Irish’s Clover (Steel Phoenixes MC #3)

Chapter 1

RUNNING ON EMPTY

NOLAN

Three weeks on the run, and I'd learned that the human body could survive on gas station coffee, protein bars, and approximately ninety minutes of sleep per night.

What it couldn't survive was stopping.

The desert outside my windshield stretched flat and white in every direction, heat shimmer warping the horizon into something liquid.

Open ground. No cover. No buildings. No trees.

Just the two-lane highway cutting a surgical line through Nevada dust and the rearview mirror I checked every eleven seconds.

I knew it was every eleven seconds because I'd counted.

Three weeks of counting: miles between rest stops, minutes between highway cameras, seconds between heartbeats when the panic hit hard enough to white-knuckle the steering wheel.

Numbers were the only thing keeping me sane.

Numbers were the reason I was running in the first place.

Two hundred and seventeen million dollars.

That was the figure that had ended my career, my apartment lease, and very nearly my life.

Two hundred and seventeen million routed through fourteen shell companies across six states, all of it traced back to federal contracts that existed only on paper, and all of it flowing into three tributaries I'd mapped on a spreadsheet that now lived on an encrypted drive in my jacket pocket, pressed against my chest like a heart that wasn't my own.

Three tributaries. Three criminal enterprises.

A human trafficking ring operated by a woman named Michelle Chen.

A pharmaceutical recycling operation run by a former FBI agent named Marcus Cross.

And a weapons diversion pipeline that funneled military surplus through Montana into the kind of hands that made the evening news.

Chen was in prison. Cross was dead. The weapons pipeline was still running.

And the people who ran it wanted me in the ground before I could prove the connection.

I checked the mirror. Eleven seconds. Empty highway, baked asphalt, the tremor of my own exhaust against the road.

The pickup truck I'd bought with cash outside of Boise was holding together through stubbornness and prayer, its air conditioning a memory and its engine making a sound that suggested metal fatigue in ways my forensic training could identify but not fix.

Twenty-three miles to the meeting point.

Tyler Kim. Former FBI. The agent who'd helped dismantle Chen's trafficking ring and survived Cross's vendetta.

He'd left the bureau and embedded himself with a motorcycle club called the Steel Phoenixes.

I'd found him through three layers of encrypted back channels, each one a risk that tightened the noose around my neck by another inch.

His response had been brief. Come to the Silver Coyote truck stop off Route 93. Thursday. 2pm. Don't be late. Don't be followed.

The first instruction I could manage.

The second, I wasn't sure about.

The Silver Coyote sat like a mirage at the junction of Route 93 and a county road that led nowhere anyone wanted to go.

A gas station, a diner with sun-bleached curtains, a gravel lot big enough for eighteen-wheelers, and a hand-painted sign of a coyote wearing sunglasses that had been fading since approximately 1987.

I pulled in at 1:47 p.m. Thirteen minutes early.

The lot held two semis, a dusty minivan, and a black motorcycle parked at the far end, away from everything else, its chrome catching the sun like a blade.

One motorcycle. I'd expected Tyler to come alone, but the single bike still made my pulse jump.

I parked between the semis, killed the engine, and sat.

Counted.

Four people visible through the diner windows.

Two truckers at the counter, a waitress with silver hair, and a man in a booth near the back who sat facing the door.

Dark hair cropped to a military buzz cut, muscular build, so still my hindbrain flagged him as a threat before I'd finished processing the visual.

He wore a plain black T-shirt and no visible patches or insignia, but the motorcycle outside matched his energy—controlled, deliberate, built for speed and violence in equal measure.

Not Tyler. Tyler was lean, sharp-featured, Korean-American. This man was something else entirely.

I reached for the door handle and stopped.

Second motorcycle. Coming from the east, the sound reaching me before the visual.

A deep, throaty rumble that didn't match the semi-truck engines idling beside me.

I tracked it through the passenger mirror.

A Harley, matte black with no chrome accents, ridden by a figure in a leather cut.

Short red hair, cropped close at the sides but wild on top, deliberately messy, matching the energy of the man wearing it.

He parked beside the first bike with the casual precision of someone who'd done it ten thousand times and swung off the seat with a looseness that seemed wrong for a biker. Too fluid. Too relaxed.

