Chapter 2 THE DEAD DON'T WRITE BACK

POV: Jason De'Leon

She was leaning against a beat-up Chevy Malibu parked just past the prison's yellow line, the paint faded from desert sun to something between blue and gray. The car had seen better decades. Rust was eating at the wheel wells, and a spider web crack ran across the windshield that someone had tried to fix with clear tape, which had not worked and never would. It was the kind of ride that would not draw attention from cops or competitors. Which meant Anna had learned to think like a criminal while he was gone.

He studied her before he moved.

Auburn hair tied back in a no-nonsense ponytail. Hazel eyes scanning the yard, scanning the gate, scanning the empty road beyond, like she was waiting for something bad to come sprinting out of the scenery. She wore black jeans worn thin at the knees, boots scuffed to hell and back, a dark hoodie zipped halfway despite the desert heat pushing a hundred degrees. The clothes hung loose on her, like she had lost weight she could not afford to lose.

But it was her eyes that told the real story. Three years ago, Anna De'Leon had looked at the world like it might still surprise her with something good. Now she watched everything like it was planning to hurt her.

He crossed the lot, gravel crunching under his boots, and she met him halfway. The hug came, brief and stiff, more obligation than affection, the kind of embrace he recognized from visiting hours, performed for the cameras, empty underneath.

He pulled back and looked at her.

"Easy," he said. "Not used to people grabbing me."

Her smile did not reach her eyes. "I thought maybe you wouldn't want to see me."

"You're the only family I've got left." He said it like a fact, flat and simple, and then scanned the lot, the road, the heat shimmer rising off the blacktop. "Speaking of which. Where's Dad? Figured the old man would want to see his boy walk out a free man."

The color left her face like water leaving a basin. Her hand flew to her neck, fingers working at the skin there, an old nervous habit he recognized from childhood, from the time she knocked Mom's good china off the shelf and spent an hour figuring out how to confess it.

"He couldn't make it," she said.

Jason went still. In the joint, stillness was a weapon. It was the silence before a man moved, the held breath before the fist. He had learned to use it the way other men used their voices.

"Couldn't make it," he repeated.

"You know how it is. Club business. Things get busy, and he..."

"Anna."

She stopped talking.

"I've been writing him letters for three years. He wrote back for six months and then stopped. You told me every visit he was just busy. That he'd come next time." Jason took one step toward her, not threatening, just closing the distance between the words and the truth. "There was no next time. Not once."

She looked at the desert. She looked at the car. She looked at the prison wall. She looked everywhere except his face.

"Anna." He kept his voice level. That was the thing about the quiet he had learned inside. It was not the absence of anger. It was anger with all the noise burned off. "Look at me."

She tried. She made it about halfway.

"Where is our father?"

The silence stretched between them, hot and trembling, like the air above summer blacktop.

"He's been busy, you know how Dad gets when there's a run coming up, or when the chapter has to deal with..."

"Anna." His voice came down like a blade. Not raised. Just final. "Where the hell is Dad?"

Her throat worked. Her eyes went bright and wet and she turned her face away and he watched her do it, watched her reach for whatever story she had been carrying for three years, and watched it fail her.

"He's dead, Jason."

The words hit him the way a shank hits, unexpected and intimate and total. Not the pain first but the shock of it, the terrible oh of suddenly understanding something that cannot be undone.

"What."

"Dad's dead." The words came out in a rush now, like a dam giving. "Three years ago. Right after they sentenced you. I didn't tell you. I couldn't tell you while you were inside. You would have done something, gotten yourself killed or added twenty years to your sentence. I was protecting you. I swear to God, Jason, I was protecting you."

Three years ago.

He had written seventeen letters. He had counted them, because in the joint you counted everything, it was how you kept hold of the days. Seventeen letters to a dead man. Seventeen letters asking how things were going, asking after the club, asking if the old Shovelhead was running yet. He could see them now with horrible clarity, sitting in some box somewhere, or worse, opened and read by someone who should never have touched them, some evidence clerk, some fed, someone who had laughed at the son who did not know.

"Three years," he said. "You let me write letters to a dead man for three years."

"Jason, please."

"Every time I asked about him. Every visit. Every phone call." He heard his own voice rising and brought it back down by force of will. "You looked me in the face and lied."

"I was scared you'd do something."

"Something." He almost laughed. It did not come out right. "Something like what? Grieve? You didn't want me to grieve."

"Something like this." She gestured at his face, at whatever she saw there, and her voice cracked like old leather. "That look. That look right there. That's what I was afraid of."

He turned away from her. He stared at the desert and breathed through his nose and waited for the red to settle.

When he turned back, his voice was under control. Barely.

"How did he die?"

She hesitated. He watched her calculate it, how much truth was safe to give him, and that calculation made something cold and surgical happen in the part of him that prison had built from scar tissue and necessity.

"Don't," he said quietly. "Don't you dare measure what you tell me. Not about this. Not about him. How did he die?"

Her chin trembled. "They said it was an accident. His brakes failed on the mountain road up past Red Rock."

"Said."

"I saw the bike after." She swallowed hard. "The brake lines were cut clean through. Not worn. Not failed. Cut. Someone knew exactly what they were doing."

Jason heard the blood moving in his ears.

"Someone," he said. "That's a word people use when they already know the name."

Anna's hand went back to her neck. Fingers against skin. The old tell.

"Say the name, Anna."

"I don't know for certain that..."

"Say it."

She closed her eyes. When she opened them again they were red at the rims and dry, all the tears burned away by something that had been living in her for three years and had no more water left in it.

"Victor," she whispered.