Death always seems to show up at the worst possible time. In my case, that happened to be a little after eleven p.m. on a stretch of road paved with my long-abandoned good intentions. You know what they say about those, don’t you? About where they lead? That was exactly where I was headed. Leo Kane, on the highway to hell.

Which meant that Death didn’t just show up at the most inopportune time for me. It chose the worst possible place to show up for me, too.

The engine of my Harley-Davidson Fat Boy roared like a dragon down that lonely corridor. The cool night air whistled around my helmet like the lash of a whip, striking at my visor before forking around me like a serpent’s tongue. This far out, the only light to guide me was the warm, golden spread of my headlamp as it cut through the ink of the surrounding shadows. It was on nights like these that I could see the sprawling expanse of the Milky Way above me, a smear of violet and blue painted over an endless void. Out here, there was no haze of ambient light to shield the heavens from view. Out here, there was just me, the stars, and the blacktop cradling my tires.

That was the one thing I’d missed about this Godforsaken swath of land in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere: the sheer magnitude of the emptiness that made everything else seem so small—so insignificant. It was like the black, moonless sky had opened its jaws and touched them to the earth, ready to swallow me whole, some devouring force that would pluck me right from the back of my bike and thrust me up amongst those stars.

Those stars that made me think of other, less terrifying things too. The way they looked out here, so crystal clear and bright, they made me think of her. Of Lucy.

It had been years since I’d gone away, walked out of her life the way a dream dissipates just seconds before you open your eyes—there one moment, gone the next. The circumstances under which we’d parted had been… complicated, to say the least, but I knew without a doubt leaving her had been the biggest mistake I’d ever made. And I’d made a lot of mistakes in my time—a hell of a lot. Some had cost me more than I could bear. Still, what I’d done to Lucy took the cake.

Not that it was my choice, exactly.

I clenched my gloved hands around the Fat Boy’s handlebars, recalling every sordid, fucked-up detail of how I’d burned any and all bridges that spanned between us. I’d never felt so powerless in all my life, and I’d told myself over and over that I’d never let myself feel that way again. But the guilt remained—and the shame, too.

So here I was, closer to her than I’d been in years and feeling just as helpless as I had back then. I knew that wasn’t true. I knew I had more power, more control over the situation than I’d had back then. But Lucy had a way of making a man feel like he ought to drop to his knees, confess all his sins, and acknowledge he was unworthy.

Just like those stars.

Shit. This was the problem with love. It offered you one hell of a high, but when you started coming down, you crashed hard and left a crater that everyone else could see. You were never the same after that, and it seemed like you always ended up a little deeper down than where you’d started. Love… shit. Love was like digging your own grave.

I’d loved Lucy with all my heart since the day I met her, from the very second the club had rolled into Pleasant Lakes. By sheer chance our eyes had met and that was it for me, man. Game over. It didn’t matter what we were up against or how it would end—I had to have her. She was everything that a man could want—sweet, brilliant, legs for days—and in the short time that the boys and I had stayed in town, I’d come to realize I would’ve done anything for her.

Hell, I still would.

A lightning strike of guilt lit up my belly again. I should’ve come back sooner. Should’ve said “fuck it” and jumped on my hog to whisk her away just like I’d promised, saving her from a dead-end life in that nowhere, shithole town. Lucy deserved so much more. She deserved better from life, and from me. But she hadn’t gotten either, and I was partly to blame.

Shit, if I was being honest with myself, I could’ve refused to go quietly at all—I could have fought, I could have kicked and screamed until I was hoarse and bloody, and she’d have known I didn’t go down without a fight. But it hadn’t gone that way—not at all.

Then everything had gone so wrong while I was away, and by the time I was free to return, I didn’t have any money to do so. I was alone and broke and so far away from home that to make ends meet I ended up taking a job at an auto body shop. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I’d spent a few years where I’d only wanted to spend a month, at most.

Now I wasn’t sure if Lucy was even the same girl I remembered and had fallen in love with.

But that didn’t matter. Not really. I had to find her. Even if it was too little, too late.

I knew it wasn’t fair for me to think that nothing would have changed after all this time, that she wouldn’t have moved on… but I hoped, maybe foolishly, that there was a chance she still loved me. That whatever had happened to her while I was gone, she hadn’t forgotten about me. That she saw me as deserving of a second chance, even when I couldn’t see it for myself. That was her gift—seeing good where other people saw none. She had eyes that looked right through you in a great and terrible way, stripped you bare in a way that being naked couldn’t match. Years ago, that kind of gaze had made me uncomfortable. Now it was all I wanted, to be open like a book in front of her. To be read, weighed, and judged.

My plan—if you could even call it a plan—was simple: I was going to ride into town, find Lucy, and save her like I’d always dreamed of. Pull her onto the back of my bike, kiss her hard on the lips, and then ride off into the sunset. You know, like at the end of every romcom ever made. A total cliché. At least, that was how I’d always envisioned it.

