Angel’s Promise (Forsaken Angels MC #1)

Chapter 1

ONE

CALLIE

I’ve lost count of the number of times I checked the rearview mirror.

Thankfully I saw nothing but empty highway behind me.

I tried not to think about the way my apartment door had looked when I came home.

Hanging open, the lock shattered, everything I owned tossed across the floor like it didn't matter. To them, none of it did.

They'd left a knife in my pillow. Blade down, buried to the hilt. The message wasn't subtle.

That was three days ago. I'd slept in my car since then, parked in different lots each night, jacket balled up against the window.

I'd gone to the police, sat in a plastic chair and told a detective everything I'd seen.

The cop in the alley behind my restaurant.

The man on his knees, the gunshot. The way the cop had looked up and seen me standing there with a trash bag in my hands, twenty feet away, and hadn't even flinched.

The detective had nodded, written things down, told me someone would be in touch.

But no one did. Two days later, two men on Harleys showed up outside my work.

Iron Jackals patches on their cuts. They didn't say anything.

They didn't have to. They just sat there, engines idling, watching me walk to my car.

That's when I ran.

My brother's voice had been in my head the whole drive.

If anything ever goes wrong, Cal. If you ever need help and I'm not there. Go to Forsaken, Montana. Find a man called Angel. Tell him you're my sister. He'll take care of you.

Ryan had said it the night before his last deployment.

We'd been sitting on the tailgate of his truck, drinking cheap beer, watching the sun bleed out over the Bitterroots.

He'd been different that night. Quieter.

Like he was filing things away in case he didn't get another chance.

I'd laughed it off because that was easier than hearing what he was really saying.

He'd been dead for six years. IED in a country I couldn't find on a map. They sent his medals in a box. I put them in a drawer and didn't open it again.

I'd never thought I'd need his advice. I'd been fine. Holding down a job, paying rent, keeping my head above water. Surviving, if nothing else. That had always been enough.

It wasn't enough anymore.

Forsaken, Montana, turned out to be less of a town and more of a suggestion.

I almost drove through it before I realized I was in it.

One main street, dusty and sun-bleached.

A feed store. A diner called Rosie's with a neon sign that buzzed like a dying bee.

A small sheriff's office with a patrol car out front that looked like it hadn't moved in a week.

Mountains ringed everything and made you feel like the sky was closer here. Snow still capped the highest ridges even though the valley was warm. The air smelled like pine, dust, something cleaner than anything I'd breathed in weeks.

I found the gas station at the far end of Main Street. The old kind. Two pumps, a hand-painted sign, a building that might have been white once. A bell jangled when I pushed open the door.

The man behind the counter looked like he'd been there since the place was built. Seventies, maybe. Leathered skin, faded flannel, a hunting cap pushed back on his head. He was reading a newspaper, and he looked up at me over the top of it with eyes that missed nothing.

"Help you?"

I stood there for a second, aware of how I must look. Three days without a proper shower. Yesterday's clothes. Eyes that felt swollen from exhaustion. My hair was pulled back in a knot that was more surrender than style, the grime of the road on my skin like a second layer.

"I know this is going to sound weird," I said. "But do you know where I can find a man called Angel? In this town?"

The newspaper came down. Slowly. He looked at me, really looked, the way people do when they're deciding something. His eyes moved over my face, my clothes, the car keys clutched in my fist.

"Wait here," he said.

He picked up a phone from behind the counter. A landline, mustard yellow with a curly cord. He dialed a number from memory, turned his shoulder slightly like that offered privacy, spoke too quietly for me to hear and then he hung up.

"Be a few minutes," he said. "You want coffee? Pot's fresh as of six this morning."

It was past noon. I almost smiled. "No, thank you."

"Suit yourself."

He went back to his paper. I stood there, too wired to sit, too tired to pace. The store smelled like motor oil and burned coffee. A cat slept on a stack of newspapers by the window, orange, enormous, completely unbothered by my existence.

I waited. The clock on the wall ticked.

Then I heard it.

Low at first, a rumble that I felt more than heard, vibrating up through the floor. Getting louder. The specific, unmistakable, chest-deep thunder of a Harley-Davidson engine. One bike. Coming fast.

The cat didn't move. The old man turned a page.

The engine cut outside. Silence. Then boots on gravel, heavy, unhurried, the walk of someone who'd never had to rush in his life because the world waited for him.

The bell jangled.

He filled the doorway. That was the first thing I registered.

He was big. A man assembled from harder materials than the rest of us.

Wide shoulders, thick arms, a chest that strained the white t-shirt under his open leather cut.

His hands hung loose at his sides, relaxed, but they looked like they could break things.

