Devoted Keeper (Echo Valley #5)

Prologue

Thirteen Years Ago

Everyone is a sinner.

Every person you’ll ever meet. Every person you’ll ever love. The difference in people isn’t if they sin, it’s what they do with it. Whether they try. Whether the person they’re becoming is worth more than the one they’ve been.

My mom used to say every saint has a past, but every sinner has a future. It was her way of saying everyone makes mistakes, but get out there and do better.

There’s a whole lot of future ahead of me.

So yesterday, I asked Ray to grant me one without Black Ridge in it.

He said yes.

And I’m about to find out what that costs me.

Black Ridge HQ is quiet at this hour — morning, most of the club is still sleeping off whatever last night was. I walk through the garage, past the bikes lined up in their particular order, past the smell of oil, cigarette smoke, gas and heavy men’s cologne.

Being a rancher’s son, coming from the mountains and wide open spaces, it took getting used to the claustrophobic shadows, the scents in the air so tangible they’re more like storm clouds hanging low. Three years of this smell and it doesn’t bother me anymore.

Shows how much a person can change.

I head to Ray’s office in at the back of the Club and knock once.

“Come in.”

He’s behind his desk when I enter — paperwork in front of him, reading glasses pushed up his nose, looking for all the world like someone’s accountant rather than the president of one of Northern California’s most powerful motorcycle clubs.

Ray is clean-cut by comparison to many of his riders.

He’s not that old either despite the glasses.

I hear the Vaughn men are plagued by early death and his father before him left him the keys.

He’s maybe mid-forties with sandy blond hair and an immaculate goatee a shade slightly darker than his hair. Everything about him shows his high standards. Ray never wears t-shirts with logos and designs, he prefers a polished look of plain pressed t-shirts or even button downs.

It makes me think of my own tattoos and how my mom said some people would choose not to respect me.

This is the first day of many where I hope she’s wrong.

“Jackal.” He gestures at the chair across from him. “Sit.”

I take the chair in front of him.

I’ve been in this office a hundred times. I know the creak of this chair, the way the light comes through the single window in the morning, the smell of the bourbon that sweetens the stale air.

“Don’t look so worried,” his gravelly voice reaches me through a smile.

“I look worried?” I force my features to relax.

It’s not Ray that makes me nervous. It’s the specific anxiety of needing something badly, and the when and how it goes depends entirely on someone else.

“You asked to leave. People leave–” He leans forward on his elbow and steeples his fingers. “It’s just that they usually do it when they’ve been here a bit longer. When the blood is a bit thicker.”

He makes it sound as though I haven’t been patched at Black Ridge long, but it feels like a lifetime ago that I first entered his lair.

Eons since I dated Mariana, a woman who introduced me to this world but also warned me to get out.

I didn’t listen. She paid for that. And now I carry the weight of it.

I glance around the room again briefly.

Has it really been three years since I looked Ray Vaughn in the eyes and told him I could cook his books?

He had a guy, of course, but a twenty-two-year-old with a forensic accounting degree walking into Ray’s garage was like a locksmith showing up at a burglary. He gave me a shot and I made this man and this club a lot of money.

That gold pinky signet ring he turns as he considers me right now? I probably bought that.

I came for money. My father was still carrying everything alone after my mom died and I couldn’t watch it anymore. My sister moved back home to help him, and that’s wasn’t fair on either of them.

Clean money is patient. I wasn’t.

I understood how to get in to a place like this but never thought about getting out. Men like Ray don’t let useful things go easily.

But Enzo found the break our family needs.

All I have to do is get free enough to take it.

Ray lifts his coffee mug and sips. “Family is a reason to leave.” His comment is a callback to our conversation yesterday when he gave me five minutes to make my case but I feel like he’s reading my mind. “It’s just important to remember we’re your family, too.”

I nod but say nothing. I don’t want to come across too eager, and I need to hear his pitch first. He’ll want something in exchange for letting me fade into anonymity. Most patched men who leave don’t truly leave at all. They stay in spirit at least, and that’s not what I asked.

I want to disappear.

I need to.

