Chapter 4
Leo stood still as a statue while Jax processed the name, the boy's small chest rising and falling with shallow, controlled breaths. The diner noise seemed to swirl around them like a distant storm, irrelevant and far away. Jax looked at Leo’s face—really looked at it—and saw the unmistakable blueprint of his own youth stripped of the hardness. The stubborn set of the jaw, the shape of the nose, the way the light caught those hazel eyes. It was a mirror he had spent twenty years running away from, now standing right in front of him, asking for shelter.
“Leo,” Jax repeated, testing the syllable on his tongue as if it were a foreign word. He hadn't spoken that name aloud in all the dark fantasies he’d nursed over greasy campfires across the country. He had wondered, of course. Every time he crossed a state line, every time he saw a kid about this age skipping stones into a lonely river, he wondered. But wondering was safe; it was a ghost story he told himself in the dark. Having the ghost breathe, bleed, and stand in front of him with scuffed sneakers was an entirely different kind of terror.
“She got sick,” Leo said quietly, filling the heavy silence as he noticed the older man’s internal struggle. The boy’s voice didn’t tremble this time; it held the flat, hollow acceptance of a child who had spent too many months watching a parent fade away in a quiet room. “In the winter. First, she couldn't work at the diner down in Billings. Then she couldn't get out of bed. Before... before she stopped talking, she gave me this jacket, the picture, and the paper. She told me to find the man with the thunder bike and the crow tattoo on his neck.”
Jax instinctively reached up with his left hand, his fingers brushing the collar of his shirt where the dark ink of a spread-winged crow peeked out from beneath the leather. He had forgotten how obvious he was. To anyone who knew the old stories, he was a walking billboard.
“Did anyone else know you were coming, Leo?” Jax asked sharply, his protective instincts suddenly flaring up, overriding his shock. If Clara had been running from the people Jax used to ride with—men who held grudges longer than asphalt lasted—then leaving Leo alone out here was a death sentence.
Leo shook his head, his messy light brown hair flopping across his forehead. “No. Mom said to pack light and walk when the bus money ran out. She said... she said the past has long arms, but the highway is wider.”
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Jax let out a harsh, humorless breath that sounded almost like a laugh, though there was no joy in it. Clara always did have a way with words, poetic even when the world was collapsing around them. He looked back toward the end of the counter where Martha was still watching them like a hawk, ready to intervene. Jax slid off his stool with a heavy thud, the leather of his chaps creaking in the quiet space. He towered over the boy, yet he deliberately slouched his shoulders, trying to make himself look less like a menacing biker gang dropout and more like what he actually was: a terrified, broken man.
“Come on, kid,” Jax said, his voice softer now, rough around the edges like sandpaper on pine. “Let’s get out of here before Martha calls the sheriff or my old club brothers walk back in through that door.”
