Dead Man's Curve - Flint
There were exactly two things Flint knew for certain about Tuesdays, and the first was that God had made them out of pure spite.
The second was that if one more thing went wrong before noon, he was going to walk out to the middle of the highway, lie down on the yellow line, and let the universe finish the job it was so clearly committed to.
“She’s dead, Prez.” Kip’s voice floated up from somewhere underneath the Dyna, muffled and apologetic and about nineteen years old. “Like. Dead dead.”
“She’s not dead,” Flint said, with the patience of a man who had decided patience was the last thing standing between him and a homicide. “She’s restin’.”
“She’s got no compression in the—”
"Restin’, Kip.”
The Dyna in question sat in the middle of the garage bay in roughly four hundred pieces, most of which were on the floor, several of which Flint suspected had wandered off entirely, and all of which needed to be one whole functioning motorcycle by dawn tomorrow. Because dawn tomorrow the Ashen Outlaws had a run to make. And the run was not optional. And the run required, at absolute minimum, that their motorcycles be motorcycles and not modern art.
This was a problem, because the only man in three counties who could put a dead bike back together in a single night was currently in a hospital bed across town with a fractured orbital and four cracked ribs, on account of some enterprising young gentlemen in Steel Sabres cuts had caught old Gus in the gas station lot Sunday night and explained their opinion of the Ashen Outlaws directly into his face.
Sixty-one years old, that man. Wrenched for the club since before Flint had a beard. And the Sabres had put him down in a parking lot like it was nothing, like it was fun, and hadn’t even taken his wallet—which was the part that kept Flint up at night, because men who beat an old man for a message and leave the cash behind aren’t looking for money. They’re looking for a reaction.
They were going to get one. Flint just needed to survive Tuesday first.
“Boone.” He didn’t raise his voice. He never did. Somewhere across the garage, over the shriek of an impact wrench being used by someone who did not know what an impact wrench was for, his enforcer’s head came up. “Take the wrench off the prospect before he takes his own thumb off with it.”
“On it, Prez.”
“And somebody find me a mechanic," Flint added, mostly to the ceiling, “before I start prayin’, and I want everyone to understand that when I pray, I get ideas."
The garage did not produce a mechanic. The garage produced a fresh crash of something metal hitting concrete, a creative bilingual curse from Boone, and Brutus—sixty pounds of brindle muscle and moral support—lifting his big blocky head off Flint’s boot to give the whole scene a look of profound canine disappointment.
“I know, brother,” Flint told the dog. “I know.”
That was when Cross came through the door, and Flint knew, the second he saw his face, that the day was about to get complicated in an entirely new direction.
He knew Cross’s faces. All of them. Ten years riding the same road, burying the same brothers, splitting the same bad decisions two ways—you learn a man’s faces. This was not the we’ve-got-a-Sabres-problem face, which Flint had been expecting. This was not even the someone’s-dead face, which Flint was always half-expecting.
This was a face Flint had only seen a handful of times in a decade, and every one of them had involved the one subject in the world that could make Wyatt “Cross” Black—six-foot-four of ex-army stillness, the steadiest hand in the club, the man Flint trusted to hold the gavel when Flint himself couldn’t be trusted with it—look like a nervous father at a school play.
His sister.
“So,” Cross said. He rubbed the back of his neck. That was another tell. “You need a mechanic.”
“I need a lot of things, Wyatt. I need forty-eight hours in a day. I need the Sabres to fall in a hole. I need Kip to stop touchin’ things.” A pause. “I do, in fact, also need a mechanic.”
“I know a mechanic.”
“You know a mechanic,” Flint repeated, slow, because there was something in the way Cross wasn’t quite looking at him, and Flint’s whole talent in this life—the thing that made him a president instead of a corpse—was noticing the things people did when they weren’t quite looking at him. “Wyatt. If you’ve been sittin’ on a mechanic while I’ve got a prospect performin’ surgery on my run bike, I’m going to have to reconsider our entire friendship.”
“She’s my sister.”
The garage kept making its noise. Somewhere Boone was still lecturing Kip. The impact wrench shrieked again. But in Flint’s head, the whole world went quiet and orderly, the way it did when a piece of information arrived that was going to matter more than it had any right to.
She.
Marlowe.
Flint had never met her. Which was a strange thing to be able to say about a woman he felt like he’d known for a decade, because Cross talked about her the way religious men talk about God—rarely, and only when it mattered, and always like it cost him something. A photo on Cross’s phone, years old now: a lanky teenager with her brother’s stubborn jaw and a grin that looked like a dare. My baby sister. Shipped out at eighteen. Toughest person I ever met and I’ve met me.
Then years of almost nothing. A postcard from places that didn’t have postcards. A name that came up when Cross was three beers deep and missing her. And then, eight months ago, a phone call that had put Cross on the floor of this very garage with his head in his hands—because the Navy had a way of calling you, and it was never good news, and this time it was a medical discharge and a rebuilt leg and a career that had ended in a way nobody would tell him the details of.
“Marlowe,” Flint said.
“She’s coming home.” Cross said it carefully, like the words were something he’d been carrying a long way and was afraid to set down wrong. “She’s—she’s not doin’ good, Flint. She won’t say it. She’ll never say it. But she’s got nowhere else, and she’s too proud to call it that, so she’s callin’ it a job. And she’s the best wrench I have ever seen in my life. Better than Gus. Better than anybody. Our old man taught her before he taught me, and then the Navy taught her the rest.” A breath. “She needs somewhere to land. And you need a mechanic. So.”
