Colt's Sunrise (Iron Thorn MC #10)

Prologue

Rhett

The first time I break a man, I am sixteen years old, and I learn two things about myself in the same heartbeat. The first is that I am capable of it. The second is that some hidden, locked-down part of me has been waiting my whole life for the door to open.

I am on the roof of the Iron Thorn clubhouse when the memory comes for me.

Twelve years later. A late-spring Tuesday in Clover Ridge, the kind of morning that feels like the world is being washed clean.

The sun is bleeding pink and gold over the ridge behind the diner, the dogwood trees along Main Street are losing the last of their petals, and somewhere down on Hawthorn the church bells start their five-thirty ring.

I have a coffee mug in one hand and the metal lip of the roof under the heel of my boot, and I am not thinking about my stepfather. I am not. Until I am.

I let the memory come. I have learned, after a long time of fighting it, that it works the other way — the more you brace, the harder it hits.

So I sit on the edge of the roof and I let it.

—

Twelve years ago, our trailer in Wilkes County smells like spilled beer and old grease and the particular sweet rot of a kitchen no one has cleaned in a week.

My mother is at the stove, trying to make a dinner she knows he isn't going to eat.

I am sixteen, six-foot-one and ninety-nine percent angles, my shoulders just starting to fill out, my hands too big for my own body.

I know what is coming because I always know.

The sound of the truck door slamming wrong.

The boots on the porch with the wrong rhythm.

The way the screen door bangs open and stays open, like he wants the whole world to know he is home.

Grady is not my father. My father is a ghost in a Polaroid in my mother's underwear drawer — a smiling man at a county fair, a man I never met, dead at twenty-three on a stretch of two-lane highway.

Grady is the man my mother married when I was eight because she was thirty-one and scared and tired, and Grady was a foreman at the lumber mill who said please at the diner.

He said please until the ring was on her finger, and then he stopped saying please, and then he started saying other things, and then he stopped saying anything at all and just started using his hands.

I have stepped between them before. I am the one who learned how to read his footsteps.

I am the one who knows that if you can get to the kitchen in time, you can angle yourself so the first hit lands on you and not her.

I have a scar on my chin from a coffee mug.

I have a tooth in the back that came loose at thirteen and never set right.

I have a habit of sleeping in my clothes, one ear cocked toward the front door, because rest is something other boys get.

But this is the last time. I don't know it yet. I will know it in about ninety seconds.

He comes through the door already swinging at the air.

Mom is at the stove. She turns and her face does the thing it always does — the soft, apologetic flinch, the small mouth, the eyes that drop to the floor like she's done something wrong by existing in his kitchen.

He says something I don't hear because the blood has started moving in my ears the way it always does, the slow heavy whoosh that means my body is loading up for what is about to happen.

He grabs her by the upper arm. Hard. Hard enough that I see her shoulder roll forward against the pull.

I move.

I am between them before the word boy finishes leaving his mouth.

I have my hand on his wrist. I am looking up at him — barely up; he is six-three and I am almost his size now, almost, and his eyes do a quick recalibration the way they have been doing for two years, ever since I started growing into the shape of a man instead of a boy who could be slapped down.

"Let her go," I say.

He laughs. He smells like Wild Turkey and gasoline. He says, "Or what."

It's not a question. It's a dare. He has dared me a hundred times and a hundred times I have stood down because my mother begged me to with her eyes. Not yet, her eyes have always said. Not yet. Don't do it. Don't be him.

But tonight her eyes are closed. Tonight her mouth is bleeding from a slap I didn't see because I was a half-second slow getting through the doorway. Tonight is the night.

I don't remember the sound. I remember the picture.

His back going through the cheap drywall of the trailer's living-room partition, his head making a dent the shape of a doorknob in the wood paneling behind it.

I remember my arm cocked back. I remember the next hit, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the sound of my mother screaming my name — not his, mine — from somewhere very far away.

When I come back into my body, I am standing over him and my hands are red and slick and Grady is not moving.

Not unconscious. Not dead. Just — emptied.

