Rogue’s Mercy (Dead Saints MC #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

ROGUE

The thing about killing a man is the quiet after.

Not during. During is all thunder and cordite and the wet sound of a body folding wrong.

But after. The Mississippi crawls past fifty yards from where I'm standing, and somewhere down Riverside a barge horn moans, and the world just keeps going like I didn't just put a hole through Ricky Salcedo's left eye socket.

I tuck the Glock into my waistband. The metal is warm.

My hands are steady. They always are. That's what my old man used to say.

Steady hands, steady head. He was wrong about one of those things, but his hands never shook either, not even when The Crest put three rounds in his chest outside a Waffle House in Germantown.

Ricky's sprawled behind the Shell station on Lamar, half his skull decorating the cinder block wall.

He was a runner for The Crest. A courier, more accurately.

Moving product through our territory like we wouldn't notice, like the Dead Saints had gone soft since Dad died.

Three months of watching. Two weeks of planning. Thirty seconds of execution.

I pull a cigarette from my cut and light it with hands that smell like gun oil and summer asphalt.

The cherry flares orange in the dark. Memphis in July is a living thing.

The heat doesn't leave when the sun goes down, just thickens, wraps around your throat like a hand.

My shirt sticks to my back. Ricky's blood is already going tacky on the concrete.

I need to call Gage. Need the cleanup crew here in twenty, before some trucker pulls in for diesel and finds what's left of Ricky's ambitions splattered across the wall.

Movement.

My hand goes to the Glock before my brain catches up. I'm already drawing, already sighting, already calculating distance and cover and exit routes when I see her.

A woman. Coming around the side of the building, keys in her hand, scrubs the color of surgical green under the fluorescent wash of the station's lights. She's maybe thirty feet away. Close enough to have heard the shot. Close enough to see me standing over a body.

Her eyes go wide. Understanding-wide. She sees the gun in my hand. Sees the body. Sees the cut on my shoulders with the president's patch. And she freezes the way a deer freezes, not out of stupidity but out of calculation. She's deciding.

I should kill her.

The thought arrives clean and practical, the way all my worst thoughts do. Witness. No mask. My face is right here under the security light, every scar and angle of it visible. She's close enough to pick me out of a lineup without hesitation.

But she's wearing scrubs. Name badge on a lanyard around her neck.

I can't read it from here, but I can see the hospital logo.

Memphis General. She's a nurse or a tech or something, probably just got off a shift, probably stopped for gas, and now she's standing in the wrong place at the worst possible time.

I don't kill civilians.

That's not mercy. That's strategy. You start dropping innocent people and the whole machine breaks down. Cops care about dead nurses in ways they don't care about dead bikers. The heat would be biblical.

But I can't let her leave either.

"Don't move." My voice comes out flat. Command voice. The one that makes prospects piss themselves and makes grown men reconsider their life choices.

She doesn't run. That's the first thing that surprises me.

"I'm not moving," she says. Her voice is steady. Tight, controlled, the way someone sounds when they're managing fear instead of being managed by it.

I cross the distance between us in four strides.

She's shorter than me by half a foot, and up close I can see details.

Dark hair pulled back in a bun that's coming loose.

Brown eyes that are tracking every movement I make with a focus that feels clinical.

Like she's assessing damage. Like I'm a patient who walked into her ER.

"You saw." I wasn’t asking a question.

"I saw." And that wasn’t a denial.

Smart. Lying to me right now would be the last mistake she ever made and somehow she knows that. Reads it in my body language or my face or the way I'm still holding a gun that killed a man sixty seconds ago.

I study her. She's not shaking. Her breathing is fast but controlled. Deliberate belly breaths, the kind they teach you for panic management. Her hands are at her sides, fingers spread, keys dangling from her right fist with one key poking out between her knuckles like a weapon.

She was going to fight me. If I'd come at her wrong, she was going to try to gouge my eye out with a car key.

My chest tightens. Recognition. She's standing in front of a man who just committed murder and she's already figured out her one possible weapon.

"Give me the keys." I hold out my hand.

She looks at my hand. Looks at the gun. Back to my hand. Then she drops the keys into my palm. Deliberately. A concession, not a surrender.

"What happens now?" she asks.

"Now you come with me."

"Where?"

"Somewhere we can figure out what the fuck to do about this."

She glances past me to Ricky's body. Her expression shifts.

Something almost professional crosses her face.

Like she's seen worse. ER nurse, I realize.

Of course she's seen worse. She's probably had to try to save men who looked like Ricky, probably had her hands inside their chest cavities trying to restart hearts that were already done.

