Kieran (Saltwater Kings MC #14)

Prologue

Kieran

The needle hums like a wasp trapped in glass, and I cannot stop watching her hands.

I'm sitting on an overturned crate in the back corner of the Saltwater Kings compound, half in shadow, pretending I'm here to clean the tools Rourke left soaking in the steel sink.

The rag in my fist has gone dry. The water's gone cold.

I haven't moved in twenty minutes, and the reason is bent over Briggs's forearm with a tattoo machine in her grip and a strand of dark hair slipping loose from the knot at the back of her head.

Freya Katsaros doesn't look up. She doesn't have to.

She knows exactly where every set of eyes in this room is pointed, and most of them are pointed at her, and she carries that knowledge the way she carries everything else — like it's hers, like it was always hers, like the world arranged itself around her a long time ago and simply forgot to tell the rest of us.

She wipes a thin line of excess ink from Briggs's skin and the design beneath comes clear. A ship. A three-master, sails full, riding the curl of a wave that breaks into a flock of gulls at the top of his shoulder. The water turns to birds. The birds turn to sky. It shouldn't work. It works.

"Hold still," she says to Briggs, who is six-three and built like a loading dock and goes absolutely rigid the second she speaks. "You flinch on the rigging, I'll make the gulls cross-eyed, and you'll have to explain that to your grandkids."

"Yes, ma'am," Briggs says.

Ma'am. The man has killed things. He says ma'am to her like he's eight years old.

I get it. God help me, I get it completely.

I've been a prospect with the Saltwater Kings for four months and eleven days.

I know the count the way you know the number of stairs in a house you grew up afraid of.

Four months and eleven days of running errands, scrubbing floors, fetching parts, standing watch in the rain while patched members sleep, taking the jobs no one else wants and saying thank you for the privilege.

It's the closest I've ever come to belonging to anything that didn't eventually get me arrested, and I want it so badly it scares me.

I want the patch. I want the road. I want a place where the door doesn't lock behind me the way every other door in my life has.

And then she walked into the clubhouse three weeks ago to ink a memorial piece on Hollis's chest, and I forgot the count for the first time since I started keeping it.

It was a Saturday. Hollis had lost his brother that spring — not a club brother, a blood one, a kid who'd gone off to the war and come back in a box — and he wanted the dates and a pair of dog tags inked over his heart, and Freya came to the compound to do it because Hollis couldn't make himself sit in a shop where strangers could watch him cry.

I was running a fuel can across the yard when her truck pulled in, and I stopped, the way the whole yard stopped, because that's what happens when she arrives — the noise drops a notch, the men straighten up, somebody kills the music.

She got out with her case over her shoulder and she didn't look at any of us.

She walked straight to Hollis, who's six-four and has put men in the hospital, and she put one hand flat on his chest, right over the place she was about to mark, and she said something too quiet to hear, and the big man's shoulders came down like she'd let the air out of him.

I watched her work on him for two hours.

I was supposed to be reorganizing the parts shelf.

I reorganized the same three shelves four times.

She talked to Hollis the whole way through it, low and steady, and somewhere in the second hour he started talking back — about the brother, the kid, the box — and I understood that the tattoo wasn't really the point.

The tattoo was the excuse. What she was actually doing was sitting with a grieving man for two hours and giving him somewhere to put it, and she'd disguised it as ink so his pride could survive it.

When she finished, Hollis looked at the dog tags over his heart in the mirror for a long time, and then he hugged her, and Freya — who I'd already filed as ice all the way through — hugged him back like she meant it, and over his shoulder her eyes were wet, and she blinked it away before anyone but me could see, and I think that's the actual moment.

Not the eyebrow. That's the moment I was done for.

The wet eyes she blinked away. The mercy she hid inside her work.

I've been keeping the wrong count ever since.

"You're staring, prospect."

The voice comes from behind me, low and amused, and I don't have to turn around to know it's Griffin.

