Cade knew it was a dream. He could feel himself running in slow motion, time distorted, events out of order. One second, he was on the beach, racing across the damp sand toward the police cars, the crowd of hushed people staring in horror as a body was dragged from the water. The next, he was back in the apartment he’d shared with Maddie, and they were screaming at each other. Another stupid argument about stupid things. What was it this time? Cade drinking with his friends too often? Maddie getting too flirty at a club? Some other nonsense they always bitched about? Did it matter? Did it really matter?

He didn’t think so. Regardless of what their argument was about, he shouldn’t have stomped out of the apartment and slammed the door in Maddie’s face. Shouldn’t have told her to go to the beach by herself, get in the water without a partner to watch her back. Night surfing was always dangerously stupid. You didn’t do it alone. Never. But he told her to. He actually fucking told her to. And she did it, just to spite him.

He blinked, and he was back on the beach, having pushed through the crowd. And there was all that remained of Maddie, a limp body covered in scratches, hair plastered to her face, eyes staring at nothing as they loaded her into the black bag, zipped it up, her final shroud. He could do nothing but stand there in shock—that was all he’d done when it actually happened; there had been nothing else to do—as they loaded her into the coroner’s van and took her away. Later, he knew, her parents would identify the body at the morgue. Then they would call him, in tears, and ask what happened, ask why he wasn’t there with her, and he wouldn’t have a satisfactory answer.

He never would.

He never…

Cade opened his eyes, for real this time, and the half-dream of the day Maddie died dissolved from fragmented moments into nothing but distant murk in his mind. He found himself lying on the ground, staring up at a sky just starting to darken as the summer sun sank toward the horizon to give way to another warm night. His face throbbed with every twitch, and the side of his head was on fire, like the skin had been shredded. His thoughts swam, along with his vision, the world off kilter.

Had he fallen? Had a bike accident? Maybe someone had hit him with a car, or…

A person leaned over him. With his unclear vision, Cade only recognized the guy thanks to the telltale bruising across his crooked nose. It was the biker he’d punched in Jean.

Cade’s memories snapped back into clarity. He’d been in Grand Park, texting Jenna, when all of a sudden, he’d been struck on the side of the face. The biker bastard must’ve spotted him in the park and jumped him to make sure he didn’t escape again. And his technique had worked. Cade had been too consumed with thoughts of Jenna to pay proper attention to his surroundings, and now it was going to cost him. The biker was sneering at him, a fire in his eyes that threatened the beating of Cade’s life. Why he hadn’t started yet, Cade could only guess.

His guess was that the guy wanted an unfair advantage, and had called his friends in to assist.

Am I imagining it, he thought, or do I hear motorcycles approaching?

Turned out he wasn’t imagining it. The bikes cut out not too far away, and several heavy sets of footsteps came marching over. Cade craned his neck back to see the other four bikers from the crew, all of them looking primed to rip off a piece of the impudent man who’d humiliated one of their own.

Oh, this was going to end very badly.

“Thought you were going to get away, didn’t you?” said Broken Nose, spitting on the ground next to Cade’s head. “But you’re not going anywhere this time, and without your lady friend in the way, we got no reason to hold back on you. We’re going to teach you a lesson, boy, about how to respect your betters. And you’re going to learn it, even if it means you have to shit in a—”

“Stop your yapping, Pete,” said one of the other bikers. “We’re in public, man. We got to make this quick, or somebody will call the cops on us. You know Alex has a warrant out in Fresno. We end up in cuffs, we’ll be in deep shit.” He shambled up to Cade and peered down, scowling underneath his dirty, stringy beard. “Let’s give this punk some solid hits and kicks, leave him black and blue, and be done with it. No reason to give a speech.”

The guy wound back his foot and drove it into Cade’s gut.

Cade gasped as pain radiated all the way up to his chest.

“Like that, Pete. Keep it simple.”

Pete scrunched his broken nose in distaste—he wanted to do a lot more than rough Cade up—but said, “Fine. Whatever.” He snapped his fingers at two of the others. “Come hold him up so I can wipe that stupid look off his face. Maybe if that pretty little thing he was out with yesterday runs away in disgust, he’ll get the message that he shouldn’t mess with people who are…What’s wrong, Frankie?”

The guy who’d kicked Cade looked over his shoulder. “Did you hear that?”

The other four turned in the same direction. “Here what?” one of them said.

Then there was a sound that no one could have missed: the sound of motorcycles falling into each other, a nasty grinding noise followed by a crash that promised major damage most wallets would be emptied trying to fix. Three of the five bikers swore and took off in the direction of, presumably, where they’d parked their motorcycles, leaving only Frankie and Pete behind to torment Cade.

Two against one is better odds, he thought, but my head is still hurting like a bitch. I might not be able to throw an accurate punch. If I keep lying here though, I’m going to get more of those damn kicks. And worse.

“Is somebody messing with our bikes?” Frankie hissed. “So help me god, if some little shit scuffed my ride, I will—”

Cade moved. He rolled over, planted his hands against the ground, dug his nails into the dry soil, and then lunged for Frankie’s legs. He rammed the back of the man’s knees, and the biker lost his footing and went down, face smacking the earth so hard Cade felt the vibrations in the ground. Cade followed through on his momentum, rolled over the guy, and pushed himself up into a wobbly standing position, raising his fists just as Pete charged him, a snarl on his bruised face.

Cade was ready for a fistfight.

But Pete apparently had no plans for one, despite Frankie’s earlier commands. He reached into his pocket and yanked out a switchblade, the blade glinting in the sunlight as it swished out of the handle. Pete swiped the knife right at Cade’s face, and Cade was forced to lurch sideways to avoid the blow, which caused him to trip over Frankie, who was trying to get to his feet. Cade ended up rolling away painfully and slamming into the same tree he’d been sitting under earlier, his shoulder taking the brunt of the blow.

Pete, furious, leaped over his fallen comrade and came at Cade with the knife again, and Cade was too dazed from the impact to move in time. He saw the knife approaching, getting closer and closer to cutting his throat, leaving him bleeding out on the ground, killed in some senseless act of violence in a city that wasn’t his home. And, as time seemed to slow down, Cade desperately trying to move, too slow, too slow, too slow, his thoughts sped up. The full weight of his stupidity smacked him, hard, and he was finally forced to admit to himself that every choice he’d made over the past two years was cowardly at best and pathetic at worst.

Leaving home and refusing to contact his family because he didn’t want their judgment about Maddie’s death resting on his shoulders. Cutting himself off from other people and giving everyone the cold shoulder because he was too afraid of getting attached again. Blaming himself for things that were definitely not his fault—Maddie choosing to surf without him—because the alternative, that life was truly unpredictable and could end in disaster no matter how hard you tried, was too terrifying for him to confront. Choosing to let Jenna fade into the ether like all the rest, even though he really, really liked her, because he feared commitment and the underlying unpredictable nature of relationships.

God, what a sad little man he was.

And now he was going to die a sad little man with nothing to show for—

Out of the shadows behind the tree emerged a woman in a neat business suit, who stepped directly in front of Cade, directly into the arc of the knife. She held up something, a can, pointed it at Pete’s face, and pressed down the top. A wide jet of mace splashed directly into Pete’s eyes, and instead of stabbing the woman with his knife, the biker screamed, dropped the knife, stumbled off to the side, fell to his knees, and began wailing at the top of his lungs as he desperately tried to wipe the stinging mist away.

Jenna lowered her can of mace, turned around, looked down at Cade, and said, “I think we should leave now.”