Ranger's Vow (Iron Thorn MC #12)

Prologue

Beckett

I was up anyway. I'm always up. Sleep and I have an arrangement where it shows up when it feels like it and I stop expecting much.

"Is this Beckett Holloway?" A woman's voice. Careful. Trained to be gentle.

"Yeah."

"Mr. Holloway, I'm calling from St. Anselm's Regional in Two Rivers. I'm sorry to be reaching you this late."

I sat up. The cabin was dark except for the one lamp I leave burning, and the lamp threw my shadow long across the floorboards.

"It's about your sister. Cora Holloway."

My whole body went still in the way it does when I'm tracking something through brush and I hear a branch snap that I didn't make. That alert. That cold.

"What happened."

She told me. The words came in the order those words always come.

Highway. Rain. A truck that crossed the line.

Instant, she said, like that was supposed to be a mercy, and maybe it was, but it didn't feel like one sitting in my dark cabin two states away with the phone pressed so hard to my ear it hurt.

"Mr. Holloway, there's something else. Your sister had her son with her tonight. He's fine. Not a scratch. He was in the car seat in the back and the car seat did its job. But we need a family member to come. Tonight, if you can. He's six months old and he doesn't have anyone else."

I already knew that. Cora didn't have anyone else. That was the whole story of our family in one sentence. We didn't have anyone else. We only ever had each other, and now there was just me, and a baby I'd met exactly twice.

"I'm coming," I said. "Three hours. Maybe less."

"Drive safe, Mr. Holloway."

I made it in two hours and forty minutes, which on those roads, in that rain, was either skill or a death wish, and honestly I wasn't picky that night about which.

I don't remember most of the drive. I remember the wipers.

I remember my hands on the wheel and how strange they looked, like they belonged to somebody else.

I remember thinking, in this flat detached way, that I needed to call the club, that Silas would want to know, that somebody should know, and then realizing the only person I'd ever called first about anything was the person I was driving toward, and she wasn't going to pick up.

Cora. Eleven months younger than me. The loud one. The funny one. The one who talked enough for both of us, which worked out, because I never had much to say.

When we were kids and our parents were busy being the kind of parents you learn to work around, Cora used to crawl into my bed during thunderstorms and narrate the thunder like it was a sports event.

"Ooh, big one, that's a ten, the judges are very impressed.

" I'd pretend to be annoyed. I'd tell her to go back to her own room.

She never did, and I never made her, and somewhere around the time I stopped being a kid I figured out that those were the only nights I actually slept.

She named her son after our grandfather. Elias. Eli. She'd called me when he was born, three in the morning, crying and laughing at the same time, and she'd said, "Beck, he's so mad about everything. He's so little and he's so mad. He's exactly like you."

I'd said congratulations. I'd said I'd come visit. I'd come visit twice in six months because I'm a coward about feelings and babies are nothing but feelings with a diaper attached.

I'd have given anything, on that drive, to go back and visit more.

The hospital was too bright and too quiet at the same time, the way they always are at two in the morning. A social worker met me at the desk. She had kind eyes and a folder and a look on her face that said she'd done this before and it never got easier.

"Mr. Holloway. Thank you for coming so quickly." She walked me down a hall. "Your sister had a will. It's recent — she updated it after Eli was born. She named you as his legal guardian. Were you aware of that?"

I wasn't. That's the part that got me, later, when I had room to feel things again. She'd thought about it. She'd sat down at some point, my chaotic little sister who couldn't keep a houseplant alive, and she'd thought, hard, about who would raise her son if she couldn't. And she'd picked me.

Me. A man who lived alone in a cabin at the edge of a tree line. A man who rode with the Iron Thorn. A man whose idea of a home-cooked meal was eggs, sometimes, if I was feeling festive.

She picked me.

"I was not aware," I said. "But it doesn't change anything. He comes with me."

The social worker nodded like that was the right answer, like maybe she'd been worried I'd give a different one.

They brought him to me in a room with a rocking chair and a window that looked out on the parking lot and the rain.

A nurse carried him. He was wrapped up tight, just a face really, a scrunched-up furious little face, and the second she put him in my arms he opened his eyes and looked at me and decided, with his whole entire body, that he hated this.

He screamed.

He screamed the way only a baby can scream, like the world had personally betrayed him, which — fair.

It had. He'd been in that car. He didn't have words for it but some animal part of him knew his whole world had ended, and the only thing anyone had to offer him was a stranger who smelled like rain and motor oil and didn't know how to hold a baby.

"He's okay," the nurse said. "He's just tired and overwhelmed. Try the rocking."

So I sat down in the rocking chair, this enormous bearded man folded into a piece of furniture built for grandmothers, and I rocked.

He kept screaming.

I rocked.

He screamed harder.

And I want to tell you that something tender and instinctive rose up in me, that I knew what to do, that blood called to blood.

But the truth is I sat there feeling like the ground had been pulled out from under my entire life, holding a furious grieving baby who wanted his mother and was never going to get her, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

So I did the only thing I knew. I talked to him. Low. The way I'd talk to a spooked horse, or a dog that didn't trust me yet.

