The Innocent and the Iron Saint

Josie Pell answered an ad for a live-in housekeeper and got a nineteen-room motel with a key hook behind the desk and a road captain named Saint who never once came up the stairs. That was the arrangement. He is twice her age, quiet, and dangerous in a way she only understands in pieces. She was twenty-one and untouched when she took the job, and by the end of summer she was neither of those things anymore. Then the feds moved in, the club went to trial, and Josie did what she thought a smart woman does — she left a voicemail, took the Greyhound to Cleveland, and raised their son alone in a studio above a bar. Two years later the case is dismissed, the motel is hers in all but paperwork, and Saint Deveraux is standing in her parking lot with a helmet, a key and no plan at all except the one that starts with her.