He drops onto the crate beside mine, a beer sweating in his hand, his marine-biology eyes — the club calls him Professor when they want to rile him — fixed on the same scene I can't stop drinking in.

"I'm cleaning the tools," I say.

"You're holding a dry rag over an empty hand and you haven't blinked in a year." He takes a pull off the bottle. "That's not cleaning. That's praying."

I make myself look back at the sink. Pick up a wrench. Set it down. "She does good work."

"She does good work," Griffin repeats, flat, like I've said something so stupid he has to hear it again to believe it.

"Kid. I've watched you not-look at her for three weeks.

You don't not-look at someone that hard over good work.

" He takes another pull. "I'm not busting you.

I'm the last guy who'd bust you. I just want you to hear yourself, because right now you sound like a man talking himself into a cliff.

" He pauses, watching her snap the tubes into the machine.

"I did the talking-myself-into-a-cliff thing once.

It worked out, eventually, but the eventually cost me more than I want to tell you about on a crate with a warm beer.

So consider yourself busted by a friend instead of caught by an enemy. That's the better version. Trust me."

"She does the best work on this coast. People drive up from three states to sit in her chair." Griffin lets that hang a second. "You know whose sister she is."

I know whose sister she is. Everyone knows whose sister she is.

She's Theo Katsaros's blood — Theo, the sergeant-at-arms, the man whose name gets said quietly even by people who aren't afraid of much.

Theo, who walked into the holding tank where they were keeping me four months ago, looked at the seventeen kinds of stupid mistakes written all over my record, and said one sentence that rerouted my entire life.

Get up. You're done wasting yourself. He sponsored my prospect period.

He vouched for me to Dominic. He is the only reason I'm sitting on this crate instead of a bunk in a state facility, and on my first day, with his hand on my shoulder and his eyes flat as river stones, he told me the one thing I was never allowed to forget.

My sister is not part of the package.

"I know whose sister she is," I tell Griffin.

"Good." He stands, claps me once on the back, hard enough to rattle my teeth. "Then you know to keep cleaning."

He walks off toward the bar. I keep cleaning. I pick the wrench back up, and I work the rag along the jaw of it, slow, methodical, the way I learned to do anything that kept my hands busy and my head down. I'm good at keeping my head down. I had a whole childhood of practice.

I grew up in Port Calloway, the part of it the postcards leave out — the streets where the marina money never reached, where the boats were always somebody else's and the work was always the kind that left you smelling like fish and engine grease and other people's money.

My mother left when I was nine. I'm told there was a note.

I never saw it. My father was a presence the way weather is a presence: sometimes warm, mostly not, occasionally violent, eventually just gone, in the indirect way that men like him go — a bar, a fight, a hospital, a folded flag of a phone call years later.

By twelve I was running with the Vane Street crew.

By fourteen I was good at it. By seventeen I was in a holding cell with a felony hanging over my head and a public defender who couldn't remember my name.

I drew on the cell wall. That's the part nobody knows.

I had a stub of pencil somebody smuggled in, and I drew the harbor from memory on the cinderblock by my bunk — the breakwater, the gulls, the light on the church on the hill — and a guard saw it and didn't make me scrub it off, and that was the kindest thing anyone did for me that whole year.

I told myself it was nothing. A way to pass time.

I told myself that until I stopped telling myself anything at all and just learned to survive.

The day Theo came for me, I'd been in the tank eleven days.

I remember it being eleven because I'd scratched the count into the paint under my bunk, the way I count everything, and I remember thinking that whatever happened next, I'd already lost — the crew had cut me loose the second the cuffs went on, because that's what crews do, that's the whole con of them, they're a family right up until the moment family costs them something.

I had nobody. I had a public defender named Marsh who called me by three different names in one meeting and a charge that was going to follow me the rest of my life, and I'd made my peace with the rest of my life being small and locked and over before it started.