Saint's Dawn (Iron Thorn MC #13)

Prologue

Gabriel

The first house had a chain-link fence and a woman named Mrs. Petrakis who counted the silverware after every meal.

I was seven. I didn't understand why she counted it until the day a fork went missing and she looked at me first. Not at the other three kids at the table. Me.

"I didn't take it," I said.

"Nobody said you did," she said, which was its own kind of answer.

I sat very still after that, hands in my lap, and watched the other three kids keep eating like nothing had happened, because for them, nothing had.

The fork turned up under the couch cushion three days later. Nobody apologized. Mrs. Petrakis just started counting the silverware a little faster after that, glancing at me twice instead of once, and I learned something that took me twenty more years to unlearn.

Some people decide who you are before you get a vote.

I remember thinking, even at seven, that it wasn't fair. I remember also thinking, somewhere underneath that, that fair probably wasn't a thing that applied to kids like me.

The second house was better, for a while. The Hendersons had a dog named Biscuit and a swing set with one broken chain and a boy named Denny who was theirs by blood and treated me like something they'd taken in out of pity, which, looking back, I probably was.

Denny had his own room. I shared the pull-out couch in the den with whatever other kid the county had most recently deposited on the Hendersons' doorstep.

There was a rotation. Faces came and went.

I stopped learning their names after a while, because learning a name meant caring when it disappeared, and disappearing was the only thing any of us reliably did.

I was twelve when their good silver watch went missing off the kitchen counter. I hadn't touched it. I didn't even know they had a good watch until it was gone and everyone was looking at me like I'd been caught with it in my hand.

"We just think it'd be better," Mrs. Henderson said, not looking at me, packing my one duffel bag herself so I wouldn't take longer than necessary, "if you went somewhere that's a better fit."

Better fit.

I turned that phrase over so many times over the years it wore smooth, like a stone in my pocket.

There is no better fit for a kid nobody actually wants to keep.

There's just the next house, and the one after that, and eventually you stop hoping any of them will stick, because hoping is the part that hurts the most.

Denny found the watch two weeks later in his own jacket pocket. Nobody called to tell me. I found out from a caseworker named Denise who mentioned it like it was a funny little footnote, a piece of gossip, and not the exact moment my whole understanding of my own worth got quietly rearranged.

"Funny how that happens," Denise said, flipping through my file in the front seat of her county sedan.

"Hilarious," I said, and stared out the window at another town I hadn't asked to move to.

By fifteen I'd stopped trying to be the kid who didn't take things, because it turned out that kid got blamed anyway, every single time, regardless of what actually happened.

So I became the other one. If they were going to call me trouble no matter what I did, I figured I might as well enjoy the reputation.

I got good at fighting. Good at doors slamming. Good at the particular sound a group home supervisor's sigh makes when they see my name on the intake sheet — again, this one, we know this one, put him in the room at the end of the hall where we can hear if things get broken.

I stopped flinching when people expected the worst from me. That was the trick I figured out somewhere around sixteen. You stop flinching, and it stops being able to reach you.

Mostly.

There's a version of that year I don't talk about much.

A judge, a diversion program, a counselor named Mr. Osei who was the first adult in a decade who didn't seem afraid of me, and who told me once, very quietly, that anger wasn't a personality, it was a symptom, and symptoms could be treated if you ever decided you wanted to be treated instead of just tolerated.

I didn't believe him. Not then. I filed it away anyway, the way you file away things you're not ready to use yet.

Twenty years old, and I rode into Clover Ridge on a bike I'd half-stolen and half-earned — long story, mostly involving a guy named Cyrus who owed me money and paid me in parts instead — looking for nothing in particular, running from everything in general.

I found the Iron Thorn clubhouse the way you find anything when you're not actually looking for it. By accident, at two in the morning, when the neon sign over the door was the only light on the whole dark stretch of road.

Knox was younger then. Not young. But younger, and quieter in a way that made him seem bigger, not smaller.

