Chrome and Roses!

CHAPTER THREE: COLLISION

The festival came, and with it, the kind of trouble she should have seen coming.

The Harvest Festival transformed Hollow Creek into something almost charming. Strings of lights, food stalls, a ferris wheel that had seen better decades but still turned. Ellie had been on her feet since five in the morning and by eight at night she was running on coffee and the particular energy of someone who has pulled off something difficult and is only now allowing herself to feel good about it.

The Road Kings had been fine. Professional, even — their president, a weathered man named Dutch who had known her father, had been grateful and paid on time. She had done her job and stayed out of whatever tension crackled in the air between the east and west sides of the festival grounds.

She was packing up the last of her equipment when she heard it — voices, raised, in the alley behind the stalls. The particular cadence of men who had moved past the point of argument and were working themselves toward something worse.

She should have walked the other direction. She knew this. But the alley ran behind her van, and she needed her van, and when she turned the corner she found four Road Kings members and two Iron Saints in a standoff that had the quality of a thing that had been building for years and had simply chosen this night to arrive.

Rafe was one of the two Saints. Of course he was.

He saw her at the same moment she saw him, and something crossed his face — not alarm exactly, but a sharp recalibration, the way a person's whole posture shifts when the math of a situation changes.

"Walk back the way you came, Ellie. His voice was absolutely steady."

"My van is back there."

"I know. Walk back anyway."

One of the Road Kings — young, wired, looking for something to prove — turned to look at her. His eyes moved between her and Rafe, and she watched the moment he decided she was useful.

"Santos got himself a girl now? He smiled in the way that meant he knew it would land like a threat."

"She's the caterer. Flat. Bored, almost. She's leaving."

"She doesn't look like she's leaving."

Ellie was, in fact, not leaving. Not because she was brave, exactly, but because her feet had stopped responding to instructions and something cold and very clear had settled over her thinking. She looked at the young Road King and spoke before she could reconsider.

"I catered your president's stage tonight. Dutch paid me on time and said thank you. Whatever this is — it has nothing to do with me or my van, and I'd like to get both of us out of this alley without anyone doing something they can't undo."

Silence.

Dutch's voice came from the far end of the alley.

"Cole. Stand down."

The young one — Cole — held for one more beat, then stepped back. Dutch came forward, took one look at the situation, and jerked his head at his men. They moved. Not happy about it, but they moved.

Dutch paused beside Ellie on his way out. His voice was low.

"You've got nerve, girl. Try to remember that nerve doesn't stop bullets."

Then he was gone. The alley emptied. It was just her and Rafe and his second, who had the good sense to drift away toward the festival lights and give them space.

Rafe walked toward her slowly. He stopped close — closer than he had at the bar, closer than he had at the market. This close she could see the tension still in his jaw, the controlled way he was breathing it down.

"You should have walked away."

"I know."

"That was stupid."

"I know that too."

"Dutch is right. Nerve doesn't—"

"I heard him. She looked up at him. Are you okay?"

He stopped. Whatever he'd been about to say next evaporated. He looked at her like she'd asked the question in a language he recognized but hadn't heard in a long time.

"No one asks me that. Quiet. Not complaining. Just noting it as a fact."

"I'm asking."

He was still for a moment. The festival sounds drifted in from the street — music, laughter, the distant mechanical groan of the ferris wheel. Some other world, warm and lit and uncomplicated.

"I'm fine. Then, like it cost him something: Thank you."

She nodded. She started toward her van. She had taken maybe four steps when his voice came again, quieter than she'd heard it.

"The Saints do a run up to Blue Ridge the first Sunday of every month. Open road, no agenda. Just the ride. If you wanted to see what this world looks like when it's not trying to scare you."

She turned around. He was leaning against the alley wall with his arms crossed, watching her with that same look — like he was waiting on a verdict and had already decided not to flinch at whatever it was.

"I don't have a bike."

"I have two."

She thought about it. She thought about Dutch's warning and the way the room had gone quiet when Rafe walked into the Devil's Spoke and every sensible reason this was a complication she did not need.

She thought about salted honey. Sweet on its own gets boring. It needs something to push against.

"First Sunday."

Something shifted in his face — not quite a smile, but the architecture of one, the shape a smile leaves behind after it's passed through a person who's forgotten how to let them stay.

"First Sunday."

She walked to her van. She did not look back. But she was smiling by the time she reached the driver's seat, in the dark, where no one could see it — which was, she thought, probably the safest place to start.