Stryker (Black Crowns MC #1)

Prologue

STRYKER

Grief was a real fucking bastard. It settled into the corners of a man’s life like dust, coating everything so gradually you didn’t realize how much weight you were carrying until something familiar suddenly felt different.

For the past week, mine had lived in the south-facing window of my office, giving me an unobstructed view of the land where Otis Rutledge had spent most of his life.

Nothing inside the room had changed since I’d learned he was dead.

My desk was still covered with operational reports from Black Castle Security, acquisition projections for Rook Holdings, and three requests Judge had marked urgent.

And the former JAG lawyer who’d become the legal eagle for the Black Crowns, Rook Holdings, and its subsidiaries wasn’t prone to exaggeration.

The framed military commendations my mentor had insisted on hanging remained lined up with mathematical precision behind me.

The photographs from the earliest days of the Black Crowns still showed younger, harder versions of men who had somehow believed building a motorcycle club, a security company, and a legitimate corporate structure at the same time was a reasonable plan.

My office looked exactly as it had before Otis died, but every time my gaze drifted toward that window, I felt the loss tighten beneath my sternum with a pressure no amount of discipline could force away.

I had buried men I’d served beside, and ones I’d commanded, whose families had looked at me as though I might explain why their sons, husbands, or fathers were coming home beneath folded flags.

Those losses had taught me how to compartmentalize grief without denying it, because a leader who fell apart merely handed his weight to everyone beneath him.

Losing Otis struck somewhere different, though, because long before anyone called me Stryker, I had been an angry kid who carried resentment like a weapon and looked for excuses to use it.

I’d been headed toward becoming the kind of man who believed fear and respect were the same thing.

Otis had seen through that shit within an hour of hiring me.

He had put a post-hole digger in my hands, pointed toward a collapsed section of fence, and told me that if I wanted to spend the afternoon furious at the world, I could at least make myself useful while I did it.

He never raised his voice when I rushed a repair or tried to hide a shortcut beneath fresh boards.

He would stand beside whatever I’d built, rub one weathered thumb over the mistake, and look at me until irritation burned hot across the back of my neck.

Then he’d make me tear the whole fucking thing down and start again, because a fence would fail if I built it wrong, and whatever depended on that fence would pay for my laziness.

Somewhere between resetting posts, mending gates, throwing hay, and learning how to calm a frightened horse without trying to overpower it, he changed the direction of my life.

If I worked past dinner, another plate appeared on the kitchen table, but he never framed the meal as charity or asked questions I wasn’t ready to answer.

He just told me to wash the dirt off my hands before his wife saw the mess, then expected me to carry my dishes to the sink when I was finished.

Otis understood that pride could make a hungry teenager refuse kindness, so he disguised it as part of the job until I was old enough to recognize what he had done.

He taught me that strength without control was nothing more than another form of weakness, and the ability to hurt someone mattered far less than the judgment required to know when violence was necessary.

By the time I enlisted in the Army at eighteen, I no longer wanted to prove I was stronger than everyone around me.

I wanted to become capable enough to stand between dangerous people and those who had no way to stop them.

That purpose carried me through selection and into Delta Force at twenty-two, where it was sharpened into something lethal beneath the command of the man who eventually became my mentor.

He was the one who gave me the name Stryker after watching me become the operator he sent through a breach when speed, precision, and overwhelming force were the only things likely to end a mission without dragging it into a prolonged fight.

Years later, while I was still active duty and spending more time overseas than in California, he listened when I told him Sable Canyon offered the land, access, and isolation we needed to build something permanent.

He bought it and founded the Black Crowns Motorcycle Club—brotherhood first, business second, violence only when justice demanded it.

I had thought myself an occasional adviser with a motorcycle and a standing invitation to the compound. My mentor had considered me a founding member and settled the disagreement by sewing a founders patch onto my cut while I was deployed, then informed me after the fact that the matter was closed.

The same stubbornness drove us when we established Black Castle Security, combining real operational experience with the preparation and discipline most private firms only promised in expensive brochures.

Rook Holdings grew around the company and the club afterward, creating a legitimate structure that employed veterans, funded our community projects, and ensured none of us ever needed to touch drugs, trafficking, or any other business that preyed on people too vulnerable to fight back.

Everything I had built carried some trace of what Otis had taught me, which was probably why the memory of finding him refused to loosen its grip.

We’d planned to meet for breakfast at the diner like we had so many times before, and by eight-fifteen I already knew something was wrong.

Otis had been many things during the seventy-eight years he’d walked this earth, but late wasn’t one of them.

I had paid for my untouched coffee, walked out, and drove directly to the ranch. The cold unease spreading through my gut had already become certainty by the time I turned beneath the weathered wooden sign at the end of his drive.

The kitchen radio was playing when I entered through the unlocked back door, the announcer’s cheerful voice scraping against the silence while a scorched smell drifted from a coffeepot that had boiled nearly dry.

One of Otis’s ceramic mugs lay shattered beside the table, and he was on the floor several feet away, his body twisted awkwardly with one hand curled against his chest and the other clawing weakly at worn boards.

I was beside him before the door stopped swinging behind me, checking his airway, breathing, and pulse while I used my free hand to call Reaper first. He was our club doctor, and I’d trusted him with my life long before he’d become one of the best trauma surgeons in Southern California.

He lived at the clubhouse, so he was closer than the nearest ambulance and was already moving before I ended the call.

Otis’s speech was incomprehensible. One side of his face had gone slack, and his unfocused eyes kept trying to find mine as I gave Reaper the symptoms and the approximate time Otis might have gone down.

I contacted emergency services next, pressed the switch that unlocked the gate, and followed Reaper’s instructions while every controlled breath I took scraped through lungs that felt too tight.

Reaper came into the kitchen minutes later.

He dropped to his knees, assessed Otis, and began working with the cold efficiency that had saved more lives than anyone outside the club would ever know.

By the time the paramedics arrived, he had stabilized enough of the immediate crisis to give the old man a chance, then climbed into the ambulance with him while I followed close enough that the flashing lights painted the hood of my truck red and white all the way to the hospital.

The doctors took Otis for imaging almost immediately, and within minutes, a surgical team was rushing him through the corridor.

His eyes found me as they pushed the gurney past, and his fingers moved restlessly against the blanket until I closed my hand around his.

The grip he returned was weak, but the urgency in it punched straight through the control I’d held since I found him on the kitchen floor.

“Stryker.”

“I’m here.”

“I…need to…call Jack.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Ranch.” His lips struggled around the word, and the muscles along his throat worked as he fought to force out more. “Jack doesn’t know…about our deal.”

“You can tell Jack yourself when you’re back home.”

His fingers tightened once before his strength began to fade. “Call.”

“You can do it later. You’re too damn stubborn to let that ranch go before you’re at least a hundred, so stop worrying about it and let them fix you.”

One corner of his mouth had twitched, the smallest trace of his usual dry amusement appearing beneath the damage the stroke had done to his face.

The surgical team pulled the gurney away before I could say anything else, leaving me beneath the harsh corridor lights with his warmth still lingering against my palm.

I stood there until the doors closed, then forced my hand open and reminded myself that he had survived long enough to reach surgeons who knew how to give him the best chance possible.

Otis hadn’t needed to explain what he meant by our deal because I remembered the first time he’d mentioned it years earlier.

Otis had studied the compound taking shape beyond the trees that lined the Black Crowns property at the edge of his land.

He had watched the crews pouring foundations and running utilities for a moment before informing me that he had already decided what would happen to the ranch after he died.

“If Jack doesn’t want the ranch when I’m gone, you get first crack at it.”

“I’m not taking property from your family.”