Saint's Sin (Iron Vow MC #18)

Prologue

Ezra

I learned two things growing up in my brother's shadow.

The first was that Liam was the dependable one.

The kind of man who showed up early, paid in cash, kept a notebook of every promise he'd ever made and another one of every promise the world had ever made him.

They called him Ledger because numbers were his language, and because, if you crossed him, he balanced the books with the same patience he used to track them.

He was the older brother by four years and forty pounds of stubborn, and he wore responsibility the way other men wore tattoos — permanent, deliberate, a thing you couldn't wash off.

The second thing I learned was that being dependable looked exhausting.

So I went the other way. Where Liam earned his name through precision, I earned mine through a joke.

I was twenty-two and three drinks deep at a bar called the Anvil when four of the Pagan Saints decided they didn't like the way I'd looked at one of their old ladies.

I hadn't looked at her, for the record. She'd been looking at me, which was a distinction the Pagan Saints did not care to make.

The fight lasted forty seconds. I walked out without a scratch, two women I'd never met before tucked under each arm, and a grin that a prospect named Booger said looked "heaven-sent, like the man was a damn saint. "

The name stuck because it was absurd. I was not holy.

I was not saintly. I was a twenty-two-year-old with a complicated relationship to alcohol, a deep gratitude for women who didn't ask follow-up questions, and a tendency to drive faster than the speed limit allowed and the road's shoulders accommodated.

The name was a joke, and the joke was on me, and I leaned into it the way I leaned into everything — fully, recklessly, with the kind of laugh that made strangers either love me on sight or want to put a bottle through my teeth.

But I had a gift. That's the part nobody likes to admit, because gifts complicate the narrative when the guy carrying them is also the guy you wouldn't trust to babysit.

Put a brush in my hand, point me at a piece of metal — a gas tank, a fender, a fairing — and I disappeared.

The world thinned out. The noise in my head, the noise other people made about me, the rumble of the bay doors when a customer rolled in, all of it faded behind the small, precise tip of a sable brush and the way an enamel flowed when you breathed it onto curved steel.

I'd been painting since I was eleven, when my father — gone now, long gone — handed me a model car kit and a tin of Testors paint and said, Here.

Don't burn down the house. By the time I was sixteen, I'd graduated from plastic to chrome, and by the time I was twenty I'd opened my own shop on the gravel lot at the edge of Ember Falls, two miles from the Iron Vow clubhouse and twenty miles from any school I'd ever attended.

Halo Custom Works.

A corrugated steel building with a roof that drummed when it rained and rattled when the wind came down off the ridge.

Inside, I had two paint booths, three compressors, an airbrush collection that had taken me six years to assemble, and a back room with a cot, a hot plate, and a stack of books I'd never tell anyone I read.

Bikers came from three states for my flames and my skulls and the intricate murals that turned their machines into moving canvases.

Iron Vow brought me steady work — Ledger insisted on it — but so did the Iron Saints out of Wheeler County, and the Devil's Tongue from the south, and once, memorably, a clean-cut dentist from Cleveland who wanted his Ducati painted to look like the inside of a human jaw.

I painted for anyone who paid. Which drove the club's hardliners crazy. Diesel, our president, shook his head every time he saw me but never said a word about it, and I knew that meant something. Diesel didn't waste silence on people he didn't respect.

What drove the club crazier was that I wasn't patched.

I'd never prospected. I'd never raised my hand to vote on anything, never stood in the back of a chapel meeting, never worn the colors on my back.

I existed in the club's gravity without orbiting it.

A satellite brother. Close enough to be family, far enough to be myself.

Liam tried every year. Birthdays. Holidays.

The time I broke my wrist and he drove me to the ER and waited four hours and asked, on the way home, with the casual tone he used for things he'd been rehearsing, You think about it yet?

Patching in? I always declined. Not because I didn't love the brotherhood — I did, I do — but because I'd watched what structure did to people.

The rules. The votes. The obligations. The way a man could love something so much that he handed it the leash to his own life.

