Rook’s Vow (Forsaken Angels MC #5)

Chapter 1

ONE

LEXIE

The trucker was six-four, two-sixty, and drunk enough that his aim was off by about a foot.

His fist sailed past Billy Hancock's jaw and connected with the napkin dispenser instead, sending it flying off the counter in a burst of chrome and paper.

Billy, who'd been coming in every Thursday night for eight years, shoved his stool back and stood up with the slow, deliberate calm of a man who'd been in enough bar fights to know which ones were worth finishing.

"Sit down, Billy."

Both of them looked at me.

I was behind the counter with a coffee pot in one hand, a dishrag over my shoulder, and I weighed about a hundred and forty pounds less than the trucker, which meant I had to make up the difference in tone.

"And you." I pointed the coffee pot at the trucker. "Out."

He swayed. His eyes went from me to the coffee pot and back again. Tried to figure out whether I was a threat or a joke and I could see him settling on joke, like they always did. A woman, smaller than him, what was I going to do about it?

"Lady, I'm not going anywhere until this piece of shit apologizes for..."

"He's not apologizing. You're leaving. You've got about ten seconds before I call the sheriff's office and your CDL becomes a conversation, and I promise you the conversation won't go well."

His mouth opened. I held up a hand.

"Nine."

He left. Slammed the door hard enough to rattle the windows, kicked the gravel getting to his rig, peeled out of the lot with more diesel smoke than dignity. His taillights disappeared down the highway, set the coffee pot down, and started picking up napkins.

"You okay, Billy?"

"Fine." He righted his stool. Sat back down. Grinned at me like he did every time I ran someone off. "You're going to get yourself killed one of these days, Lex."

"Maybe. But not tonight."

He laughed. I poured him a fresh cup and went to call the sheriff to let him know the guy in the rig had too much to drink and needs to be off the road. I then went back to work like nothing had happened.

That was my life. This was Lane's, the truck stop my grandparents built in 1974 on the highway that ran along the far side of Forsaken, Montana.

Twenty-four hours, seven days, fifty years of truckers, drifters, families on road trips, and every kind of person the highway brought through.

My grandmother taught me how to run a register before I could reach the counter without a stool.

My grandfather taught me how to read a room, how to spot the trouble before they got loud, how to talk down a fight without raising my voice.

When they died within six months of each other, they left me the building, the business, and a set of skills that had nothing to do with a degree and everything to do with knowing that a woman who runs a truck stop alone has to be harder than anything that walks through her door.

I was twenty-nine and I'd been running Lane's solo for four years.

I could change the fryer oil, fix the ice machine, balance the books, and remove a man twice my size from the premises without breaking a sweat or a nail.

The regulars knew me. The truckers on the long haul between Billings and the coast knew me.

The town knew me, or knew of me, the Lane girl out on the highway, tough as her granddad and twice as stubborn.

I was good at my life. I was proud of it, this building with its chrome stools, its wide windows, and its neon sign that hummed in the dark.

The smell of coffee, grease, and cold highway air.

The sound of rigs in the lot and the jukebox that only played songs my grandmother had loaded thirty years ago and I didn’t have the heart to change.

It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't easy, and some nights the loneliness hit so hard I could taste it, but it was mine.

But then the Jackals came.

The first time, I didn't think much of it. Bikers came through all the time. A group of four, leather cuts with a patch I didn't recognize, ordering coffee, eating burgers, paying cash. Polite enough. Loud, as men in groups always were, but nothing I couldn't handle.

The second time, a week later, there were six of them.

They took the booth in the back corner. Two of them went outside and stood by the trucks in the lot and something in their posture told me they weren't admiring the view.

A man I'd never seen before pulled in driving a pickup with out-of-state plates.

He went to the booth, sat down, and left twenty minutes later. No food, no coffee. Just business.

The third time, I understood.

They weren't passing through. They were setting up.

My truck stop, with its steady stream of traffic, its location on the far highway, and its single woman behind the counter who wasn't connected to anyone who might push back, was exactly what they needed.

A waystation. A place to meet, to exchange whatever they were exchanging, to do their business in the open because nothing looked more innocent than a couple of bikes in a truck stop parking lot.

I told them to leave.

I waited until the lot was mostly empty, walked up to the table where three of them were sitting with their boots on my vinyl seats and their coffee gone cold, and I told them I knew what they were doing and I wanted them gone.

I said it like I'd said it to a thousand drunks and troublemakers, calm, clear, with the certainty of a woman standing on ground she'd inherited and intended to keep.

The one in the middle looked at me. He was older than the others, thicker, with a beard that had gone gray and eyes that held nothing behind them.

No anger, no threat. Just an emptiness that looked through me like I was weather.

Like I was a thing that was happening near him and he hadn't decided yet whether to wait it out or move.

He didn't say anything. He finished his coffee, put a twenty on the table, and walked out.

That night, after I'd locked up, someone put a rock through my front window.

Clean throw, straight through the glass, the impact so loud in the empty building it stopped my heart for two full beats.

I stood behind the counter with shattered glass at my feet, the highway wind coming through the hole, and I understood, with perfect clarity, that I was in trouble I couldn't handle.