"He's dead," she says. Matter of fact.

"Yeah."

"You're not going to kill me." She says it like she's testing a hypothesis. Like she's poking at the edges of my threat to see where it bends.

I step closer. Close enough that she has to tilt her head back to hold eye contact, and she does. Holds it without blinking. "What makes you sure about that?"

"Because if you were going to, you'd have done it already instead of talking."

She's right. And the fact that she's right, that she read me that fast and that accurately, makes her more dangerous than she knows.

"Get on the bike." I nod toward my Road King, parked at the edge of the lot, blacked out, no chrome, no shine. A shadow with handlebars.

"I don't know you."

"Rogue." I don't know why I give her my real name.

The club calls me Rogue. I earned that one at nineteen when I went off-book and torched a Crest stash house nobody told me to touch.

So, she knows my road name. Makes me human, makes her less likely to bolt, creates a thread of connection that's harder to cut. That's what I tell myself.

"I don't know what you're going to do to me.” She blurts out quickly.

I take a breath. The heat presses against us, and I can smell her now. Antiseptic and something floral underneath, and sweat. Human and female and alive in a way that feels sharp against the background of what I just did.

"Right now? I'm going to take you somewhere safe. You're going to stay there while I figure this out. Nobody's going to touch you, nobody's going to hurt you. But you don't leave until I say."

"That's kidnapping."

"That's survival. Yours and mine."

She processes this. I watch her do it. Watch the calculations run behind her eyes.

She's measuring risk, running scenarios, and she's smart enough to know that her best odds are with me right now, not running into the Memphis night with a dead body fifty feet away and sirens that could come any minute.

"Margot," she says.

"What?"

"My name. You gave me yours, so I’m giving you mine.”

Margot. I file it away in the same part of my brain where I keep tactical information. Exit routes, weapon counts, threat assessments. Margot the ER nurse who doesn't scream when she should.

"Get on the bike, Margot."

She walks past me. Doesn't flinch when her shoulder nearly brushes my arm. Doesn't hurry. She swings a leg over the Road King like she's done it before and settles behind me without being told where to put her hands.

I dial Gage one-handed. He picks up on the first ring.

"Shell station on Lamar. Cleanup. Twenty minutes."

"Done." Gage doesn't ask questions. That's why he's my enforcer.

I swing onto the bike and her hands come to my waist. Resting. Light and deliberate, like everything else about her. I can feel the warmth of her palms through my shirt, ten individual points of pressure from her fingers.

The Road King rumbles to life and I pull out of the lot, leaving Ricky Salcedo's body cooling in the Memphis heat. In my mirrors, the gas station gets smaller. Just another pool of yellow light in a city full of them.

The woman behind me doesn't look back.

I should be thinking about The Crest. About what Ricky's disappearance will trigger, what moves they'll make, how to position the club for what comes next. I should be three steps ahead, the way I always am, the way I have to be to keep my brothers alive.

Instead I'm thinking about her hands on my waist. About the way she said that's kidnapping with her chin up like she was daring me to confirm it. About the fact that she saw me at my worst, standing over a corpse with a gun in my hand, and she didn’t look at me with disgust.

I take us down Riverside, then cut through the warehouse district toward the water.

The Forge rises up out of the dark. The old ironworks building that's been our clubhouse for fifteen years, brick and steel and river damp.

The Saints' bikes are lined up out front like a chrome fence.

Gage's Dyna is missing. Already en route to the Shell station.

I kill the engine and the silence is sudden and thick. Her hands leave my waist and the absence registers like a temperature change.

"This is where you bring me?" She's looking up at The Forge. The iron gates, the dim security lights, the Saints logo welded into the metal above the door. Two skulls flanking an anvil, wreathed in flame.

"This is home."

She gets off the bike. Stands there in her surgical scrubs under my clubhouse lights and looks at me with those assessing eyes.

"For how long?"

The honest answer is I don't know. Until I figure out if she's a threat or a liability or something else entirely. Until The Crest situation resolves. Until I can trust that letting her walk won't bring the whole house down.

"As long as it takes," I say.

She nods once. Acknowledgment. She's filing this away the same way I filed her name.

I walk toward the door and she follows without being told. The Memphis night sits heavy on both of us, and somewhere behind us lays a dead man while the river keeps moving, keeps carrying everything south toward the Gulf, toward forgetting.

I've got a witness in my clubhouse and blood on my conscience and a war coming from Nashville.

And she's not afraid of me.

That last part is the problem.