Terry took a sip of his coffee. “Kid, we can’t harbor a runaway. You get that, right?”
“I’m not asking you to hide me,” she said. “I’m just asking for work.”
“Work requires a name. An age. Documentation.”
“Sky Holloway. Fourteen. And I don’t have documentation anymore.”
Terry sighed. He had three kids at home. He knew what it looked like when a teenager was running from something real. He also knew what it meant to get tangled up in someone else’s legal mess.
“Where’d you come from?”
She closed the notebook. “A group home, two counties over.”
“And they just let you walk out?”
“They didn’t let me do anything.”
Over the next few days, the story came out in pieces. Sky didn’t volunteer much, but the crew was patient. They’d seen plenty of people carrying weight they didn’t want to talk about.
Lucy, who handled the club’s books and paperwork, was the one who finally got her to open up. Lucy had a way of asking questions that didn’t feel like interrogations. She brought Sky food one evening, sat down, and talked about nothing in particular until Sky started filling the silence.
She’d been in foster care since Luther died, bouncing through homes that ranged from tolerable to unbearable. But the group home was worse in ways that didn’t leave bruises. Rules without logic. Punishments that felt personal.
She’d mentioned her brother once during intake, and the staff told her to stop living in the past. When she asked if she could keep his dog tags, they said personal items were a privilege, not a right.
A supervisor found her sketchbook. She’d been drawing Luther’s bikes from memory, every detail she could remember. The exhaust pipes he’d customized, the flame patterns he’d taught her to layer, the emblem he’d worn on his cut.
The supervisor flipped through it, then tossed it in the trash without a word.
Sky waited until lights out, fished it from the dumpster, and left that same night. She’d been on the move ever since, sleeping in bus stations and fast-food bathrooms, doing odd jobs for cash, staying ahead of the system that kept trying to drag her back.
Lucy listened without interrupting.
When Sky finished, Lucy nodded once. “Hollow never told us about you,” Lucy said gently. “Why do you think that was?”
Sky shrugged. “He kept his life separate. He said the club was important, but so was I. He didn’t want those things touching.”
“Did he ever try to get you out?”
“Before he died? I don’t know. Maybe. He said he was working on something, but then the accident happened, and everything just fell apart.”
Lucy made a mental note to dig into that later. If Luther had been trying to get custody, there’d be a paper trail. And if there was a paper trail, maybe they could use it.
Sky kept painting. Word started to spread among the local riders. People who’d known Hollow back in the day came by just to see her work. A few of them watched in silence, shaking their heads.
“That’s Hollow,” one of them said quietly.
But the attention made Terry nervous. The more people who knew she was there, the harder it would be to keep her off the radar. He brought it up at the next club meeting.
“We need to figure this out,” he said. “She’s been here too long. Someone’s going to call it in.”
“She’s Hollow’s sister,” Gregory said flatly. “We owe him.”
“We owe him respect,” Terry countered. “But sheltering a runaway minor? That’s a legal nightmare. We’ve worked too hard to stay clean.”
The room divided. Jimmy stayed quiet, which wasn’t like him.
Lucy left the argument and went to the back office, digging through old club records. She found Luther’s file. Sparse. No mention of family.
She found something else. A document request from years back. A petition filed with the county family court.
Luther had tried to get custody of Sky.
Lucy read the attached report twice. The petition had been denied. The reason cited was Luther’s association with the Iron Jaws Motorcycle Club. The evaluator deemed him unfit. Wrong lifestyle. Wrong associates.
An incident report was sealed. Lucy couldn’t access the details, but the summary mentioned violence at Sky’s group home. Allegations buried.
Lucy sat back, staring at the screen.
Luther had tried to save her. The system stopped him.
She printed the documents and brought them to Gregory that night. He read them in silence. When he finished, he set the papers down.
“He tried,” Gregory said quietly. “And they stopped him.”
“Which means this isn’t just about a runaway,” Lucy said. “The system failed her before Luther even died.”
Gregory looked toward the paint bay, where Sky was working late, headphones in.
“So, what do we do?”
Lucy didn’t have an answer. But they weren’t sending Sky back.
The garage felt different as the days passed. Terry avoided Gregory during meetings. Jimmy focused on paint jobs and stayed quiet. The younger members stayed out of it.
Jeff was the one who accidentally made things worse. He’d been helping Lucy pull old records when he found a thread of emails that didn’t belong. A message thread from years back, dated near Luther’s custody petition.
Someone had been digging into the Iron Jaws’ background checks, association patterns. The inquiry had come from a law firm, but the firm was representing a private client. The name was redacted in most places, but Jeff found one email where it slipped through.
Michael Ventry.
Jeff didn’t recognize the name. He brought it to Lucy.
Lucy’s expression changed. “Ventry,” she said quietly. “He ran with the Steel Chains. Rival club from back in the day.”
“What happened to him?”
“His brother died in a crash,” Lucy said. “Same night Hollow went down.”
Jeff leaned back. “You think it was connected?”
“Official report called them separate crashes. Different highways. The Chains thought Hollow caused it. Ran his brother off the road, then crashed fleeing.”
“Did he?”
Lucy shook her head. “Hollow was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a killer. Gregory was with him that night. Said they were riding alone, heading back from a run. Hollow hit a patch of oil and went down hard. The Chains guy crashed an hour later, miles away. Pure coincidence. But Ventry didn’t buy it.”
Jeff pulled up more recent records. Ventry had hired a private investigator who specialized in tracking runaways. The investigator had been active in the area for weeks, asking questions at bus stations and shelters.
Lucy’s stomach dropped. “He’s been following her.”
She brought everything to Gregory that night. The club gathered in the back room. Door closed. Voices low.