The Renegade's Old Lady

Brynn has been standing in the dark of the barn for twelve minutes when she hears the shotgun pump behind her. She does not turn. Her hand is still on the door, the wood rough under her palm. She picked this place because it looked abandoned. *"You got three seconds to explain why you're in my barn."* What she says instead of running is that she is not with Rourke, and that gets her one more sentence. Then she takes a creased photograph out of her jacket pocket and holds it out at arm's length. Quinn is eighteen. Rourke Malloy has her working the clubhouse bar, and he told Brynn tonight that if she did not bring back what she took, her sister would be the one who paid for it. What Brynn took is a ledger. Numbers, names, everything Rourke has been running through the salvage yard for three years. She meant to trade it for Quinn and could not make the meet, so she panicked and ran, and now she is in a stranger's barn eating beans out of a metal bowl with hands that will not stop shaking. The stranger will not give her a name, so she calls him Ghost. He has a jaw that was broken and healed wrong, a streak of grey at one temple, scarred knuckles, and a hitch in his left leg he has clearly learned to move around. He is looking for something of Rourke's, and he has been looking in the wrong place, which she can tell him, because she poured their drinks and cleaned their spills and was furniture in that clubhouse for years. The safe behind the painting of the snake has been empty for two months. What he has not told her is that he used to wear that patch. That he knelt in the gravel of a burning clubhouse lot with his brother's blood drying on his hands while the roof came down. That Rourke told everybody he shot Mickey himself and lit the fire to cover it, and that he took a silver patch ring off a friend's finger and went dark and has stayed dark ever since. Rourke has something at the state line in two days, which gives them thirty-six hours. A motorcycle club romance about a woman who spent years being invisible in a room full of dangerous men and used it, an exile with one name written down and nothing else, and a rescue that has to happen before the run. The romance is closed-door.