Chapter 1
I'd barely reached the booth when someone bumped my shoulder.
The tray tilted. Two cups of hot coffee crashed across the table — and straight onto the gray-bearded biker's leather vest.
The diner went silent.
I froze. "Oh my God — I'm so sorry."
Three bikers behind the man immediately stood. Their hands went to their cuts. The air in the diner got thick enough to chew.
But the older biker raised one hand. "Sit down."
His voice was calm. That somehow frightened me more.
I grabbed a towel from the counter and hurried toward him. "I'll clean it. I swear, I didn't mean —"
Then his eyes dropped to my left forearm.
I stopped wiping. My sleeve had ridden up. A dark red mark curved across my skin near the wrist — the crescent-shaped birthmark I'd had since birth. The one I usually kept covered.
The biker's expression changed completely.
"Where did you get that?"
I instinctively pulled my arm back, covering the mark. "It's just a scar."
"No." He leaned closer. I could smell leather and cigarette smoke and something like motor oil. "I know that mark."
I stepped back. My eyes fell to the patch on his vest. Silver letters on a black rocker.
SILVER RIDGE.
My face tightened. My father's voice, even after all these years, echoed in my head. Never speak to anyone wearing that name.
"My father told me never to speak to anyone wearing that name," I said.
The bikers behind him exchanged uneasy looks. The gray-bearded man slowly stood. He was tall — taller than I expected, broad in the shoulders, with eyes that missed nothing.
"What was your father's name?"
I hesitated. Every instinct told me to run. But something in his face — something like grief — held me in place.
"Daniel Carter," I said.
Every trace of anger disappeared from his face. One biker behind him whispered, "Jack…"
Jack Mercer ignored him. He stared at me as if he'd seen a ghost.
"Daniel had a daughter?"
My breathing quickened. "You knew him?"
Jack looked again at the mark on my arm. Then he said something that made my blood run cold.
"That isn't a burn mark."
I frowned. "What are you talking about? I never said it was a burn."
"Your father had the exact same mark," he said quietly. "Same arm. Same crescent. He used to say it was the Carter family curse. Or the Carter family crown — depending on the day."
I shook my head. "That's impossible. I never knew my father. He died before I was born. My aunt raised me. She never — she never mentioned a mark."
Jack's jaw tightened. He glanced toward the man who had bumped me — the stranger who'd made me spill the coffee.
The man was already moving toward the diner door.
Jack's expression hardened. "Then ask him why he recognized it before I did."
I turned.
The stranger stopped. One hand on the door. And slowly — deliberately — he looked back.
His eyes met mine. They were cold. Calculating. And in them, I saw something I'd never seen before: recognition. Not of my face. Of something else.
He smiled. Just a twitch of the lips. Then he was gone, the bell above the door jingling behind him.
Jack was already moving. "Holt — get the door. Don't let him —"
But it was too late. By the time the biker named Holt reached the entrance, the stranger's motorcycle was already roaring down the highway.
Jack stood in the doorway, watching him go. His fists were clenched. When he turned back to me, his face was grim.
"Claire," he said — and I don't know how he knew my name, because I'd never told him. "You need to come with me. Right now. Because that man wasn't here by accident. And neither were you."
I looked at the empty doorway. At the coffee still dripping onto the floor. At the three bikers, now standing between me and the exit.
May you like
And I realized — the mark on my arm, the mark I'd hidden my whole life, wasn't just a birthmark.
It was a target.
