Page 49 of Steadfast

“Roll down the windows,” I ordered as I rolled mine down. “He’s going to fill up the spare tire.”

“I wanna go,” Ronan said, leaning forward.

“You’re staying here.”

“Why does Cian get to go?”

“Shut up, Ronan,” Saoirse snapped.

I clenched my jaw and willed myself not to cry as I watched my little brother carry the spare down the road. I lost sight of him as he grew too small to see, and my leg bounced with nerves as I waited for him to start back up the hill we were on.

The kids bickered in the back, but I tuned them out. Ten minutes later, Cian came back into view, slowly but steadily carrying the tire back up the hill.

I let out a breath of relief.

Then, the motorcycles showed up again, somehow louder this time. I looked behind us just as the first one pulled off the road and parked behind us.

“Oh, my god,” Saoirse said in horror. “Aoife?”

“I see them,” I replied.

For a terrified second, I wondered if it would be better to stay in the car, but Cian was still walking toward us, the windows were down, and it wasn’t as if the car could move anyway.

“Stay here,” I ordered as I climbed out of the car.

“Hey, nice to see you again,” the biker called out, smiling at me. “You need some help?”

He was huge. He was huge and wearing a leather vest with patches on it—and I wasn’t a moron, I knew what those meant—and he was off his bike and striding toward me. The other bikes were parked behind him, but the men stayed on them.

“We’re good,” I called back, walking to the back of the car so I could put myself between the men and my siblings. “Thanks, though.”

“You sure?” he asked, tilting his head to the side.

My heart was thudding in my chest so hard that I had to keep myself from pressing my hand to it.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “All good.”

The biker looked past me at Cian.

“Got a flat?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer.

I nodded. “We’ll change it. Thanks for stopping, though.”

“You know how to change a flat?” he asked dubiously.

In any other situation, I’d be offended that he thought I wasn’t capable of changing a flat tire. I mean, I didn’t have a clue how to do it, but he didn’t know that. For all he knew, I was a freaking mechanic, and I changed flat tires all day. But I wasn’t offended. I was trying too hard to act like I knew what I was doing and he and his friends could be on their way.

“Hey,” Cian called, out of breath as he hurried toward us. “Get going.”

I swallowed hard.

My little brother was trying to boss the biker, shooing him away like a thirteen-year-old boy was any kind of threat. Cian was just as afraid as I was, I could tell by the way his voice had thickened with the accent that each of us had lost in our first year of grade school.

“Go on,” he ordered as he reached me. He dropped the tire and took one step in front of me, his shoulder pushing me back.

The biker in front of us lifted his hands in surrender, taking a single step back. Meanwhile an old man in the back climbed off the motorcycle that Ronan had been so fascinated with and started toward us. One of the other men said something I couldn’t hear, but the old man just shook his head and kept coming.

“Thought you might need some help with that tire.”

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