He is breathing in wet, gravelly hitches, and his nose is broken in two places, and his right eye is closing, and he looks up at me with the first clean look of fear I have ever seen on his face.

He looks up at me like he is finally, finally meeting me.

My mother screams again. Her hands are over her mouth.

I stand there. I am sixteen years old and my arms are shaking and there is something inside me that is purring like a well-tuned engine, satisfied and warm, and that purring scares me more than anything I have ever felt in my life.

Because I liked it. I liked the way the drywall gave.

I liked the moment his eyes went wide. I liked, God help me, the sound my mother made when she realized I had won.

I did not just protect her.

I enjoyed it.

I drop my hands. I take three steps back. My boot hits the leg of the coffee table and the empty whiskey bottle on it rolls and falls and breaks. My mother flinches at the sound. She is more afraid of the broken bottle than of the broken man.

That is the first thing that breaks my heart.

I look at her and I say, "Mom. We have to go."

She does not move.

I say, "Mom. We have to go. Right now."

She looks at Grady on the floor. Then at me.

Then at Grady again. He coughs, and a tooth comes out onto the carpet, and she makes a sound — half-laugh, half-sob — and then she is moving, finally moving, faster than I have ever seen her.

She grabs a duffel bag from the closet. She grabs the cash from the coffee can on top of the fridge.

She grabs me by the wrist, and her hand is so small, and she pulls me out the screen door into the gravel driveway under a sky full of summer stars.

We sleep in the car that night. We sleep in the car for four nights.

By the fifth night we are in a motel in Tennessee with a thin mattress and a Bible in the nightstand drawer, and she is on her knees beside the bed praying for the first time since I was small, and I am sitting in the bathtub fully clothed with the door locked because I cannot stop shaking.

I never see Grady again.

I never go back to that house, that town, that school, that life.

I never tell anyone, until much, much later, that the thing I am most ashamed of is not that I broke him. It is that I did it well.

—

The years after are a smear. A drift. I work the kinds of jobs that don't ask questions.

I bus tables. I load trucks. I haul scrap.

My mother gets her feet under her, eventually.

She remarries at thirty-eight, a soft-spoken accountant named Lawrence who plays bluegrass guitar on the back porch and who I will love until I die because he has never once raised his voice at her, not once, not in twelve years.

He is a good man. He is the kind of man I do not know how to be.

I move out at eighteen. I tell myself it is because I want them to have their start. The truth is I cannot be in the house with that kind of softness. It scrapes against the thing inside me. It makes me want to break something just to remember the shape of myself.

I bar-fight my way through my twenties. I am not proud of it.

I get arrested twice — once for breaking a pool cue across a man's chest in a roadhouse outside Knoxville because he wouldn't let go of a waitress's wrist, once for putting a guy through a plate-glass window in Asheville for spitting on a homeless veteran on the sidewalk.

Both times the charges get dropped. Both times the man I hit decides, somewhere between the emergency room and the police station, that he doesn't want to testify.

Both times I stand on the courthouse steps in my one good shirt and feel the purr in my chest and hate myself for feeling it.

I do not start the fights. I want to be clear about that.

I have never started a fight in my life.

But I am the kind of man who, if you start one in front of me — if you put your hands on someone who can't fight back — I will finish it, and I will finish it the way Grady got finished, and I will not feel sorry.

I will feel that low warm purr, and then I will feel sick, and then I will drive a hundred miles before I sleep.

I tell myself I am not him. I am not Grady.

The trouble is I do not know what I am instead.

—

Knox finds me in a parking lot outside a bar in Lexington when I am twenty-three.

There are three men on the ground. They are alive, but only because I checked.

My knuckles are split. My lip is split. The girl they had cornered against the dumpster is gone — she ran the moment the third one went down — and I am standing alone in a yellow circle of streetlight feeling the purr fade out of me like a song ending.

There is a man on a Harley at the mouth of the alley.

He does not move. He does not call out. He just sits there with one boot down on the asphalt and the engine off, watching me the way you watch a storm to see which way it is going to turn.

He says, "You eat?"

I say, "What?"