Lila ended up sitting in our booth with a grilled cheese she barely touched. She studied the patch on my vest—the black-and-silver emblem of Iron Vale—and finally asked, “Are you a good biker?”
Cole barked a laugh before I could answer.
I smiled. “Most days.”
She thought about that seriously. “You look scary.”
“That’s fair.”
She looked toward the window, where the sun had started to dip, turning the desert orange. “He said scary people are the ones who help.”
I felt that one like a punch.
Cole went very still.
“Sometimes,” I said carefully, “bad people say things backward to make good people seem dangerous.”
She nodded as if she understood more than she should have.
An hour later, a female deputy approached. “We found her mother.”
Lila turned so fast her chair squeaked on the floor. “Mommy?”
The deputy smiled gently. “She’s on her way.”
I’d seen men survive wrecks that should’ve killed them. I’d seen riders break bones and laugh through the pain. But nothing in all my years hit me like the sight of that little girl trying not to hope too hard.
When her mother came through the diner doors, she looked half-broken already—hair wild, face streaked with tears, desperation written into every line of her body.
“Lila!”
The girl ran.
The sound that left her mother then wasn’t a word. It was something older than language. Relief. Agony. Love. They collided in the middle of the diner and dropped to their knees holding each other so tightly it looked like neither would ever let go again.
Nobody in that room pretended not to cry.
Not the waitresses.
Not the deputies.
Not the riders.
Certainly not me.
Her mother kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and Lila kept shaking her head and saying, “He said you left. He said you didn’t want me.”
The woman looked like her heart had been torn out alive. “Never. Baby, never.”
That should’ve been the end of it.
But it wasn’t.
Because the next morning, the sheriff called me.
They had searched Darren Pike’s trailer again, deeper this time, and found a locked metal box hidden beneath loose floorboards.
Inside were burner phones, receipts, route maps—and photographs.
One of the photographs made the sheriff ask me to come in immediately.