The Renegade's Vow

*Church is called to order.* Twelve men ring a scarred oak table in a hall that smells of stale beer, wood polish and decades of brotherhood baked into the walls. Cade Marlow takes the head of it as vice president. Deke Malone takes the chair on his left, the one Deke still believes should have been his. Serpents pushed into the east timber line yesterday. Three of them, on bikes, marking trees with a snake. *They think we're weak because we got a new VP who's never spilled blood for this club.* The president shuts that down. He is Cade's father, sixty-three years old, two fingers gone from his left hand, and he has never had to raise his voice. Cade rides out afterwards to Torres Auto to ask whether any unfamiliar bikes have come down that road. Maya Torres has never once smiled at him in three years of oil changes and tire swaps. She has also never charged him full price and never asked a question about his club. *You don't come here to check on me, Cade. So either your club's got trouble, or you've got trouble, and either way, I'd like to know if it's about to land in my shop.* Two bikes, she tells him. Black and green, loud pipes. They circled the lot once and headed back toward the county line. Then the light drops, and he sees the front window of her shop shattered in a starburst across the concrete, and a serpent sprayed on the cinderblock below the frame, fresh and still wet. Maya's father built that shop. He taught her to rebuild a carburetor before she knew how to ride a bike, and he died on its floor behind the workbench with a bullet in his head. She will not pay anybody, and she will not leave. *I know you're lying. I want the truth.* What Cade will not say is that her father knew something, that a dead man left a record, and that somebody would burn this whole town down to find it first. After that come a folded map with three red crosses on it, a small spiral register sewn into a jacket lining with one name checked off seven times, a diner receipt, a safe-deposit key a man handed his daughter a month before he was killed, a shop burned to ash, and a little girl with a crescent-moon birthmark who has finally stopped dreaming about men with guns in her grandmother's kitchen. *Not the VP of the Iron Wolves. Not the man who fights wars in the street. Just her father.* This is a motorcycle club romance about a patch somebody else wanted: a vice president who happens to be the president's son, a mechanic with an unsolved murder in her own building, a traitor at the table, and a choice between a club and a child. The romance is closed-door.