Enzo wants me to be CEO of GhostEye, the fledgling company he’s been nurturing on the side of his day job and finally has a product the world needs. He seems to have found the ability to crack into the dark web and I don’t know how he does it but I know this means the beginning of something huge.

Enzo has always been hellbent on bringing down the bad guys. The irony of his CEO being one isn’t lost on me.

Jackal needs to become a ghost.

Ray picks up his coffee mug and cups one hand around it. “Tell me about Enzo’s business.”

I hate hearing my twin’s name in his mouth. Ray has never gone against his word or treated me wrong but somehow him knowing who my brother is gets too close to what I really love in this world.

I’m not like the other members. I didn’t come here for brotherhood. I already have that.

“It’s software,” I answer, hoping that will placate him, knowing damn well it won’t.

He leans back in his leather chair. “My understanding is it’s tech that would work in tandem with the cops?”

“Not exactly.” I keep my voice even. “It’s more of a security company. But it isn’t anything yet apart from an idea.”

“But security for who?” He leans back in his chair. “We’re not exactly clean here, Rio. It’s hard to think of you on the other side.”

Black Ridge isn’t the darkest operation I could have fallen into. Pot. Gambling. Loans. Nothing I’m proud of but nothing that kept me up at night either.

I reassure him the way I always have — with just enough truth to sound credible. “I’m sure you’ll stay off the radar like you have been. You’ve been doing this a long time.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

And the negotiation begins.

“Are you asking me to promise to keep you out of trouble, Ray? I don’t have the power to promise something like that.

” I remind him that Enzo’s company isn’t something worth coming after.

At least not yet. “There’s some software in development.

My brother needs help raising capital and running the day-to-day. ”

“But this tech company you’re forming — you can promise it won’t make things any harder for us.”

My lips form a thin line. If he needs me to make sure GhostEye, or whatever this company becomes, doesn’t come anywhere near club business, I can agree to that. Enzo and I have way bigger fish to fry than petty criminal riders. And that’s all there is here at Black Ridge.

I nod once.

“Good.” He pauses, letting the room get thick with tension. “And I might need a favor or two over the years.”

And there it is. The price for my freedom. The price is a golden leash, a fucking favor. Or two. Which means as many as he goddamn likes because he knows he can ask and I have no choice but to say yes.

“Like what?” I ask, suspicion leaching into my voice.

“I don’t know.” He spreads his hands. “I’m just saying if I need help, I’d like to think I can call on you the way you’ve been able to call on Black Ridge. After all, seems to me we’re an investor in this security company.”

There is the first and only reminder necessary that dirty money has made its way to my brother’s dream. I’ve never been proud of being a patched man. But this is the first time I’ve felt ashamed of it.

But if I play my cards right, Enzo will never know.

Nobody will.

Ray opens his desk drawer and places a manila folder on the desk between us.

“My insurance,” he says. “Same arrangement I have with every man who knows what you know and wants to walk out of here. In here will be the only evidence Jackal ever existed. My word this stays between us.”

He doesn’t have to open it and show me for me to know there are photos in there, some sort of paper trail of my time here at Black Ridge.

A solemn look settles in his eyes. “You keep quiet, I keep quiet. A favor from time to time… and nobody will know you were ever here.”

“And the other men?”

What will the club announcement look like?

“I’ll tell them you met a woman and moved to Mexico.” He drums his fingers on the manila folder. “They won’t come looking if I don’t.”

Considering him across the desk, it’s plain to see there’s no room for negotiation. And this? It sounds like the best I’ll do. One folder of evidence on me. Not digital. Only Ray knows. I take him in one last time and see truth in his eyes.

“Sounds like a deal,” I say.

We shake hands across the desk — firm, brief.

And then I walk out through the garage one last time. Past the bikes. Past the smell.

I get into my car, hands settling on the wheel, air filling my chest for the first time since walking into that office.

Every sinner has a future.

That’s what my mom believed. She believed your mistakes don’t have to be the last word. You get another chance if you want it.

This is another chance.

I just hope Black Ridge turns out to be the means to an end, I told myself it was.

And not the end itself.