Chapter 2 - The Handwritten Threat
The diner grew preternaturally quiet, the background chatter of bikers fading into a dull hum as Jax stared at the inked words on the scrap of paper. Martha leaned over the counter, trying to catch a glimpse, but Jax quickly balled his fist around the note, his knuckles turning chalk-white under his weathered skin. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped engine piston.
“Who gave you this?” Jax asked, his voice suddenly sharp enough to slice glass. He grabbed the boy by the frayed shoulder of his jacket, pulling him closer, ignoring the sharp gasp of protest from Martha behind the counter.
“Don’t you touch him, you brute!” Martha shouted, reaching for the heavy metal syrup dispenser as a makeshift weapon. Across the room, two heavy-set bikers at a corner booth slowly stood up, their eyes narrowing at the commotion, hands drifting toward their heavy belt buckles.
The boy looked up at Jax without an ounce of fear in his hazel eyes. “She said you’d know. She said if I didn’t find you before midnight, the men in the black truck would come back for the rest of the boxes.”
Jax’s grip slackened. The color drained from his tanned face, leaving him looking older than his forty-eight years. The black truck. It was a ghost from a life he thought he had buried deep beneath years of highway dust and cheap whiskey. He dropped to one knee, bringing himself eye-level with the child, completely ignoring the stares of the patrons around them.
“Where is she, kid? Where is your mother?” Jax pressed, his voice cracking slightly on the last word.
“She’s not my mother,” the boy whispered, his lower lip trembling for the first time. “She told me to call her Aunt Clara, but she left me at the motel by the interstate three days ago. She said if I showed you the picture and the note, you’d have to protect me because of what happened in Phoenix.”
Jax closed his eyes tightly, a collective memory of fire, sirens, and blood flashing behind his eyelids. Phoenix. A dozen years of running had been designed to make sure nobody ever connected him to that night again. Yet here, in a dusty nowhere town, a child had walked through his front door carrying the exact proof he had spent a lifetime trying to destroy.
“Jax,” Martha warned, stepping around the counter now, her hostility replaced by genuine alarm as she saw the sheer terror etched into the tough biker’s face. “What is going on? Who is this kid?”
Jax stood up slowly, gently taking the faded photograph from the boy’s slackened fingers. He looked at the baby in his younger arms in the picture, then down at the boy standing before him. The resemblance was undeniable, hauntingly precise—the same shape of the jaw, the same wide, hopeful eyes.
“He’s my son,” Jax whispered, the confession tearing through the quiet diner like a gunshot.
May you like
Before anyone could process the staggering admission, the front windows of the diner suddenly exploded inward in a hail of shattering glass and flying shards.
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