Ronan's father called an emergency meeting before midnight, the compound's senior members gathered in the same reinforced room where they'd opened the mysterious package hours earlier. I sat beside Ronan, uninvited but unwilling to be left out, aware of the weight of every gaze that kept flicking toward me and then quickly away.
"The bike belonged to a rider named Cole Ashford," Ronan's father said, spreading an old photograph across the table — a young man, dark-haired, grinning at the camera with an easy confidence I recognized instantly, having watched him die through the eyes of a stranger three nights ago. "He rode with us for two years before the accident on Route 9. Good rider. Reckless. The kind who thought the rules applied to everyone except him."
"That's the man Vera saw die,"
