Chapter 6: The Old Family Cabin
We couldn't go back to the garage, and we couldn't stay by the creek where Vince or any of the club riders might spot us cutting through the timberland. Jax knew the county better than anyone; he led me three miles deeper into the hills, past an old logging gate that had rusted off its hinges twenty years ago, until we reached a weathered, gray-shingled cabin tucked away in a hollow between two timber ridges.
The cabin looked abandoned at first glance. The front porch was sagging toward the dirt, and the windows were caked with years of dust and pine needles. But when Jax pulled a heavy brass key from a hidden notch behind the cedar doorframe and turned the lock, the heavy timber door groaned open with a familiar, dry sound.
“Whose place is this?” I asked, stepping inside behind him, my hand trailing over the rough-hewn log walls. The air inside smelled of dry cedar, old books, and a faint trace of woodsmoke from a fire that must have been burned years ago.
“My old man’s,” Jax said, tossing his leather vest onto an old horsehair armchair by the cold stone fireplace. He walked straight to a small iron woodstove in the corner and began stuffing it with dry kindling from an old wicker basket. “He built it back in the seventies when the timber mills were still booming. Before he drank himself out of a job and walked away from everything, too.”
I watched him work. Stripped of his leather cut, without the club patches and the heavy silver rings on every finger, Jax looked less like an enforcer and more like just a man—tired, battered by the years, but moving with a quiet purpose I hadn't seen in him at the diner. He struck a wooden match against the side of the stove, and a bright orange tongue of flame leaped up, casting long, flickering shadows across the low timber ceiling.
“He left you this place?” I asked, setting my small jacket over the arm of a wooden rocking chair to dry by the heat.
“He left me a pile of debts and a closed door,” Jax corrected, his voice flat as he adjusted the stove damper. “I haven't set foot in here since I was seventeen years old. Thought I burned every bridge that tied me to these hills.” He stopped, looking down at a stack of cardboard boxes piled neatly in the corner beneath a moth-eaten woolen blanket. “Turns out some things just wait in the dark until you’re finally forced to look at them.”
I walked over to the stack of boxes. The cardboard was soft and gray with age, the edges chewed by mice. Without asking, I knelt down and pulled back the topmost flap. Inside, resting beneath a layer of yellowed newspaper clippings and old black-and-white photographs of men standing beside logging trucks, was something that made my breath catch in my throat—an old, beat-up acoustic guitar with a cracked neck and faded mother-of-pearl inlay around the soundhole.
“Mom played that,” I whispered, touching the edge of the wood with the tip of my finger.
Jax froze. He turned away from the stove, his eyes dropping to the box between us. For a long moment, the only sound in the cabin was the cheerful crackle of dry cedar catching fire inside the iron stove.
“She played?” Jax asked, his voice dropping into a register so quiet I almost missed it over the flames.
“Every Sunday when the rent was paid and we had flour for pancakes,” I said, looking up at him. “She’d sit on the edge of the mattress and sing old highway songs. She told me you taught her two chords before you left—just enough to keep the rhythm going while the world fell apart around her.”
Jax walked slowly across the wide plank floor. He knelt down beside me on the dusty boards, his large, calloused hands—the same hands that had gripped handlebars on cross-country runs and thrown punches in tavern parking lots—hovered hesitatingly over the battered guitar case. Slowly, with infinite care, he reached out and lifted the instrument from the box. He cradled it against his chest the way a soldier holds a rifle, his fingers automatically finding the familiar neck position, smoothing over the worn frets where the finish had worn down to raw mahogany.
“G-major,” Jax murmured, more to himself than to me, his voice rough with old memories. “And D.”
He didn't play a song. He just pressed his fingers against the strings and strummed once—a single, clean, resonant chord that echoed off the high timber beams of the cabin, filling the empty room with a warm, haunting sound that seemed to chase away twelve years of silence.
“She kept it all those years?” Jax asked, his gaze fixed on the worn wood of the guitar body.
“She kept everything that mattered,” I said quietly. “Even when we didn't have food for supper, she wouldn't let me sell it. She said some things aren't currency. They’re proof you were here.”
Jax swallowed hard. He set the guitar gently against the stone hearth, then reached into his vest pocket and pulled out the old faded photograph from the diner—the one where a twenty-year-old biker with long dark hair and a fierce, reckless grin was holding an eight-pound baby wrapped in a faded blue blanket. He laid it flat on the wooden coffee table beside the stove, right next to my birth certificate.
“Vince and the club are going to come looking for us when the sun gets high,” Jax said, his voice hardening again, settling into the cold, practical tone of a man who knew how trouble worked in these hills. “They think I’m hiding something from them. And they’re right. I’m hiding my son.” He looked up from the photo, his pale eyes locking onto mine with a fierce, absolute certainty that left no room for argument. “We’re not running anymore, Leo. Tomorrow, we go down to the county records office in town. We get your name legally tied to mine, and let the club do whatever the hell they want about it.”
May you like
I looked from the faded photograph on the table to the man sitting across from me in the firelight. The fear that had kept my stomach in knots since I walked into the diner yesterday afternoon didn't disappear completely, but for the first time in my life, the weight of the road didn't feel so heavy anymore.
“Okay,” I said softly. “Let’s do it.”