"I know," I said. "I know, buddy. It's bad. It's real bad. I'm not gonna lie to you about that. You and me, we got dealt a rough one tonight."

He hiccuped. Kept crying. But quieter.

"Your mom was the best person I ever knew. She was a pain in my neck and she was the best person I ever knew, and those two things were the same thing, and someday I'm gonna tell you all about her. Every story. She had a thousand of them."

His little fist found my finger and grabbed it. Grabbed it hard. Babies do that, it's a reflex, it doesn't mean anything. I know that. I knew it then.

It wrecked me anyway.

"I don't know how to do this," I told him, and my voice cracked on it, which it does not do, which it has not done since I was younger than Cora was when she died.

"I want you to know that going in, so it's fair.

I don't know the first thing about any of this.

I'm gonna get it wrong. A lot. Probably constantly. "

He looked up at me. Wet eyes, long lashes already, Cora's lashes. He'd stopped screaming. He was just staring at me now, this small grave assessment, like he was deciding something.

"But here's what I can promise you." I steadied my voice because this part mattered, this part I needed to get out right even if there was nobody to hear it but a six-month-old and the rain.

"You are never gonna wonder if somebody wanted you.

Not for one day of your life. I will get everything else wrong, but I will not get that wrong.

You're mine now. I'm yours. That's a done deal.

That's the one thing I'm sure of in this whole mess. "

He sighed. This enormous shuddering baby sigh, the kind that comes after a long cry, and his eyes started to drift shut.

"Yeah," I whispered. "You're tired. Me too, buddy. Me too."

He fell asleep on my chest in that rocking chair at the hospital, his fist still wrapped around my finger, and I didn't move for a long time, because moving might wake him and because I had nowhere to be and no one waiting and the only thing left in the world that was mine was sleeping on my chest and I wasn't ready to set him down.

I brought him home to Clover Ridge two days later, after paperwork and a tiny funeral and a phone call to the club that I mostly couldn't get through.

They were waiting for me. Of course they were. That's the thing about the Iron Thorn that people who only see the patches and the bikes never understand — when one of us is drowning, the whole club gets in the water.

Wren showed up the first night and taught me how to make a bottle without scalding the kid or myself, which it turns out is a real skill with real stakes.

Briar — my cousin, distant enough that we'd grown up barely knowing each other, close enough that she dropped everything — came and crawled around my cabin on her hands and knees finding every sharp corner and every outlet and every choking hazard, which it turns out is the entire contents of a cabin when you look at it from a baby's height.

"Beckett," she'd called from under my kitchen table. "Why do you have a fish hook on the floor."

"I tie flies."

"Not anymore you don't. Not down here."

Gemma, the nurse, gave me her cell number and told me to call any hour, any day, no such thing as a dumb question, and over the next three years I tested that promise to its absolute limit.

Two a.m. fevers. Rashes I was sure were fatal.

The time Eli swallowed a button and I drove to her house doing ninety with him strapped in the back, and it turned out he hadn't swallowed a button at all, the button was in my truck, and she didn't laugh at me even though she absolutely should have.

The club rallied. They always rallied.

But the club went home at night. They had their own beds, their own people, their own lives that were filling up around me while mine reorganized itself around one small demanding human.

And in the dark, alone, with a baby who woke every two hours grieving a mother he'd never remember and a grief of my own I didn't have time to sit down inside of — in the dark it was just me.

Just me and Eli and a vow I'd made in a hospital rocking chair.

I made it again, over his crib, the first night in the cabin, both of us strangers to this new shape of a life.

I stood there gripping the rail of a crib Diesel had built and Briar had sanded smooth, and I watched him breathe, this impossibly fragile thing the universe had handed me without an instruction manual, and I said it out loud so it would count.

"I'm gonna be enough for you. Whatever it takes. However bad I fumble it. You're gonna grow up sure of one thing in this whole uncertain world, and it's gonna be this: you were wanted. You are wanted. I'm not going anywhere."

He slept through the whole speech. Babies are terrible audiences.

I meant every word.

What I didn't know, standing there at three years old in the dark, was that "enough" was going to be the hardest word I ever tried to live up to.

That I'd spend the next three years convinced, most days, that I was failing.

That I could track a deer through a thunderstorm and field-strip an engine blind and stare down men twice my size without blinking, and none of it, none of it, prepared me for the specific terror of a toddler with a hundred-and-two fever at midnight and nobody to tell me whether that was fine or the end of the world.

I didn't know that being enough would turn out to be a thing I couldn't do alone, no matter how hard I worked at it, no matter how many vows I made.

I didn't know that the answer was already living three miles away, getting kids to eat their vegetables and laughing in a way that filled rooms, with no idea yet that her own life was about to come apart at the seams.

I just knew the boy on my chest was mine.

The rest of it — all the rest of it — I had to learn the hard way.

I fell asleep in the rocking chair again that first night home, Eli finally quiet against me, the cabin too big and too silent around us both. Two survivors of a wreck neither of us caused.

We made it to morning.

That was the whole goal, those days. Make it to morning. We did it one night at a time, and somehow, three years' worth of nights later, we were still here.

Still surviving.

Just the two of us.

For now.