The Reaper's Claim

The wrench slips. Bodie catches it before it hits the concrete, wipes his palm on his jeans, and tosses it back into the open toolbox bolted to the clubhouse porch. Gunner leans against the railing with his arms crossed, watching the lot like he expects trouble to roll in any second. *You talk to Prez yet?* *About what?* *About the salvage. That '79 Shovelhead's been sitting in Stan's garage for three years. Stan's dead. His kid's been letting it rust.* The Reapers want it stripped for the fall run: three hundred miles through the Bitterroot Valley, a meet with the Montana chapters, a chance to show the club has not gone soft since Knox took the gavel. Stan's kid is asking five hundred for the bike. Stan's kid will not take five hundred for the bike. Sawyer Ashford runs the garage at the dead end of Mill Street now. She slides out from under a Ford on a creeper, grease across her cheekbone, and reads Bodie in about a second and a half. *You're blocking my light. And you're not a customer.* He gives her his name and his club. She tells him she already knows both, and why he is standing in her bay. He says the Reapers are not just a bunch of bikers. She agrees with him, smiling thin and cold. *You're right. You're worse.* He does not leave with the bike. He leaves with a wrench on the concrete six inches from his boot and glass all over his seat. What Bodie does not offer up is the thing everybody in the club already knows about him: his father informed on the Reapers, and Knox's father died because of it. *It's my name.* What Sawyer does not know yet is that Stan was not the whole story either. There is a letter waiting about a mother she never met, and a half-brother riding with the Devils' Hand, and that half-brother is the man who killed the father who raised her. And somebody inside the Reapers has been selling routes out for years, and the president has known for two months and has been trying to buy his way clear before the rest of the table finds out how bad he let it get. This is a dark motorcycle club romance set in Montana: a mechanic who will not sell her father's bike, a vice president carrying a sin he did not commit, and a club where the cheapest thing on the table turns out to be loyalty. The heat is closed door.