Page 1 of Open Road

Prologue

ROAM

Three in the morning, and the road is mine.

That’s the thing about this hour—the civilians are all tucked in somewhere, dreaming about mortgages, alarm clocks, or whatever it is people dream about when their lives run on schedule. The highway belongs to the ones who don’t—truckers, ghosts, and men like me.

I open the throttle and let the bike eat the asphalt.

The air off the Everglades hits differently at speed. It’s warm, thick, and threaded with something wild underneath like cypress, stagnant water, and things that don’t have names in polite conversation. Florida at night has teeth if you know where to look. I’ve always liked that about it.

The job is done.

I don’t think about jobs once they’re finished. Thinking about them doesn’t change them, and it doesn’t undo them. In this life, the things you spend too long turning over in your head are the things that eventually turn on you. Three men were skimming from a gun shipment that passed through Tampa. They’d been doing it for eight months, careful and incremental, figuring no one would notice the margins.

Someone noticed and Creed made a call.

I drove four hours and handled it and now I’m driving back.

That’s all it is.

The mile markers blur past. I don’t count them. I never did see the point in counting what’s already behind you.

My cut snaps at the edges in the wind, the leather worn so soft it moves like a second skin now, stiff only at the patches, and the ink of the Royal Bastards’ crest sits between myshoulder blades like a declaration. I’ve worn it so long, I forget it’s there until someone’s eyes catch on it and change. Fear, mostly. Occasionally, something else. It doesn’t matter either way because the cut is what I am, and I took the road name to match.

Roam.

Winchester gave me that one back when I was twenty-six. I’d joined at twenty-one, spent two years as a prospect before I earned my patch. A few years later, after more jobs than I cared to count, Winchester started calling me Roam and the name stuck.

‘He’s always fucking gone,’he said one night.‘Just call him Roam and be done with it.’Creed had laughed. We were brothers even then, long before he wore the president’s patch. I wasn’t there to hear it. I was somewhere in South Carolina, being gone. That was seventeen years ago.

I roll my right shoulder where the muscle has started to stiffen in the cold. Not old… older, there’s a difference, and I know exactly where the line sits because I’ve been watching for it.

My hands on the bars are steady. My eyes are sharp. I can still move quietly enough to be behind a man before he hears me coming and can still ride twelve hours without stopping if the road asks it of me.

The silver at my temples is just mileage. I’ve earned every strand of it.

A cluster of truck stop lights appears on the horizon, so I ease back on the throttle, letting the bike settle into something like patience. The night sky out here is the real thing, with no city glow to wash it out. It is black, stars, and the occasional smear of clouds. Lyric would want to photograph it. Highway’s woman sees the world through a lens, always framing things, always looking for the shot. I understand the impulse even if I don’tshare it. Some things you just let exist without trying to capture them.

I don’t stop at the truck stop. With nowhere I need to be and nothing waiting for me at the other end, the road becomes the reason to keep riding.

It always has been.

My room at the compound is exactly as I left it—a bed, chair, and spare jacket on a hook by the door. No photographs on the wall, no clutter on the dresser, nothing that would tell a stranger anything about the man who sleeps there.

Creed’s place is full of Devil—her color, warmth, and that particular brand of organized chaos that Australian women seem to carry with them everywhere. Lucy has done the same to Reaper’s space, softening the edges whether he admits it or not. Highway’s room smells like Lyric’s perfume and the worn leather of her camera bag, both lingering long after she’s gone.

Mine smells like leather and nothing.

And I don’t care.

The road is ahead of me, two lanes of pale asphalt cutting through the dark, straight as an arrow. I know this stretch and the way the palmetto scrub gives way to open pasture about twelve miles north, the overpass where the paint is peeling on the guardrail, and the pull-off where I once sat for two hours waiting for a man who never showed up. I know roads the way other men know their own houses. Better, maybe. Houses have corners, but roads keep going.

This is the life.

I think it and mean it, and somewhere under the engine noise and the rush of warm air, it settles in me the way it always does, steady, clean, and sufficient.

I don’t need more than this.