Wraith’s Promise (Iron Phoenix MC #5)

Chapter 1 - Quinn

I'm already awake. I'm always already awake. Four years out of the service and my body still hasn't gotten the memo that it's allowed to sleep past sunrise, that there's no formation to make, no watch to stand.

I'm sitting at my kitchen table with black coffee and a protein bar I don't want, staring at my phone before it even finishes its first buzz, because I know that ringtone. I picked it specifically so I'd know.

"Ranger," I say, and my chest does the thing it always does when I hear his name on the screen: half relief, half dread, because good news from my brother is rare enough that I brace for the other kind.

"Hey, Quinnie." His voice is rough, like he hasn't slept well in a long time.

"You sound like hell."

"Long week." A pause. "You busy?"

I look around my studio apartment: one room, a mattress on a frame I built myself, a rack of free weights in the corner because gym memberships cost money I don't have, and dishes in the sink I should've done yesterday. Busy isn't the word for what my life is. Empty is closer.

"Depends what you're offering," I say.

He laughs, short and surprised, like he wasn't expecting me to make it easy. "There's a job. Guy in the club needs a babysitter. Long-term, live-in probably, good pay. His daughter's five."

I sit up straighter. "What club?"

"Mine."

That's all he says, but it's enough to reorganize every cell in my body.

Ranger left three years ago. Not left me, left the life we grew up in, the military, the life our father tried to beat into both of us like discipline was a nail and we were boards that needed straightening.

Ranger went in one direction. He found some brotherhood out in a town called Millhaven, some motorcycle club that, from everything he's told me over the phone, sounds less like the outlaw stereotype and more like the family neither of us ever had.

I went another direction. I stayed in the military like Dad wanted, because even after everything, some part of me still wanted to make him proud, which is its own kind of stupid I've spent years trying to unlearn.

We don't talk enough. That's my fault as much as his. Some wounds you don't call your brother about because saying them out loud makes them real, and some nights it's easier to let the silence sit between two people than to admit how much you need them.

"It’s the war, isn’t ?" I ask him.

He's mentioned it before, vaguely, the way you mention weather you're trying not to worry someone about. Some rival club.

"Yeah." No point lying to me; he never has been able to. "It's bad right now. Real bad. We just pulled six women out of a trafficking operation two days ago. Things are escalating, not calming down."

"And you want me to bring a five-year-old into that."

"I want you to protect a five-year-old in that," he says, and there's an edge to his voice now, something urgent.

"Her dad's one of us. Good man. Single father, ex-wife walked out on both of them years back.

He's trying to keep her safe but he's also trying to fight a war, and he can't be in two places at once.

I told him about you. Told him you're the only person I trust with this. "

"You told him what I can do?"

"I told him you'd bury anyone who got near her before they hit the ground."

I laugh, but it isn't really funny, because it's true, and because four years ago I would've been proud of that sentence and now I mostly just feel tired carrying it. "You know I don't love this. Another war. Another gun. I did enough of that overseas, Ranger."

"I know." His voice softens. "I wouldn't ask if I didn't trust you'd say no if you needed to."

I look at my ceiling, at the water stain shaped like Florida that's been there since I moved in, and I think about my bank account, which currently has enough to make it two more weeks before I have to make some very unpleasant decisions about which bills matter more than others.

I think about my apartment, silent except for the hum of a refrigerator that's older than some of my exes. I think about how long it's been since I felt like I mattered to anyone, and how long it's been since I've seen my brother's face instead of just heard his voice through a phone speaker.

And I think about a five-year-old girl I've never met.

"What's her name?" I ask.

"Mariah."

"Tell me about her."

He does. He tells me she's got dark curls that never behave, that she's fearless in a way that terrifies her father, that she's never once been quiet a day in her life and that's exactly what makes her perfect.

Tells me her dad's name is Dean, goes by Wraith in the club, that he's the planner, the strategist, the one who got every rescued woman home safe two days ago without a single hitch.

Tells me Dean's ex-wife said Mariah was too much, too loud, too demanding, and left when she was barely two.

Something ugly moves through me when he says that.

I know what it's like to be told you're too much by someone who was supposed to love you unconditionally.

I know what it's like to spend years trying to become smaller, quieter, easier, just to be worth staying for.

I don't need to meet this woman to hate her a little.

"When do you need me there?" I ask.

"You haven't asked about pay."

"I don't care about pay, Ranger."

There's a pause, and when he speaks again his voice has thickened. "I miss you, Quinnie."

"I miss you too," I say, and it comes out rougher than I mean it to.

"You'll be close. Not in the same house, but close enough I can actually see you. That mean anything to you?"

"It means everything," I admit, because there's no point pretending otherwise, not to him.

Not to the person who stood between me and our father's belt more times than either of us have ever been able to count, who took hits meant for me until I was old enough to understand what he was doing and old enough to hate that he had to.

I owe him everything. I've never told him that in so many words, but I think he knows.

"Okay," I say. "I'll pack today. Tell me where."

He gives me a Millhaven address, four hours from where I'm sitting, and a time, and tells me Dean will be expecting me by early afternoon tomorrow. Tells me the club is on high alert, that I should expect security, cameras, maybe a pat-down if I'm not recognized on sight.

"Wear something normal," he adds, like an afterthought. "Nothing tactical. Dean's already nervous about bringing a stranger in close to Mariah. If you show up looking like you're about to breach a compound, it won't help."

I glance down at myself—sweatpants, an old Army tank top, hair scraped back in the bun I default to when I haven't decided what kind of day I'm having.

"I can do normal," I say, though normal has always been a costume I put on rather than something I actually am.

After we hang up, I sit at my table for a long time with my coffee going cold, staring at nothing, feeling something move through my chest that I haven't felt in longer than I want to admit.

It isn't quite hope. Hope has burned me too many times to trust easily.

But it's adjacent to hope. A cousin of it, maybe.

I think about the two things in my life that are permanently, quietly broken: the years of nightmares that still drag me out of sleep some nights, convinced I'm back in a truck that's about to hit an IED, convinced I can still hear my father's belt hit the closet door before it hits skin.

And the thing the doctor told me four years ago in a sterile office with bad lighting, the thing that broke something in me so specifically and so privately that I never told anyone the whole truth of it—not Ranger, not the two friends I still talk to from my unit, not the therapist I saw twice before deciding I wasn't ready.

I can't have children. Not won't. Can't. Some scarring, some damage, nothing to be done about it, the doctor said, like she was reading off a grocery list instead of ending a future I hadn't even fully let myself want yet.

I've made a strange kind of peace with it in the years since.

Not full peace. Fragile peace, the kind that holds most days and collapses on others, usually around baby showers I don't attend or the family gatherings where my cousins' kids run past me shrieking with a kind of joy that I'll never get to give anyone myself.

But if I can't be a mother, I can at least be something. I can protect the children other people were lucky enough to have. It's not the same. It will never be the same. But it's something, and something has to be enough, because it's what I've got.

I get up from the table, dump the cold coffee down the sink, and go to pull my duffel bag out from under my bed.

The following afternoon…

I'm standing on a porch in Millhaven with a floral bag over one shoulder, my hair in two braids because it makes me look softer, more harmless, less like the woman who once disarmed a man twice her size in under ten seconds without breaking a sweat.

I've learned that people see what they expect to see, and what they expect from pigtails and a warm smile is never the truth of what I am underneath.

I raise my hand and knock.

Somewhere inside, I hear the thunder of small feet, followed by a voice: low, steady, the kind of voice that sounds like it's spent years talking people down from ledges they didn't know they were standing on.

"Mariah, let me get the door, baby—"

The door opens.