He stretched, arms overhead, rolling his shoulders loose, and said something to the diner window that made the dark-haired man inside shake his head. Even through the glass, even from forty feet away, I caught the grin. Wide, sharp. A smile that dared the world to take a swing.

Two men. One motorcycle each. One in the diner, one just arrived.

And neither of them was Tyler Kim.

I reached into my jacket, felt the hard edge of the drive against my fingertips, and made myself breathe. In for four, hold for four, out for four. A technique I'd learned from a therapist I could no longer contact about anxiety I could no longer afford to treat.

Then I got out of the truck.

The heat hit like a wall—dry, vicious, pulling moisture out of my skin before I'd taken three steps.

I crossed the gravel toward the diner entrance, keeping my stride even, my shoulders level, my hands visible.

The dark-haired man inside tracked me through the glass.

I could feel it the way you feel a scope, that specific, focused pressure of being watched by someone who was deciding whether you were prey.

The bell above the door chimed when I pushed through. Cold air, the smell of burnt coffee, the crackle of a radio tuned to a country station that was more static than music.

I went to the counter. Ordered coffee I wouldn't drink. Sat three stools down from the nearest trucker and waited.

1:52 p.m.

The redhead came through the door behind me, bringing the heat with him, and dropped onto the stool directly to my left.

Not one stool away. Not two. Directly beside me, close enough that I could smell engine oil and something warmer underneath, leather and sun-heated skin I could feel from six inches away, radiating warmth like a dare.

"Beautiful day for a drive." The words came out bright, almost musical, a voice that filled the room without trying.

He flagged the waitress with two fingers and a grin that could have charmed a traffic citation into a warning.

"Coffee, darlin'. Black. And whatever pie you've got that didn't come out of a freezer. "

The waitress softened visibly. "Cherry. Baked it myself this morning."

"Then I'm a lucky man."

He turned to me, and those green eyes—quick, sharp, missing absolutely nothing—swept from my face to my hands to the bulge in my jacket where the drive sat. The assessment lasted less than two seconds. It was the most thorough two seconds of my life.

"You look like you haven't slept since the Clinton administration." That bright voice, that sharp grin, utterly at odds with the precision of his gaze. "Rough week?"

Before I could answer, the dark-haired man from the booth appeared at the redhead's shoulder.

He moved without sound, one moment across the room, the next right here, close enough to touch.

My pulse hit a hundred and twenty. I felt it in my throat, in my wrists, in the backs of my knees.

He radiated controlled violence the way a transformer radiates heat—not a choice, just a physical fact.

His eyes—dark, assessing, utterly calm—flicked to mine and held.

"We should go." Low. Quiet. The words barely carried past the three of us.

"Dec, the man just sat down. Let him breathe." The redhead's hand found my forearm, light, warm, grounding. "You're Nolan, right? Tyler sent us. I'm Irish. The charming silent type is Declan."

I opened my mouth to respond. Got as far as the first syllable.

That was when the black SUV pulled into the lot.

I knew the vehicle. Not this specific one, but the type—government-adjacent, tinted windows, the aggressive posture of something that had been modified beyond factory specs.

I'd seen its twin outside my apartment building in D.C.

the morning I'd run, parked across the street with its engine idling and two men inside who were not making any effort to hide.

My body went cold. Not the slow chill of dread—the instant, full-body freeze of a prey animal hearing a branch crack.

"That's them." My voice came out flat. Dead. All the fear compressed into something too dense for sound. "They found me."

Irish's grin vanished. The transformation was instantaneous—bright to sharp, warmth to wire, the man who'd been flirting with a waitress ten seconds ago replaced by someone whose eyes went hard and whose hand dropped from my arm to his waistband.

"How many?" Declan. Already moving, his body angling between me and the door with the fluid inevitability of water finding its level.

"At least two in the vehicle. Could be more." I was counting again, couldn't help it. The SUV's dimensions, the probable seating capacity, the angle of approach. "They work in pairs but travel in fours."

"You get all that from a black truck pulling into a parking lot?" Irish's voice carried a note of something that might have been impressed.

"I get that from three weeks of watching them circle every place I've slept."