So.
Flint looked at his best friend—at the ten years in his face, at the fear he was doing a bad job of hiding, at the fact that this steady, lethal, unflappable man was standing in a garage practically asking permission to bring his own broken sister home—and there was never really a version of this where Flint said no. They both knew it. Cross had probably known it before he walked through the door.
“Course she’s got a place here,” Flint said, and meant it, gentle, the o going long and Irish the way it did when something reached him. “She’s blood, Wyatt. That’s not even a question. Tell her the bay’s hers. Tell her Gus left it a mess and she’ll want to burn the whole thing down, and she’d be right.”
Something in Cross’s shoulders came down an inch. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I’m gettin’ a mechanic out of it, I should be thankin’ you." Flint bent to scratch Brutus behind the ear, and asked the next thing lightly, easily, because it was an easy thing, obviously, a simple thing—“She patched? She riding with us, or just wrenchin’?”
“Just the garage.” Cross’s voice changed. Went flat and careful in a way Flint clocked instantly. “Flint. She’s—the guys are gonna—” He stopped. Started again. “She’s an omega.”
Flint went still.
Not because it mattered. It didn’t matter, not to him, not to the way the club would treat blood. But because of how Cross had said it—braced, protective, like he was setting down a live thing he expected somebody to mishandle.
“She hides it,” Cross went on, quieter. “Suppressants, the military kind, the good stuff. You won’t even—she won’t smell like anything. She’s spent her whole life makin’ sure nobody clocks it, ’cause the second an alpha does, they start—” His jaw worked. “They start hoverin’. Treatin’ her like she’s made of glass. And I’m tellin’ you right now, brother, as your VP and as her blood: the day one of these idiots looks at my little sister like she’s a prize instead of a person, I will end them, and you will help me dig the hole.”
“Wyatt.”
“I mean it, Flint.”
“I know you do.” Flint straightened up. Put a hand on his friend’s shoulder—the one that had taken a bullet in Reno so Flint’s could stay whole, the shoulder that meant brother in a language older than words. “She’s family. She’s off-limits. Every man in this club is going to treat her like she’s your sister, which she is, and my sister, which she now also is, and anyone who forgets it answers to both of us.” He squeezed. “Nobody touches her. Nobody hovers. You have my word, and you’ve never once had cause to doubt it.”
And he meant every syllable. That was the thing Flint would come back to, later—much later, when everything had gone to blood and stardust and he was trying to work out the exact moment he’d doomed himself. He had meant it. Standing in that garage with his hand on his best friend’s shoulder and his dog on his boot, Marlowe Black was a photo of a teenager, a name in a prayer, a wounded kid coming home to lick her wounds. Sacred. Simple. Somebody to protect.
He’d remember believing that.
“So when’s she rollin’ in?” he asked, already turning back toward the corpse of the Dyna, already doing the grim arithmetic of the run—if she was half as good as Cross swore, if she got here in a day, maybe two, then maybe, by the grace of a God who owed him one, they salvaged tomorrow. “I’ll need to clear the second bay. Gus left it lookin’ like a scrapyard had a nightmare.”
“She’s in town.”
Flint stopped.
“...Come again?”
Cross had the decency to look caught. Did the neck-rub thing again—the tell that meant he’d been sitting on something and hoping it wouldn’t come up. “She’s been in town three days, Flint. Got herself a room out past the Curve. That motel with the sign that don’t light up right.” His mouth twisted, somewhere between fond and furious. “Won’t stay at mine. Won’t stay here. Said she wasn’t gonna ‘move in on family charity,’ said she’d come ’round when there was work and not a minute before. Stubborn as our old man and twice as mean about it.”
Three days.
Three days his best friend’s sister had been holed up alone in a roach motel off Dead Man’s Curve, medically discharged and rebuilt and running on God-knew-what, rather than let a single living soul watch her land soft. Flint felt that one go in under his ribs—a small, specific ache he chose not to look at too closely, and filed instead where he kept all the strays and the limping dogs and the people who swore up and down they didn’t need a thing right up until the moment they did.
“Well,” Flint said, and nodded at the four hundred pieces of motorcycle scattered across his floor. “There’s work. God’s honest truth, there has never been more work.” He set the wrench down. Picked it back up. Noticed himself doing it. “How fast can she get here?”
Cross already had his phone out. “Ten minutes.”
Ten minutes.
Flint let a breath out slow. “Tell her to come.”
He said it easy. Said it like it was nothing—because it was nothing, because she was blood and the bay was hers and this was the plainest transaction in the whole crooked world. A wrench for a home. A soft place for a hard soldier. A favor owed to the one man who’d caught a bullet in Reno so that Flint’s own body could keep the habit of breathing.
Cross’s thumbs moved. The message went.
And somewhere out past Dead Man’s Curve, in a motel room with a sign that didn’t light up right, a phone lit up instead—and a woman Flint had never once laid eyes on read three words from her brother and reached for her jacket.
Flint turned back to the dead bike. Crouched down beside it. Told himself, firmly, in the calm and reasonable voice of a man who had given his best friend his word not ten minutes ago, that he was absolutely not listening for the sound of the road.
He was listening for the road
