The boy staggered past the funnel cake stand, clutching his side with both hands, and when he hit the gravel his blood spattered my boots like red confetti.
Music died. Ferris wheel kept spinning like the sky didn’t get the memo. The county fair smelled of grease and hay and river mud, and the lights glittered hard enough to make your teeth ache.
I dropped to my knees.
He was maybe ten. Freckles, bad haircut, the stubborn jaw of a kid who’d learned not to cry where anyone could see. His T-shirt stuck wet to his skin. Blood soaked his waistband.
“Hey, kid,” I said. “Where’s it hurt?”
He tried to push himself up, jaw chattering. He was all bones and brave. He shoved a crumpled paper at me, the writing smeared and desperate.
Find the Black Ravens MC—my dad said they owe him a favor.
I looked up. My boys had circled, leather and denim and years of bad roads—Knuckle, Preacher, Diego, and the rest. Hawkers and families stood frozen, clutching corn dogs and stuffed bears, like we’d torn a hole in the evening.
“Call an ambulance,” I told someone. Anyone.
“Already on it,” Diego said, phone to his ear. “No signal. Too many people.”
The kid swallowed. “You Bear?”
That old name, like gravel in a glass. “Yeah.”
“Dad said you’d come.” He blinked hard. “I can’t find him.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jonah.”
I lifted the shirt. Cut across his side—deep and dirty, edges angry. Not fresh. At least a day old. Infection creeping. Someone had wrapped it in duct tape. Someone who didn’t want this boy seen.
“Who did this?” I asked.
“Fell,” he said, quick and automatic, and then bit his lip like the taste of the lie hurt.
My hand shook. I smoothed his hair back. “Jonah what?”
“Hollis.”
Hollis hit me like a punch. I saw the prison yard, heat shimmering above razor wire, a summer riot where men turned into animals and one man stood between me and a piece of steel meant for my liver. Ezra Hollis. Skinny preacher’s kid with a laugh that made guards flinch. He’d saved me, and we’d sealed it with a stupid thing men do when they’ve got nothing else—a blood oath, palm to palm, swearing on the skin we still had. “Some day,” he’d said, “maybe you can pay it forward, Bear. Maybe it’ll matter.”
I met Jonah’s eyes. “Your dad Ezra?”
He nodded.
“Where is he?”
The boy tried to answer and couldn’t. His breath hitched like a motor that wouldn’t start.
Sirens finally found a trail through the fried-dough chaos. Two EMTs hustled a gurney toward us. The sheriff’s deputy jogged behind them, chest puffed, sweating through his tan shirt. Folks made space for the uniform, not for us.
“Back up,” the deputy barked. “No crowding.”
“This is my kid,” a man’s voice shouted from beyond the cotton candy stall. I turned.
He had a biker’s jacket he hadn’t earned, shiny new, with patches that meant nothing. Gray stubble. Drunk eyes. Stepdad; I could smell it on him.
Jonah went rigid. He tried to roll away under my shadow.
“Stand aside,” the deputy said again, closer now, hand near his holster, like we were the problem and not the blood spilling into the dirt.
Preacher stepped up, palms out. “We’re helping, officer.”
“Your kind doesn’t help,” the deputy said, too loud. I saw people nodding because that was easier than looking at the boy.
This is the part of the story where the world hands you a war and expects you to apologize for picking up a shield.
“Let the medics through,” I said, low.
The EMTs slid in, professional and quiet, and I loved them for it. They cut tape, pressed gauze, measured breath. Jonah winced but didn’t make a sound.
“Kid’s septic,” one EMT said to the other. “We gotta go now.”
“Hospital’s twenty minutes,” the other said. “Your name, buddy?”
“Jonah,” I said. “Hollis.”
The EMT’s head snapped up. Something like recognition, or maybe it was my voice when I said his name.
“You’re not the father,” the deputy said.
“I’m the debt collector,” I said, and then I lifted the gurney with them.
