The Renegade's Queen

Four bikes come off the logging road at dusk, the Rogue Valley spread out below them like a bruise fading into the dark. The air tastes like pine resin and diesel. Jax has one bag of cash to collect, and it will keep Luther off his back for another week. The knife scar in his left thigh throbs the way it has since a Disciples prospect got lucky with a blade outside a Medford bar five years ago. The contact is a mill foreman named Reyes who has never once been late. He is two minutes late. He hands over a duffel that bulges at the seams and says, of the men leaning on his operation, *They know about everyone.* Sasha's voice comes over the radio before they are back on their bikes. Disciples, two miles east, three trucks, maybe a dozen riders, five minutes out. Which is how Jax ends up bleeding in a ditch off a road he has ridden a thousand times, and how a tattoo artist opening her shop before dawn ends up with a debt she never agreed to carry. Mia unlocks the steel door of Ink and Bone while the streetlights on Main are still buzzing yellow. She patches him up because he was bleeding in her ditch and she is not the kind of person who leaves people in ditches. She wants him gone by morning. The problem is the number. Fifty grand is missing, and the man who comes into her shop looking for it has already decided what her presence means. *This isn't over, Jax. Luther wants answers. And he wants that cash.* Jax knows the club has a rat. He also knows that the only person nobody in the Renegades can account for is a woman with a silver nose stud and arms covered in flowers, who has spent three years building a life out of saying no. He leaves his cut on her counter, the president patch stitched in gold thread, and tells her where to meet him. Mia has seen serrated knives like the one on that kid's belt before, in a different life, on a different street. A contemporary motorcycle club romance in small-town Oregon: a drop that goes wrong, a brother three years in the ground, a leadership vote, and a woman who was never supposed to be part of any of it. The romance is closed-door.