I called a glazier. He couldn't come for three days, so I nailed plywood over the gap, swept up the glass, and opened the next morning like nothing had happened.

But things had happened. My regulars noticed.

Pauline and her husband, who drove through every Sunday on their way to church in Kalispell, started waving as they passed instead of pulling in.

The truckers on the long haul who used to linger over pie and bad coffee were timing their stops differently, choosing to push through to the next town.

My business was bleeding out, slowly, quietly, like a wound bleeds when you don't realize how deep it goes until your shirt is soaked. It seemed that word was spreading that my truck stop was attracting people you don’t want to be around.

The Jackals kept coming though. Not every day.

Just enough to keep the message that they weren’t going anywhere clear.

Two bikes in the lot on a Tuesday afternoon.

Four on a Friday night, the same booth, the same pickup from out of state.

They were careful now. Polite, even. Left cash on the table, didn't cause trouble, didn't threaten me directly.

They didn't need to. The plywood over my window said everything they weren't bothering to say, and every regular who stopped coming was a sentence in a letter I was being forced to write myself.

Fear had teeth, and it found me in the hours between three and five in the morning, when the stop was empty, the highway was silent and I sat behind the counter with a baseball bat within reach and listened to every sound the building made.

I'd never been scared of a man before. I'd handled drunks, creeps, a trucker who once pulled a knife over a bill dispute, and I'd handled them all with the same steadiness my grandfather had taught me.

But these men were different. They weren't drunk, they weren't angry, they weren't reacting to anything.

They were deciding. And the thing they were deciding was whether I was an obstacle worth removing or just furniture that came with the building.

The older Jackal, the one with the gray beard, had come back the morning after the window.

Alone. Sat at the counter and ordered coffee and waited until the only other customer left, and then he'd looked at me and said, very calmly, that if I talked to anyone about what was happening here, if I called the sheriff or mentioned their name to a single living person, they would burn the building to the ground with me inside it.

He said it like it was nothing. He finished his coffee, left cash on the counter and walked out.

I believed him. Every word. I had no intention of calling the sheriff and signing my own death sentence.

I didn't call anyone at all. Because the truth underneath the fear was simpler and uglier than the fear itself.

I didn't know who to call because I had no one.

My parents were dead before I could remember them.

My grandparents were gone. I had no siblings, no partner, no network of people who owed me favors or would come running.

I had a truck stop on a lonely highway, a reputation for being tough, and a plywood window that told anyone paying attention how much that reputation was worth when the trouble was real.

I was handling it. That was what I told myself. I was handling it the way I'd handled everything, alone, with my hands steady, and no crack showing.

The bell over the door rang at ten past two in the morning.

I looked up from the register and he was there.

The quiet one. He'd been coming in for months, always early hours of the morning, and always alone. Black coffee, didn’t often order food, and sat on the stool at the far end of the counter where the light was thinnest. He never talked much.

A nod when he came in, a word or two if I said something first, cash on the counter when he left.

I knew he was one of the bikers from the MC in town, the one that had been in Forsaken for years, the ones people called the Angels.

I knew his road name was Rook but I knew almost nothing else about him.

Today he sat down in his usual spot, and I poured his coffee without asking. He wrapped his hands around the mug, settled, and his eyes moved across the room like they always did, slow, thorough, and taking in everything without appearing to look at anything.

His gaze stopped on the plywood.

He studied it. The new wood, pale against the dark frame where the window used to be, the nails I'd hammered in myself. He looked at it for a long time, a look that was closer to reading, and then he looked at me.

"What happened to your window?"

"Truck kicked up a rock." The lie came out smooth. I'd been practicing it for three days.

He held my gaze. Gave nothing away. His face was lean, angular, built for noticing everything and offering nothing in return.

Light brown hair cut short, dark eyes that took in the room like he'd already memorized it.

He was tall, and muscular with tattoos crawling up his arms. But he was still and contained.

A man you'd walk past in a crowd and never notice unless you took another look, which made the fact that I always noticed him a problem I hadn't examined yet.

"Must have been a big rock," he said.

"Montana rocks. They grow them different out here don’t they?”

His eyes shifted. Not a smile, nothing that obvious. Just a flicker, there and gone, that told me he knew I was lying and had decided not to push it.

He drank his coffee and I absentmindedly wiped the counter.

The highway was empty, the lot dark except for his bike and the light from the sign.

He stayed for an hour, like he always did, settled at his end of the counter while I did the things that needed doing in the dead stretch between two and four.

Restocked the sugar dispensers. Ran a rag over the pie case.

Counted the register for something to do with my hands.

When he left, he put a ten on the counter for a two-dollar coffee. He always overpaid. I'd stopped trying to give him change months ago.

"Night, Lexie."

"Night."

The door closed behind him. His bike engine turned over in the lot, a low rumble, and the sound of it faded down the highway until the silence came back.

I picked up his mug. Rinsed it and set it in the rack with the others.

The stop was quiet again. Just me, the plywood, the baseball bat, and the hours until morning. I poured myself a coffee and stood behind the register, watched the empty highway, and waited for the sun.