Yeah, I’m a romantic. Fuck you.

But I’m also a realist. I knew it wouldn’t be that easy. There were other forces at work here, forces that had a hold on her like a vise, and it would take more than just me rolling into town like some cowboy to free her from those. Though if the last time I’d seen her was any indication, she still chafed under the weight of her responsibilities. That was what I liked most about Lucy—her spark. In defiance of so many attempts to extinguish the fire inside her, that girl was a goddamn flame.

My thoughts faded into the rumbling of the engine, a soft, low hum that lulled my mind into an almost Zen-like state of being. This was what I’d joined the MC for in the first place—that sense of calm and freedom that being on the back of a powerful bike always brought. The rhythm of the machinery gliding across the road brought a stillness to my soul that nothing else could. It was the closest I’d ever felt to faith or religion, alone in the dark, the world whipping past me even as time stood still. This was my solitude, my real home. I couldn’t wait to share it with Lucy.

I breathed in the scent of the open road through my helmet as I barreled down the highway, barely taking note of the town limit sign as I entered Pleasant Lakes proper. I still had plenty of time before I even made it to the first sign of civilization, at least another three miles.

But things like distance don’t seem to matter much when your life starts flashing before your eyes.

I was still lost in my thoughts, images of Lucy’s soft lips inching closer to mine flitting through my brain. I was practically drowning in those fantasies, hardly paying attention to the world around me when I saw it: a small, delicate-looking doe that had leapt right into the path of my bike. At first I didn’t even recognize what it was, or that I should move out of the way—a split second of hesitation that might have been the difference between simply swerving to avoid it and what ended up actually happening.

I felt my heart jump into my throat as I pulled hard on my bike, turning it to the side. The back tire slid and I started to skid, all of my weight tumbling to the left. Before I even realized that I’d lost control of the bike I was already on my side, sparks flying as metal ground against the black asphalt. My ribs exploded in a kaleidoscope of pain, my vision blurring with the skipping vibrations of my helmet getting dragged over the rough road, along with the seven hundred pounds of metal I was still attached to. The bite of the grave tore the leg of my pants to ribbon, along with the skin underneath it.

A lot of people think you panic when you stare death in the face. It wasn’t like that for me. In all the stories of near-misses I’d ever heard my MC brothers tell, it wasn’t like that for anybody. This weird, unsettling calm came over me, and I thought, Huh. So this is how I die.

That was it. Well, that and a small, cold rock of dread in my gut, a sensation that was overpowered by my brain doing its best to block out the most unbearable parts of the trauma.

I came to a stop somewhere in the dead center of the road, my entire body feeling like one big bruise. Adrenaline hissed and bubbled through my veins the second I realized I was still breathing, a stark contrast to the calm that had passed over me seconds—or was it minutes? I couldn’t be sure—ago. I was shaking, and the shaking hurt. Something had to be broken, but even that concern seemed far away compared to the one flashing in neon letters across my mind’s eye:

Get the fuck out of the road!

Moving was almost completely out of the question. Any effort I made to turn my body or push the bike out from on top of me was met with another explosion of pain from somewhere in my side. If I had to take a guess, I’d cracked a rib. I took a strangled breath as I tried to gather my wits, still fighting the drowsiness that I knew was the oncoming veil of shock. For the first time in a long time I prayed to God that I hadn’t punctured a lung. It was absolute agony pulling in air.

I sucked in a few ragged gulps anyway, fogging my visor and wincing as I tried to maneuver my leg out from underneath the bike. The fabric of my jeans had been no match for the twenty-or-so feet I’d skidded along the road, which had ground it to scraps before sinking rocks and abrasive chunks of blacktop into my vulnerable calf. I could already feel the blood pouring down into my boot as I lay there, trapped. Helpless.

I pushed the visor of my helmet up, a cool breeze freezing the sweat to my face as I hoped for someone to come by and find me. I patted my jacket for my cell phone, but no dice—it must have gotten knocked from the pocket in the accident. All I could do was wait and hope that I wouldn’t be here all night, or worse, that I was in such bad shape I might not make it that long.

Everything felt like it was getting so close, like the world was slowly caving in on me. A deeper darkness than the night itself was creeping over the edges of my vision. My eyelids felt heavy, and no matter how hard I tried to keep them open, they would immediately start to close. It took everything I had to stay awake, all the energy I had left focused solely on not letting myself fall asleep, where I may very well go into shock and die. If I wasn’t hit by a car first.

I heard it before I saw it: the sound of its engine reverberating through the ground beneath me. I turned my face up and was instantly blinded by the bright lights as they barreled toward me, and in that moment I was so sure that I was done for. I couldn’t fight it anymore, and slowly I faded into the warm embrace of unconsciousness, distantly wondering which might hurt worse: the initial accident, or getting run over by a truck.