He looked at my knuckles first, and then my record, which somebody ran within the hour on a laptop that was older than some of the guys drinking around it, and then my whole sorry story, which I gave him in about four flat sentences because I'd learned long ago not to waste anybody's sympathy on the long version.

I waited for the part where he told me to keep moving. I'd heard some version of that sentence in every town I'd ever passed through.

"You hungry?" he said instead.

I didn't know what to do with a question like that. Genuinely didn't. Nobody had asked me if I was hungry in about eight years. Everybody just assumed I'd already eaten, or didn't deserve to, or wasn't really theirs to feed in the first place.

"Yeah," I said, because it was true, and because lying suddenly, strangely, felt unnecessary.

"Kitchen's that way," Knox said, jerking his chin toward a door with a busted hinge. "Eat something. Then we'll talk about whether you're staying."

I stayed. I ate two bowls of something Harper's predecessor had made — a chili that could have stripped paint — and then I sat at that scarred wooden table until sunrise, listening to a room full of grown men talk to each other like brothers, and somewhere around four in the morning I decided, quietly, that I wasn't leaving.

The brothers had a running joke within a month, about my rap sheet being long enough to paper the inside of a church, wasn't it funny, wouldn't it be funny if —

Diesel was the one who said it first, laughing so hard he nearly fell off his stool.

"Saint," he said. "We should call him Saint. Ironic as hell."

Roman — Diesel, everybody calls him Diesel, though I've never once heard the actual reasoning behind it and I've stopped asking — thought it was the funniest thing anybody had said in a week.

The whole table thought so. Somebody clapped me on the back.

Somebody else started a chant that died out after about four rounds because nobody could keep a straight face.

The name stuck before I could talk them out of it, and honestly, I never tried very hard.

I wore it like a joke because a joke doesn't have expectations.

A joke can't disappoint anybody. I laughed along every single time somebody used it, loud and easy, and underneath the laughing, some old, stubborn, seven-year-old part of me thought: they don't mean it.

Nobody's ever meant it. Don't get used to a name that isn't true, because names that aren't true have a way of getting revoked the second you slip up.

Ten years later, I'm sitting on the clubhouse roof at sunrise with a beer I'm not really drinking, watching the light come up gold and pink over Clover Ridge, and I've still got the wings tattooed across my back that gave the name its shape, and I still don't believe it. Not really. Not underneath.

Below me the town is waking up in slow, ordinary pieces.

Sprinklers ticking on in someone's yard.

A dog barking two streets over, then giving up.

A screen door slamming. Somewhere past the tree line, church bells start ringing, calling the good and the faithful to Sunday service, and I lift my beer toward the white steeple like I'm saluting an old enemy I've made peace with, mostly, in the specific way you make peace with something you've decided to just avoid instead.

"Morning," I say to the bells, to the church, to God, if He's listening, which I've never been entirely sure of. "Don't worry. I'm not coming in."

The bells don't answer. They never do. That's the nice thing about bells. They ring the same whether you're worth ringing for or not.

I grin anyway, because grinning is the other trick, the one that goes hand in hand with not flinching. You smile at the thing that could hurt you, and it never quite gets the satisfaction of watching you feel it. Nobody's ever caught me not smiling. That's the whole point.

Below me, the clubhouse starts stirring — I can hear Diesel's truck cough to life, hear Harper's radio drifting up through an open window, some old country song about a woman who left and a man who never quite got over it.

Ordinary Sunday sounds. My whole life, more or less, condensed into engine noise and somebody else's heartbreak playing on the radio.

I have no idea, sitting up there in the gold light with my joke of a name and my armor of a smile, that in about six days a preacher's daughter is going to walk up the clubhouse driveway in a sundress and sensible shoes, clipboard held to her chest like a shield, and undo about twenty years of very carefully constructed nonsense in the time it takes her to say hello.

The bells keep ringing. I keep grinning at nothing, beer going warm in my hand, sun climbing higher over a town that's never once asked what I actually wanted, only ever told me what I already was.

Turns out nothing was about to become something.

I just didn't know it yet.