from pretending I wasn’t scared all the time. Wade was the quiet boy sitting behind the auto shop building with a split lip and bruised ribs he claimed came from “falling off his bike.”
I knew better. Kids like us always knew. Wade had an abusive drunk for a father.
I had nobody.
No parents.
No family.
No history.
Just one name.
Maria.
That was all I knew about the woman who gave birth to me before disappearing forever.
No last name.
No photo.
No answers.
Nothing.
Wade used to joke that we were two strays that found each other first. Maybe he was right.
By sixteen, he was sneaking through my foster bedroom window almost every night. By eighteen, we were standing in front of a courthouse judge getting married with forty-three dollars in our shared bank account and absolutely no idea what we were doing. A few months later, I got pregnant with Skylar. Everyone expected us to fail.
Maybe statistically we should have, but we loved each other enough to fight for more.
Wade worked long hours as a mechanic while I finished school. We scraped and struggled and somehow built a life from nothing. When Tommy was born four years later, Wade cried harder than I did holding him for the first time.
He loved our children fiercely.
That’s why none of this made sense in my head sometimes. How could the same man who kissed me goodbye every morning gamble away mortgage payments? How could he hold me at night while hiding debt collectors from me during the day?
I didn’t know about any of it until after the accident, after the funeral, after the bank notices and after strangers started calling my phone demanding money I didn’t have.
The house was gone within weeks. Everything we built together disappeared right along with him.
A soft rustling sound pulled me from my thoughts.
Skylar sat curled against the window in Wade’s old gray jumper, the sleeves hanging past her hands. Headphones covered her ears while an ancient iPod rested tightly in her lap like something precious.
Like him, at ten years old, she looked too quiet lately, she is too watchful and it broke my heart because she looked exactly like me.
Same honey-brown hair.
Same green eyes.
Same face.
Sometimes when she stared at me, it felt like looking at my younger self—the lonely foster kid pretending she wasn’t terrified of the world.
“You okay, bug?” I asked gently.
Skylar glanced at me before shrugging one shoulder.
“You’re doing the worried thing again.”
“The worried thing?”
“You get this line right here.” She pointed at her forehead seriously.
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
“Great. I’m aging rapidly at twenty-eight.”
“You’re basically ancient already.”
“Wow. Rude.”
That finally earned me the smallest smile.
God, I missed her smiling, for weeks after Wade died, our house had felt unbearably quiet. Like grief itself had moved in beside us.
But this move? This was supposed to help.
New town.
New school.
New memories.
A chance to breathe somewhere Wade didn’t exist in every corner because staying had been slowly destroying me.
Every street reminded me of him.
Every grocery store aisle.
Every unpaid bill sitting on the kitchen counter.
I couldn’t drown there anymore.
The teaching position at Creek Wood Elementary had felt like fate when I found it online at two in the morning during another panic spiral about money.
Small town.
Steady paycheck.
Temporary teacher housing.
Hope.
Tiny fragile hope, but enough to keep going. Rain continued falling as we drove deeper into town beneath towering pine trees and thick mountain fog. Creek Wood looked exactly like the kind of place people forgot existed. Old storefronts. Flickering neon signs. Weathered buildings.
Quiet.
The kind of quiet that felt heavy somehow.
Tommy stirred awake just as a glowing diner sign appeared ahead through the rain.
“Can we stop now?” he mumbled sleepily.
I smiled softly, pulling toward the parking lot.
“Yeah, baby,” I whispered. “We can stop.”
Tommy was practically asleep again by the time we climbed out of the car.
Rain drizzled lightly over us as I hurried around the hood and opened the back door. Tommy immediately reached for me with tired arms, and I lifted him onto my hip automatically despite the ache in my back from hours of driving.
Skylar climbed out beside us quietly, tugging Wade’s jumper tighter around herself while she shoved the iPod into the pocket.
The diner glowed warmly against the dark, wet evening. Neon lights buzzed in the windows, and for the first time in days, something inside me loosened slightly.
Maybe because it looked normal.
Safe. I could do safe.
“Come on,” I said softly. “Let’s get some food.”
A bell chimed overhead when I pushed open the diner door and instantly the room went silent. My steps faltered, every head in the diner turned toward us. Heat crawled up my neck immediately under the sudden attention. A few older women near the counter stared openly while a man halfway through lifting his coffee cup froze completely.
What the hell?
Tommy buried his face against my shoulder while Skylar moved closer to my side.
Then I noticed them.
Three men wearing leather cuts sat toward the back corner of the diner near the windows. Large patches covered their backs and shoulders.
Devils Creek MC.
Bikers.
The biggest one had dark hair streaked with gray and a face carved from hard years and harder living. Beside him sat a younger blond man staring at me like he’d seen a ghost but it was the man in the middle who held my attention.
Dark eyes.
Dark hair.
Broad shoulders.
Calm in a way that felt dangerous.
His gaze locked onto mine with an intensity that should’ve made me uncomfortable. It should have scared me. Instead, something strange settled low in my chest.Not fear.Not even panic.Safety.Like somehow, impossibly, I’d just walked into a room full of strangers the tight knot in my chest had loosened for the first time in months.
The dark-haired biker’s expression tightened almost imperceptibly as his eyes moved over Skylar and Tommy before returning to me.
The entire diner still felt frozen and suddenly I had the overwhelming feeling that walking into Creek Wood had changed everything.