I'd watched my brother do it, and I'd watched it make him stronger and smaller in the same motion, and I'd decided, somewhere around eighteen, that freedom was the only currency I wouldn't spend.

I told myself that, anyway. I told myself that on the nights when I was alone in the shop at two in the morning, listening to the steel breathe and the rain hit the roof like applause, and the thought of going home to an empty apartment felt less like freedom and more like a habit I'd never bothered to break.

Tonight, freedom had delivered me to an unfamiliar doorstep.

I was parked across the street from the Ember Falls Community Church at eleven p.m. Headlight off.

Engine cooling. The exhaust ticking the way it did when a long ride started letting go of itself.

I sat astride the bike with both feet on the ground and my hands resting loose on the tank, and I stared up at a second-floor window where a light burned gold behind a thin white curtain.

Her window.

I knew it was her window because everyone in Ember Falls knew the layout of the Crane house.

The pastor lived behind the church in a brick parsonage that had been built when men still wore hats indoors.

His wife kept the windows clean. His daughter taught piano to half the children in town, and the parents who dropped them off knew which window was hers because, in the summer, you could hear Chopin drifting through the screen.

Delilah Crane.

I had no business being parked outside the Ember Falls Community Church at eleven p.m. thinking about a woman whose father had once spent fifteen years of his life trying to put my brother in prison.

Vernon Crane had been a detective before he'd been a pastor, and Iron Vow MC had been his obsession the way painting was mine.

He'd retired under a cloud that nobody in town would explain to me, found God with the same blunt-force intensity he'd once applied to suspects, and taken over the Community Church when I was about fourteen.

I'd seen him in the grocery store. I'd seen him in the diner.

He'd looked at me exactly once in all the years since, and the look had been the look a man gives a dog he's already decided he won't be feeding.

His daughter, on the other hand, had walked into my shop that afternoon.

Tuesday. Around four. Modest blue cardigan, hair tied back, a sensible bag on her shoulder.

She'd come to pick up her sedan after an oil change — even pastors' daughters needed oil changes — and she'd dug through her bag for her wallet at the counter, and she'd left, and I hadn't thought about her again for almost an hour.

Then I'd seen the journal.

Small. Brown leather. Cracked at the spine the way a book gets when it's loved. Sitting on the corner of my counter where she'd set it down to find her credit card.

I called the number she'd left on the work order. No answer. I called the church office. No answer. I sat down on my stool and looked at the journal and told myself, very clearly, that the decent thing to do was put it in a drawer and call her in the morning.

I opened it instead.

That's the truth. I'm not going to dress it up.

I opened the journal because I am a man who has been told not to do things his entire life, and the telling has never once worked.

I opened it expecting a grocery list. I expected the phone numbers of friends.

I expected the ordinary marginalia of an ordinary woman's ordinary life.

I got handwriting that looked like calligraphy and poetry that hit me in the chest like a bottle thrown across a room.

I read the first page. On Sundays I sit in the third pew and I count the slats in the ceiling because counting is a thing my mouth is allowed to do.

I read the second page. He calls me his good girl.

I want to know what a bad one tastes like, just once, just to ruin the comparison.

I read the third page. The man on the motorcycle has hands the color of varnished wood, and when he passed through town today I felt the air leave my lungs the way it does in church when the choir hits the right note.

I stopped reading then. I closed the journal. I sat in my shop with the compressors humming and the dusk light bleeding amber through the high windows and I felt, for the first time in maybe a decade, like a man caught doing something he shouldn't.

I tried to put it down. I really did. I made it about ten minutes.

Then I read six more pages. I read about the way she'd lain awake the night before, listening to her father pray downstairs.

I read a poem about a piano with one key that didn't work, and how she'd learned to write around it, and how she suspected the rest of her life would be written the same way.

I read a line about loneliness so accurate it made me set the journal down and walk outside and stand on the gravel for two minutes, hands on my hips, breathing like a man who'd just taken a punch.