The Renegade's Claim

Ezra answers on the fifth ring. Ella says she needs him. He says he is mid-run, full club, and that he will be there at first light with cash and a plan. She says *I love you, big brother,* and hangs up. He rides at four in the morning anyway. The motel door is unlocked. The needle is on the floor and the television is playing an infomercial for a vegetable chopper, and the ambulance he calls does not need to hurry. *He buried her three days later in a cemetery outside Ironwood.* Then he went back to the garage, back to the club, and never spoke of her again. *Two years passed. The guilt stayed buried.* Morgan Tate arrives in Iron Knights territory with a camera and a question nobody wants asked. Her brother has been missing three weeks. She has already tried the official route. *Sheriff doesn't care about a missing man with a record.* She does not pretend to be anything other than what she is, which is a problem, because she is standing in a town where the wrong photograph gets people killed. Ezra is president now, and his club has bigger trouble than a stranger with a lens. A supply depot in Crescent City was hit two nights ago and somebody gave up the drop time. Across the county line, the Reapers and Royce Kessler are suddenly very well informed. The two threads are the same thread. Morgan's brother went missing because of what he was looking into. Ella's last months intersect with the same people. And the evidence, when it finally surfaces, is a signature dated six months back on a document dividing territory, supply routes and a percentage split, in the handwriting of the man who has been Ezra's vice president for three years. What the title calls a claim is really a decision: whether a man who once chose the club over his sister will do it a second time. A closed-door motorcycle club romance about betrayal inside a patch, a photographer who will not be handled, and a rescue that runs on a camera, a ridge, a telephoto lens and two minutes.