Protected by the Silver Fox MC

Prologue

Eight Years Ago

Wren Sutter was twenty-six the night she learned that numbers could kill you.

Her father sat at the kitchen table with a coffee going cold at his elbow and a legal pad covered in his cramped, slanting handwriting, the kind of handwriting he used when he didn't want anyone else to be able to read it if they found it.

Rows of figures. Dates. Initials instead of names.

He had been at it for three nights running, and on the third night, Wren came downstairs for water and found him staring at a single line like it had said something to him personally.

"Dad."

He didn't jump, exactly. Frank Sutter didn't startle. But his hand moved to cover the pad, quick and automatic, before he caught himself and made it look like he was just reaching for his coffee.

"Go back to bed, Wrenny."

"It's late. I couldn't sleep anyway."

That got a small huff out of him, almost a laugh.

He looked older than forty-six right then, the kitchen light carving shadows under his eyes that she hadn't noticed before, or maybe just hadn't let herself notice.

Frank Sutter had spent nineteen years as a state investigator for timber and land fraud, a job so unglamorous that at school career days he used to joke he was in "paperwork enforcement," and people always laughed like he meant it as a joke.

He hadn't meant it as a joke tonight.

"What are you working on?" she asked, and pulled out the chair across from him before he could tell her not to.

He was quiet long enough that she thought he'd refuse. Then he turned the legal pad a few degrees, not all the way around, just enough that she could see the numbers without being able to read the names beside them.

"You know how you're always telling me that a column of numbers can't lie, even when people do?"

"I say that because it's true."

"It's true right up until somebody decides which numbers go in the column.

" He tapped the page, three lines down. "Somebody's been running money through timber contracts that don't match the timber.

Same amount, every quarter, going back six years.

It's not a rounding error. It's not bad bookkeeping.

Somebody built it that way on purpose, and they built it to look boring, because boring doesn't get looked at. "

"So look at it."

"I am looking at it." He said it quietly, and something in his voice made the back of her neck go cold, though she couldn't have said why at the time.

She was twenty-six. She thought fear was for other people's fathers.

"Wren, if anything ever happens where I'm not around to explain something to you, I want you to remember this.

The truth doesn't hide in secrets. People are good at secrets.

Nobody watches a spreadsheet. The truth hides in the boring column, in the number that's a little too round, in the total that comes out even when nothing in real life ever comes out even. You understand?"

"You're scaring me."

"I don't mean to." He closed the legal pad and slid it into the leather satchel he kept by his chair, the one she was never, ever supposed to touch, and he smiled at her in the way that meant the conversation was over even though it didn't feel over at all.

"Go to bed. I love you. I'll see you at breakfast."

She did not see him at breakfast.

Four days later, on a stretch of county road two miles outside Cedar Bend that he had driven ten thousand times without incident, Frank Sutter's truck went off the shoulder at sixty-five miles an hour into a stand of lodgepole pine.

The county called it deer. Everyone in Cedar Bend knew someone whose truck had met a deer on that road; it was the kind of story that got told so often it stopped sounding like a story and started sounding like weather.

Nobody found the legal pad. Nobody found the satchel. The state closed his open cases within a month, folded quietly into other investigators' workloads, footnoted, forgotten.

Wren's mother packed up the house eleven weeks later and they left Cedar Bend for good, and Wren spent the drive out of town with her forehead against the passenger window watching the mountains get smaller, promising herself two things.

That she would never again let herself love something enough to be undone by losing it.

And that someday, she would learn to read a column of numbers the way her father had, well enough to find whatever it was he'd found.

It took her eight years to become the kind of woman who could keep the first promise.

It would take her considerably less time to break it.

? ? ?

The letter came on a Tuesday, forwarded twice, the return address of a Cedar Bend post office box she hadn't seen since she was twenty-six.

Wren Sutter, CPA, CFE. Forensic Accounting Services.

The letterhead on her own reply would have looked, to anyone who didn't know her, like the letterhead of a woman with a perfectly ordinary, perfectly controlled life.

Which was, mostly, true. She had built that life on purpose, the way she built everything, one careful reconciled entry at a time.

Apartment in Denver. A caseload of corporate fraud and divorce audits that never asked her to feel anything about the numbers, only to find them.

No family left to speak of. No reason, ever, to go back to Cedar Bend, Montana.

She read the letter twice standing at her own kitchen counter, in an apartment two states and eight years away from the one where her father had closed a legal pad and told her to go to bed.

Wren. It's Marcus. I know it's been a long time and I know I don't have any right asking you for anything.

But I need someone I can trust with the club's books before the county finishes deciding we're not worth having around anymore, and there's nobody left alive.

I trust the way I trusted your father. I know what that costs you to hear. I'm asking anyway. Come home.

M.D.

She set the letter down. Picked it back up. Read the initials at the bottom like they might rearrange themselves into something less complicated if she looked at them long enough.

Marcus Doyle. Cage, everyone had called him, back when she was young enough that a man in his late thirties seemed impossibly grown, impossibly certain, the kind of man who ran a motorcycle club the way other men ran banks: like the whole town's fortunes rested somewhere inside his ledger whether the town wanted to admit it or not.

He had been her father's friend. Maybe the last one who'd stood at the funeral and looked like he meant it.

Come home.

Wren Sutter did not believe in going backward. She believed in double-entry bookkeeping, in things that balanced, in the particular peace of a number that finally, after enough patient searching, told the truth.

She booked the flight anyway.

Because somewhere in Cedar Bend, Montana, there was a column of numbers that had waited eight years for someone to finally look at it the way her father had taught her to look, and God help her, she was tired of pretending she hadn't spent every year since wanting to.