The cut was black leather, well-worn, patches I couldn't read from this distance. He seemed to wear it like a second skin.

My eyes went to his face. I'd expected someone younger, maybe. My brother had been thirty-six when he died, and some stupid part of my brain had imagined Angel frozen at the same age, preserved in the time of Ryan's stories.

He was forties, at least. His dark hair was cropped short, with occasional gray hairs in the way men do when they've earned every year twice over. His jaw was hard, his mouth set. His eyes were dark and steady and they landed on me like a physical weight.

He looked at the old man. The old man tipped his chin toward me, a gesture so small I'd have missed it if I wasn't vibrating with adrenaline.

Then he looked at me again. Those dark eyes, taking me in.

My wrinkled clothes, my exhaustion, my white-knuckle grip on my keys.

I watched him read me the same way the old man had.

Fast, thorough, missing nothing. This was a man who'd spent a lifetime figuring out who was dangerous and who wasn't, and doing it in the space of a heartbeat.

He knew I wasn't dangerous. What he didn't know was why I was here.

I opened my mouth and my brother's name fell out.

"Ryan Mercer," I said. "He was my brother."

Everything in him changed. It wasn't dramatic, but something moved behind those steady eyes, something old and deep that surfaced for just a second before he forced it back down.

Pain. Real, raw, bone-deep pain. The kind that lives in you. The kind that wakes you up at night, sits on your chest, and doesn't leave until it's good and ready. This was more than recognition. More than remembering a name from a long time ago.

This man didn't just know my brother.

He'd loved my brother.

I could see the loss, still alive under the surface after all these years, barely contained, a wound that had scarred over but never healed underneath.

My brother's name had just ripped the scab clean off, and this mountain of a man in leather and boots was standing in a gas station doorway trying to hold himself together in front of a stranger.

"I'm Callie," I said, and my voice cracked on it. "He told me to find you if I needed help. He said you'd take care of me."

Something settled in his face. The pain didn't leave. But something else came in alongside it, something that looked like a door locking shut. A decision, already made.

"Follow me," he said.

That was it. Two words. He didn't ask why I was there, didn't ask what kind of trouble. He looked at me, heard my brother's name, and decided. Whatever he was going to do, he'd already committed to it in the space between Ryan's name and mine.

He turned and walked out. The bell jangled behind him.

I looked at the old man. He'd put down his newspaper and was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read.

"Go on, then," he said quietly. "You're alright now."

His bike was parked out front. Black, chrome, built the way he was, heavy and deliberate. He threw a leg over it, the engine roared to life, and the sound went through my chest like a second heartbeat. He didn't look back to check if I was following. He knew I would.

I got in my car. My hands were shaking on the steering wheel and I couldn't make them stop.

I pulled out behind him, followed the growl of his exhaust through town.

People on the sidewalk looked up when he passed.

He clearly belonged here the way the mountains did.

We continued on the road until the town had passed.

A few minutes later, at the side of the road, I saw a bar called ‘Angels Rest,’ which was clearly a biker and trucker bar given the bikes and trucks lined up outside.

Behind it, in a compound was a series of buildings.

Angel slowed down and steered toward it.

We were greeted at the gate by a prospect who stood aside and let us in.

This was either a cage or a fortress, and everything depended on which side of the gate you stood.

The compound spread across a clearing at the base of a ridge. The main building was a lodge, log and stone, sprawling, the kind of place that had started as something else and grown with purpose. Smoke drifted from a chimney. A wide porch ran the length of the front, built solid. Built strong.

Around it, workshops with bay doors open, bikes lined up outside. Beyond all of it, the ridge rose up like a wall, snowcapped and silent, cutting the compound off from the rest of the world.

There were men. Looking up from bikes or stepping onto the porch.

Leather cuts, heavy boots, the easy posture of people who were very comfortable in their own territory.

They watched Angel's bike roll in. They watched my car behind it.

I counted six, maybe seven, before I stopped counting because my hands were shaking again.

I'd come looking for one man. A name my brother gave me. A promise made on a tailgate six years ago by someone who knew he might not come home.

Angel pulled his bike to a stop near the lodge, cut the engine, swung off. He stood and turned to face my car. Waiting. Patient. That same settled expression on his face, the one that said he'd already decided and the rest was just details.

I put my car in park and turned off the engine.

The silence was enormous. Wind in the pines, the tick of cooling engines, the distant sound of someone working metal in one of the shops. That was all.

I got out of the car on legs that didn't feel entirely trustworthy, stood in the gravel, and looked at what my brother had sent me to.

One man who'd loved him like a real brother. And every man who stood behind him.