The Notebook: A Dark MC Romance

The gate buzzed before it rolled open, metal dragging on metal, and Jason De'Leon walked out of Ely State Prison into July heat that hit like a wall.

Three years.

He didn't look back at the building. Didn't look up at the guard tower either. He just stood there a second on the gravel, duffel bag in one hand, and let the sun do what it wanted to his skin.

A horn tapped, once, polite.

Anna's truck. Borrowed, he could tell, too clean inside, a rosary hanging off a mirror that wasn't hers. She sat behind the wheel with the engine running and the AC clearly losing the fight against the desert.

He crossed the lot. Got in. Didn't say anything yet.

She looked thinner than he remembered. Dark circles cut deep under her eyes, the kind that don't come from one bad night. She had her hair pulled back tight, sleeves down past her wrists even in this heat, and her hands were doing something nervous on the wheel before she caught herself and stopped.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

She pulled out onto the highway. Neither of them talked for a mile. Jason watched the prison shrink in the side mirror until it was just a smudge of fence and dust, and then it was gone, and there was nothing out here but scrub brush and heat shimmer on asphalt running flat to the horizon.

"You look the same," Anna said. "Older. Same."

"Three years'll do that."

"I wrote you. Every week."

"I know. I got them."

"You didn't write back much."

"Wasn't much to say in there." He turned his head, looked at her properly for the first time. "You gonna tell me why you look like you haven't slept since Tuesday?"

Anna's jaw tightened. Her eyes stayed on the road.

"Anna."

"There's no easy way to say this," she said, and her voice came out flat, rehearsed, like she'd practiced it in a mirror so many times the words had worn smooth and stopped meaning anything. "Dad's dead."

Jason didn't move.

"Three weeks ago," she said. "I wanted to tell you in person. I didn't want you finding out from a letter, or some guard, or..." She stopped herself. Swallowed. "Faulty machinery. His bike, going down the grade out past Mount Charleston. Brakes failed. They found him at the bottom."

The truck cab went quiet except for the AC rattling in the dash vents.

Jason had written seventeen letters to a dead man. He did the math without meaning to, counted backward, lined up dates, found the gap where his father had stopped being alive on the other end of an envelope and Jason hadn't known it. Seventeen letters into a hole in the ground.

Grief came in waves, and that's exactly what it felt like, water, not fire. First the cold drop of it, the floor going out from under him even though he hadn't moved an inch. Then something hot underneath that, low in his chest, not crying, not yet, just pressure building with nowhere to go. Then under that, colder than the first wave, something clean and quiet settling into place like a key turning in a lock.

Marcus De'Leon didn't lose control of a bike on a road he'd ridden a thousand times.

"Faulty machinery," Jason said.

"That's what they said."

"Who's they."

"The coroner's report."

"Who signed off on the bike before he rode."

Anna's hands tightened on the wheel. He watched it happen, the white at her knuckles, the way her sleeve slid back half an inch when she shifted her grip.

There it was. A bruise, yellow-green at the edges, the old kind, wrapped halfway around her wrist like a bracelet that had been put on too hard. She caught him looking. For one second neither of them said anything, and then she pulled the sleeve back down with a small, automatic motion, practiced, the way you'd straighten a picture frame, and put both hands back on the wheel like nothing had happened.

Jason didn't say anything either. He filed it. He'd learned that inside. You don't spend a reaction on something the second you see it. You hold it. You wait.

"Who's running the club now," he said instead.

Anna's eyes flicked to him and away. "Jason."

"Who, Anna."

She drove another quarter mile before she answered, and when she did, her voice had gone smaller, not scared exactly. Careful. The voice of someone picking her way across ice she already knew was thin.

"Victor."

The word sat in the cab between them.

Jason went still. Not the stillness of a man absorbing bad news. Anna had seen that before, knew what that looked like, the slumped shoulders, the exhale. This was different. This was a stillness that didn't move at all, didn't blink, didn't breathe different. His hands stayed flat on his knees. His face didn't do anything.

Anna had grown up around men who got loud when they were angry. Men who broke things. She'd never been afraid of loud.

She was afraid of this.

"Tell me everything," Jason said.

His voice came out so quiet she had to lean toward him to catch it over the engine noise, and something about that, about a man this big, this still, dropping his voice down to almost nothing, made the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

"Tell me everything," he said again, "from the beginning. Don't leave anything out."

Anna's hands found the wheel again, twelve and four, and her sleeve had already covered the bruise, and somewhere underneath the fear, some old and tired part of her was already calculating what she could say and what she couldn't, what was safe to hand her brother and what would get someone killed if it got back to the wrong ears.

She opened her mouth.

She didn't know yet how to tell him the truth without it costing both of them everything.