Page 16 of Riding with the President Biker

I become aware of everything outside this room in increments. The snow through the high windows, the weight of what comes next, my brother somewhere in this building who does not know I am here.

I turn and lean back against the table. Hansen stays close, and neither of us reaches immediately for anything.

The honesty of the last hour seems worth sitting inside for another minute.

He looks at me differently than he has looked at anyone in this building tonight. I feel that.

"That place," I say.

He focuses immediately, the shift visible, and I watch his expression change without losing the thread between us.

"I listened the whole time I was there," I tell him. "I couldn't see much but I counted turns on the drive in. Fourteen minutes from your compound — eleven on paved road, three on gravel. They entered from the north side. The east corridor has a secondary entrance, low on the south wall, barely visible from the main approach. There were four men." I pause. "The one who grabbed me first, he has a rasp when he breathes. Something in his chest doesn't clear fully. I'll recognize it if I hear it again."

He is very still.

"And I heard two of them talking when they thought I wasn't tracking it." I hold his gaze. "Something about a Doctor. About the quarry. One of them said he would burn everything there if it came to it — records, equipment, all of it. That he had a plan there if he got cornered."

The quality of Hansen's stillness shifts entirely.

"And you're sure about the quarry?" he asks.

"Yeah, I memorize under pressure."

He is quiet for a moment, and then he reaches forward and touches the side of my face, his thumb moving softly beside the bruise.

"The quarry," he says quietly, confirming it for himself.

"If he is cornered, that is where he goes."

He nods once. Then he looks at me in the way he did before, no performance in it, and for a moment the war outside this room stops being the loudest thing.

Chapter 5 — Hansen

Dawn comes in steel-gray light, making the snow look like ash.

The cold hits the moment we push out of the clubhouse, the kind winter air that does not ease in from the edges but arrives all at once, pressing through fabric and into muscle.

We move before the sun fully clears the ridge.

There is no last-minute speech, no theatrical moment at the gate. The men understand what this ride is. Deadwood did not miscalculate, they made a sequence of choices, each one deliberate, each one pointing in the same direction.

They ran trafficking through this county with infrastructure they had been building for years. When the bust happened they chose escalation over retreat. They hit the bar. They hit the depot. They took Leah from us.

Every decision they made after the trafficking exposure was a decision to burn everything rather than negotiate anything, which tells me they knew, when it came to it, that negotiation was never going to save them.

They were right about that.

I ride at the front and the world narrows to the road ahead, headlights cutting through gray morning, exhaust fogging in cold air behind us. The highway is empty at this hour, surface slick from overnight freeze, rooftops white, the quarry road ahead of us still dark between tree lines.

Last night sits inside me differently than I expected it to.

I thought it might create distraction. The hazard of caring about an outcome too personally, the way a good surgeon should not operate on family.

What it created instead is the opposite, a clarity so clean it almost feels external, like the last variable has been identified and the calculation has finally run complete. I am not riding toward this because I am angry, though anger is present underneath like bedrock. I am riding toward this because it is the correct decision, and the correct decision has always been the one I stand behind regardless of its weight.

Leah is back at the club with two men I trust at the doors.

That fact does not divide my attention. It consolidates it.