Knox’s Sin (IRON SAINTS MC #2)

CHAPTER ONE

Zola Crowne could close out a month of books before the rest of the Iron Saints finished arguing about whose turn it was to buy lunch.

She liked that about the work. Numbers did not lie to you.

They did not soften a thing to protect you, did not decide on their own that you couldn't be trusted with the truth.

A column either balanced or it didn't, and when it balanced the world made sense for as long as the screen stayed open.

On a Friday at the end of October, with the light going long and gold across the floor of Saint's Forge, the world made a great deal of sense.

It was the one hour the two halves of her life sat still long enough to look at each other.

Mornings she was a nursing student in scrubs, learning the hundred ways a body could fail and the handful of ways two hands could buy it time.

Afternoons she was the daughter of an outlaw, keeping a fortune clean for men who'd never once let her past a door.

She'd been splitting herself down the middle so long she'd stopped feeling the seam — Crowne on her father's side, Beaumont on her mother's, the club and the Lowcountry, the desk and the creek.

Most days she carried both without spilling either. Most days.

The custom they'd built for a doctor up in Mount Pleasant had cleared.

The parts order for the three bikes on the lift had come in under budget.

Payroll was done, the taxes were set aside in the account nobody but her and her father touched, and the legitimate face of an outlaw motorcycle club balanced to the dollar.

That was the joke she never said out loud. The Iron Saints could put the fear of God into half the Lowcountry, and the thing keeping them clean enough to stay free was a twenty-seven-year-old woman with a ledger, a nursing textbook, and a basket she wove one coil at a time between invoices.

She reached for the basket now. It sat on the corner of the desk where a normal office kept a stapler.

Sweetgrass and longleaf pine needle and a strip of palmetto, the bundle still smelling green and sweet under the harder smell of motor oil that lived in everything out here.

Her grandmother had put the first coil in her hands when she was six.

You don't rush it, baby. The grass tell you when it ready.

Twenty-one years later her fingers knew the work without asking permission, looping and binding, the bone awl her grandmother used worn smooth and dark from two women's hands.

She hummed while she worked. An old song, one of Grandma Mae's, the kind that didn't have a beginning so much as a place you came in. It ran under the noise of the shop like water under a dock.

The basket was for Grandma Mae, though Mae didn't need another basket; the old woman's house out on the creek was so full of them already they hung from the porch beams like paper-wasp nests.

It was an excuse, was all. A reason to drive out past the end of the pavement on a Sunday, to sit on the haint-blue porch her grandmother had painted with her own hands against the old spirits, to weave and not talk and let the tide go out while Mae told the same three stories she'd been telling since Zola was knee-high.

That house was the one place on earth nobody managed her.

Her father had never set foot in it. He sent money for the roof and the well pump, and he had never once driven out, and Zola had quit wondering why a long while back, because the answer lived in a piece of her parents' history she'd only ever been handed in fragments, same as everything else.

Out there she wasn't the president's daughter.

She was just Mae's grandbaby, a Beaumont woman with grass in her hands, and the hush of it was the nearest thing to free she'd ever found.

Out on the floor somebody dropped a wrench, somebody else laughed, and Tiny's voice rose over the rest, big and easy, telling a story that was going to end with him as the hero of it.

He was the size of a vending machine and gentle as a reading lamp, and he'd been prospecting eleven months and would have walked into traffic if her father told him to.

He'd also walk her to her car tonight, because that was the rule, and he'd do it like it was a privilege instead of a leash.

Across the shop, in the third bay, Nadège had a Saint in the chair with his sleeve pushed up, the buzz of her machine threading under the noise of the floor.

She'd been inking the club since the summer, since she and Ez quit pretending they weren't the most obvious thing in three counties, and she still carried herself like a woman braced for a fight that never came, like she kept waiting for this world to take something from her and kept getting surprised when it didn't. Zola understood that better than she let on.

