She was standing beside a broken fence post at the edge of a small farmhouse property just off the main road. 77 years old if she was a day, with white hair pulled back and oversized glasses sitting low on her nose. Her hands were shaking slightly as she tried to hammer a nail into rotting wood that had no business holding anything together anymore.
She didn't look up when the motorcycles slowed. She didn't flinch at the engine noise. She just kept working—quiet and stubborn. It was the way people act when they've learned that nobody is coming to help, and they've made their peace with it.
Damon pulled over. The rest of the pack followed without a word. He climbed off his bike, walked to the edge of her property, and said simply, "You need a hand with that, ma'am?"
She finally looked up. That’s when her eyes landed on his patch. She went completely still. Her hammer dropped into the grass. In a voice barely above a whisper, she said, "My son wears that same patch."
The laughter that had been drifting between the riders abruptly stopped. That patch didn't belong to some weekend riding club. It belonged to one of the oldest, most respected, and most feared motorcycle brotherhoods in the country. According to everything Damon knew—everything he had carried in his chest for twenty-two years—the last man from Red Hollow who wore that patch was dead.
Her name was Clara Bennett. Widowed, living alone, her husband Raymond had died years earlier—a Vietnam veteran who never fully came home, even when his body did. Her son Ethan had been her whole world after that. He was a quiet kid, an angry teenager, a decorated soldier, and then, twenty-two years ago, he was just gone.
Clara brought them inside. You could see in the set of her jaw that she didn't trust easily anymore, but the alternative was standing in the heat pretending nothing had happened. The kitchen smelled like burnt coffee and faded floral candles. Unpaid bills sat in a stack near the toaster, and a foreclosure notice was half-tucked under an empty fruit bowl. Damon saw all of it, but he didn't say a word.
Clara set a faded, sepia-toned photograph on the table. It showed a young man in military gear standing beside a dusty jeep overseas, sporting a big grin and the club patch on his jacket. Standing right next to him, with an arm thrown over his shoulder, was a much younger Damon Hayes.
Damon picked up the photograph with the kind of care you give something you're afraid might shatter. His jaw tightened. A vein throbbed in his temple.
One of the younger riders quietly asked, "Reaper, you good?"