Jinx's Wager (Iron Vow MC #17)

Prologue

Callum

The first thing you should know about me is that I was christened twice.

Once at St. Brigid's in South Boston, where my mother poured a thimble of holy water over my forehead and named me Callum Declan Brennan, after a grandfather I never met and a saint who probably wouldn't claim me.

And once at the Iron Vow compound on a Tuesday afternoon in October, where Diesel looked at the smoldering wreckage of his vintage Harley and said, very quietly, "Jesus Christ, kid. You're a goddamn jinx."

The road name stuck before the holy water dried.

Two years. That's how long I've been a prospect.

Most guys earn their patch in one. There's a kid named Tucker who pulled it off in nine months, and we don't talk about him because nobody likes a show-off.

The standard timeline is twelve months — long enough to prove you can take an order, short enough that the club doesn't have to feed you forever.

I am at twenty-four months and counting, and the only reason I haven't been kicked is that nobody can quite agree on what to do with me.

I'm sitting on the curb outside the compound right now, lacing up boots that have seen four winters and approximately one polish, and I'm thinking about all of this because today is the day I plan to fix it.

Today is the day I run a clean shift. No spilled beer.

No dropped tools. No accidentally igniting anything that wasn't supposed to be ignited.

I have made a list. The list is in my pocket.

I checked it three times this morning, which is two more times than I checked whether my front tire was inflated, which is why my front tire is currently flat in the parking lot behind me and Diesel is going to have something to say about that when he walks out at noon.

Let me back up. You should know how I got here, because otherwise none of the rest will make sense.

My father was named Sean Brennan. He came over from Cork at twenty-two with a duffel bag and a trade and a promise to my mother — a Boston-born girl named Maureen O'Donnell who he'd met when she was on a study-abroad year in Galway — that he would make her a good life.

He kept the promise for fourteen years. He poured concrete on the Big Dig and built decks in Quincy and replaced furnaces in three-deckers all over Dorchester, and every Friday he came home with a paycheck and a story and a kiss for my mother that made my sisters groan and cover their eyes.

Then on a Tuesday in March when I was ten years old, he sat down on the kitchen floor to tie his work boot and never stood up again.

Heart attack. Forty-two years old. The doctor said it was the kind of thing that just happens, and my mother nodded and thanked him, and that night after my sisters were asleep she stood in the kitchen and screamed into a dish towel until her voice gave out, and I sat on the stairs and listened, and I thought: Okay. So this is what the world does.

My mother is a school librarian. She reads, on average, three books a week.

She raised four kids on her salary and my father's life insurance and the sheer force of her will, and she did it without ever once making us feel poor.

Her name is Maureen and she is five-foot-two and has hair the color of a copper kettle and a temper to match, and she is the only person on this earth who is allowed to call me Callum without getting a face for it.

My three sisters — Brigid, Aoife, and Saoirse, all older, all terrifying — taught me how to dance at weddings and how to take a punch from a cousin and how to braid hair, which is a skill I have used exactly once but which came in handy on that one occasion.

They all live within twenty miles of my mother.

They call her every day. I call her on Sundays, and she always says, "Callum, you sound tired," and I always say, "I'm fine, Ma," and she always says, "Mm," in a way that means she knows I'm lying.

I left Boston at nineteen. Not because I wanted to.

Because Brigid got married to a guy named Patrick who is a perfectly fine human being if you like guys named Patrick, and the wedding was supposed to be the most joyful weekend of our family's year, and I — through a series of decisions that started with a borrowed tuxedo and ended with an unsecured floral arch — destroyed the cake, the photographer's tripod, and a non-trivial portion of the dance floor.

My mother didn't yell. My mother never yells.

She just looked at me, in my too-small tuxedo with frosting on the cuff, and said, "Callum, my love.

I think it's time you tried the world somewhere else for a little while.

" So I did. I packed a duffel bag — like my father — and I rode a bus west until the bus ran out of road, which turned out to be a town called Ember Falls, and I got off because the driver said, "End of the line, kid," and I didn't have anywhere better to be.

I bartended at a place called the Sunrise Grill for two years before I ever sat on a motorcycle.

Sienna ran the kitchen. She fed me three meals a day for the price of one because I was skinny and lonely and reminded her of someone she used to know.

The Iron Vow guys came in on Thursdays. They sat in the back booth and they tipped well and they told stories that I pretended not to listen to while I polished glasses.

Diesel was already president by then. Razor was already a sergeant-at-arms. Havoc was the loud one.

Mateo was the quiet one. There were others — Boomer, who's gone now, and Crow, who's also gone now, and a handful of patched members who came and went depending on the night — and I learned them the way you learn a language you don't speak yet.

By rhythm. By repetition. By listening for the beats between the words.

I don't know how to explain what happened to me in those Thursday booths.

I know how it sounds. I know that grown men aren't supposed to fall in love with a brotherhood of bikers the way kids fall in love with the circus, but I did.

I watched the way they leaned toward each other.

I watched the way nobody finished a story alone — somebody always picked up a thread, somebody always confirmed a detail, somebody always laughed at the part that was supposed to be sad because that's how they made it bearable.

I watched the way they paid for each other's food without keeping count.

I watched the way Diesel, who is not a sentimental man, would catch the eye of a member across the room and just nod, and the member would nod back, and a whole conversation would happen in two inches of head movement.

I had not been part of anything since my father died.

Not really. I had been part of my family, which is a different kind of belonging — you don't choose your family; your family is the gravity you're born into.

The Iron Vow guys had chosen each other.

They had walked into a room full of strangers and said, These ones.

These are mine. I wanted to know what that felt like.

I wanted it the way a thirsty man wants a glass of water and won't quit thinking about water until he gets some.

So I asked. On a Thursday in November, when I was twenty-one and had been pouring their beers for ten months, I waited until the booth had thinned out to just Diesel and an older member named Thatcher, and I came over with the check and I said, "Sir.

I would like to know what a man has to do to prospect for your club.

" Diesel looked at me for a long time. Then he said, "How old are you, kid?

" I said, "Twenty-one." He said, "Got a bike?

" I said, "No, sir." He said, "Got the money for a bike?

" I said, "I can save up." He said, "Got a death wish?

" I said, "No, sir, I just have a wish, and that's not it.

" Thatcher laughed. Diesel didn't, but his mouth moved in a way that suggested it might have, in a different life.

He said, "Come back when you have a bike, kid. Then we'll talk."

I bought a 1998 Sportster off a guy in Dunridge for three thousand dollars and a promise to fix his fence.

I taught myself to ride in the parking lot of an abandoned grocery store.

I dropped that bike a number of times that I will not specify in writing.

I came back to Diesel six months later with skinned palms and a bike that ran, mostly, and he looked at me and he said, "All right, kid. Let's see what we've got."

What we've got, it turns out, is a disaster.

The Harley I backed into was Diesel's pride and joy — a 1979 Shovelhead he restored with his own two hands over a decade.

I was supposed to move a club truck twelve feet so a vendor could unload kegs.

I moved it sixteen feet. The four-foot difference contained the Shovelhead.

The compound alarm I set off was the silent one that goes directly to the local PD, and we had three squad cars in the lot before I finished apologizing.

The mud puddle came in at the end like a punchline God couldn't resist. I was trying to run.

I was not, as it turns out, a good runner.

That was day two. Day one was uneventful, which I have come to understand is the only reason they didn't kick me on day three.