We moved. The crowd parted for uniforms and not for leather until my boys spread wide, a wing of black along the fairway, and folks suddenly found the decency to step back. My men blocked the stepdad, blocked the deputy’s mouth with their silence, and walked us to the ambulance on a street of blinking games and stunned faces.
We ride because it’s the only way to outrun the things chasing us. Sometimes the things find you anyway.
The ambulance doors slammed. “We need a police escort,” the driver yelled.
The deputy hesitated, looking for permission in his own doubt. He shook his head.
I didn’t wait.
“Ravens!” I roared.
Engines answered. A dozen bikes thundered to life, old warhorses coughing fire and sin. We poured onto the county road, forming a wedge around the ambulance. Headlights cut the summer dusk. We ran red, cut the line of pickup trucks, and made a lane where none existed. People cursed us until they saw the white box and then their faces changed and their hands lifted in blessing or apology. I don’t know which.
At St. Luke’s, the ER doors blew open. Nurses swarmed. Jonah’s hand found mine as they rolled him inside.
“Don’t leave,” he whispered. The words felt scripted in somebody else’s tragedy, but they landed in me like something I’d always been waiting to hear.
“I won’t,” I promised, and for once, I meant it right.
They took him away. Blood tracked on the linoleum. The air tasted like metal and lemon cleaner and old grief.
Sheriff Donovan arrived while we were pacing the hallway. He was haggard and big, like someone who’d once played football and never forgave the world for ending the season. He nodded at me because we’d known each other thirty years—me on one side of the line, him on the other, both of us aging out of our old mistakes.
“What’s the story, Bear?”
“Boy’s cut bad,” I said. “Infected. He asked for us.”
“You can’t interfere with CPS.”
“We can keep him alive.”
“Stepfather says the kid ran off. Claims it was an accident.” Donovan’s jaw flexed. “Neighbors heard different. But without the dad, without papers…”
“His dad is Ezra Hollis,” I said.
He blinked. He knew. Everyone in that county who mattered knew. Ezra Hollis—the man who’d walked out of prison with a Bible, fell in love with a woman who deserved better than either of us, and disappeared when the world wasn’t decent enough to pay a man for his new heart. The man who once saved me.
“Ezra’s dead,” Donovan said softly. “Three months now. A fire at the warehouse. He ran in twice to drag people out. Roof took him the third time.”
The floor tilted under me. Not surprise. Something worse, like the moment you know the thing you feared has already happened and you weren’t there.
Diego swore under his breath. Preacher took off his shades, tucked them away like a prayer.
“He saved me once,” I said. “Said someday it’d matter.”
Donovan’s eyes changed. “Someday might be today.”
A doctor hustled out. He was young and tired and looked like he hadn’t eaten in a week. “We’ve cleaned the wound. Peritonitis. He’s septic. We’re taking him into surgery. We need blood.”
“What type?” I asked.
“O-negative.”
Silence. The kind that empties all the noise out of a place.
“I’m O-negative,” I said.
“Me too,” Knuckle said.
“Me three,” Preacher said.
The doctor nodded like he’d just been handed a ladder in a flood. “We’ll take all of you.”
He turned to go and then looked back at me. “Are you family?”
“I am now,” I said.
He didn’t argue. He didn’t have time.
They drained me in a room with buzzing lights. The needle bit, and I watched the bag fill, dark and thick, the way a promise looks when you finally stop making excuses for breaking it. Across the hall, Preacher winked at me, pale as milk. Knuckle flipped the bird at the fluorescent ceiling. We bled like men who had finally been given a reason for the blood we’d already spilled.
When it was done, the nurse pressed gauze and tape and told me to sit. I stood anyway. My legs felt like wet rope. The hallway swayed and settled.
Hours—or minutes—later, the doctor reappeared, a pair of tired crescents under his eyes. “He’s in recovery. You bought us time. That infection wanted him.”
“Can I see him?” I asked.
He nodded. “One at a time.”
I slipped into the dim room. Machines blinked. Jonah looked smaller than any fight he’d had to carry. He turned his head, eyelids heavy.