She'd watched Nadège go from a stranger who eyed every cut in the room to a woman who gave Tiny grief about his haircut, and somewhere in the middle of it the two of them had fallen into the offhand friendship busy women fall into, built mostly out of coffee neither of them ever finished.

Nadège caught her eye across the floor and tipped her chin at the basket on the desk. "Still doing more with your hands than any of these animals," she called.

"Says the woman who draws on people for a living," Zola called back, and Nadège laughed, and the Saint in her chair yelped because she'd laughed mid-line, and for a breath the Forge felt less like a fort and more like a place people actually lived in.

That was what Zola kept forgetting and kept having to learn over: that underneath all the rules these were her people, that she loved them down to the bone, and that the loving was the exact thing that made the cage so hard to climb out of.

She set the awl down and looked at the rule from the inside, turning it over to see if it had changed shape since yesterday. It hadn't.

She was not allowed to leave the building alone.

She was not allowed past the door at the back where church happened, where the actual club met and the actual decisions got made, where her father ran the only world he'd ever loved.

She could not forget her phone, because if she came home five minutes late from her hospital rotation the text arrived — You good?

— gentle, never sharp, and it didn't matter how gentle it was.

It landed like a hand on her shoulder pushing her back into her chair.

Loved. She was so loved it was hard to breathe sometimes. That was the part nobody on the outside understood about a cage built out of love. The bars were warm. You couldn't even hate them honestly.

E ain right, she thought, in her grandmother's voice, the words she only ever thought and never said in this building, because Gullah was the one piece of herself the club didn't get to put its hands on.

It wasn't right, being managed like a line item.

And it wasn't going to change, because the men in her life had decided a long time ago that loving her and listening to her were two different jobs, and they only kept staff for the one.

It hadn't always sat this heavy. As a girl she'd worn the watching like a coat in winter, glad of it. She'd learned the weight of it slow, one held door at a time, and somewhere in the last year the coat had become a thing she wanted off.

Last Tuesday at the hospital, a man on her rotation had crashed in the middle of her shift — sixty-one, heart giving out under her hands while the monitors screamed — and Zola had not frozen.

She'd called it, started compressions, counted out loud in the voice her instructor said was the calmest she'd ever heard on a student, and held a stranger's life in her two hands until the team took over and got it beating again.

She'd driven home shaking afterward, but not from fear.

From the size of it. From knowing, all the way down, that she was good for something the world actually needed, that her hands could keep a person on this side of the door.

She wanted that. Wanted it so bad some nights it scared her, a life where she clocked in at a hospital and clocked out again and the worst thing waiting in the parking deck was a long shift and a cold car.

Her father thought the nursing degree was a hobby, a thing to keep her busy and safe inside the lines he'd drawn around her.

He had never once asked what she meant to do with the license when she finally held it.

In his head she ran the Forge's books until she was old and gray, behind the desk, behind the glass, behind the door at the back, safe.

He loved her too much to picture her anywhere his eyes couldn't reach.

She loved him too much to tell him she'd already started picturing it for herself.

Then she'd walked into the Forge the next morning and her father had asked if she'd remembered to take Tiny to the parking deck.

The bell over the front rang. She heard her father before she saw him.

Bishop's boots had a heel all their own, slow and certain, the walk of a man who'd never once needed to hurry because the room waited on him.

He came through with a stranger half a step behind, a wiry man in a Carhartt jacket with a clipboard and the look of somebody who sold things to people he was a little afraid of.

"Zola." His whole face changed when he said her name, every time, like a light coming on behind it.

Fifty-one years old, silver coming in at the temples, the strong jaw she'd inherited from him and the pale Lowcountry eyes she hadn't.

"This is the man with the Shovelhead frame.

Cut him a check off the parts account, would you, baby. We agreed on eighteen."

"Sixteen," Zola said, without looking up from the screen. "You agreed on eighteen. That frame's got a cracked weld at the neck I can see from here, and he knows it, and so do you."