Page 1 of The Grief We Hold

PROLOGUE

TWO YEARS AGO

I’m a walking, talking corpse of a man capable of only one thing:

Taking lives.

Once, I was alive. Had a strong identity, fulfilling relationships, and an exciting career as a biker—reasons to smile.

My life was filled with everything good in this world.

There was my brotherhood, the Colorado chapter of the Iron Outlaws. True one percenters. A modern-day motorcycle club with the most traditional of values that eschewed the law: a life created outside the lines of society.

There, I thrived as sergeant at arms, enjoying the responsibilities and privileges of my title.

Then there was my wife, Hallie. The mother of my child, and owner of my every heartbeat. Strawberry-blonde hair that would lean copper, and a playful spirit that yanked me from the darker side of my life.

And finally, my little sunbeam. My daughter, Lottie. I called herLotsfor short. Not quite a year old, but she had me wrappedaround her little finger. On the day she was born, I said to Butch, my president, that I’d kill for her.

Didn’t think that three hundred and seventeen days later, I’d be here to keep my vow in the dank barn that sits on the club’s ranch. My knife flashes in the half-light. One side is engraved with Hallie’s name, the other with Lottie’s.

“Fuck you, motherfucker,” shouts the man hanging by his feet from the barn joist.

Shoutsmight be too strong a word. He’s been screaming for the past hour, so his voice is hoarse. In between his cries, there’s the steady monotonous drip of his blood hitting the tarpaulin.

No member of his motorcycle club is coming to save him. They don’t know we have him. And even if they did, they wouldn’t cross the Oakum Ridge Ranch property line.

The Midtown Rebels Motorcycle Club is a club with no ethics, no understanding of what it truly means to be one percenters. The club started in Boston, and like a virus, it keeps trying to spread across the United States. Filled with Plastic Paddies who loudly claim their Irishness while simultaneously dissociating from what it means to be Irish.

They’re cheap, watered-down replicas who copied our club. Tried to do what we do instead of finding something original.

Then they came to claim Colorado as their own.

Their first mistake.

Then they came for me.

Their second mistake.

Then they took my girls’ lives while looking for me.

My soul seeped from my body as I held Hallie and Lottie in my arms. Smoke, one of my Outlaw brothers, had to hold me down when the police tried to arrange the removal of their cold bodies.

I got my road name, Wraith, because of my pale skin and long white-blond hair, but it’s now who I am: a ghost with unfinished business, eager to pass on so I can join my girls.

“You don’t need to do it this way, Wraith,” Smoke says, his rough voice interrupting my thoughts.

Our Stetsoned road captain is worried about my soul or some shit. He’s stayed by my side since it happened, trying to keep me on the path of the righteous man—or as righteous as an Iron Outlaw can be.

I kick the corner of the tarp beneath the hanging man. “Yes. I do.”

I peer at the man’s cut. His road name is Reaper.

Ironic, seeing as I’m the one with the knife in my hands, and he’s the one bleeding out slowly.

Smoke slaps my shoulder. “You’re losing yourself instead of dealing with losingthem,” he says. The words should affect me, but the branches of nerves and feelings in my body shut down the day I shoveled dirt over my girls’ coffin.

The two quarters I keep in my cut’s pocket clink together. If the legends are true and you really do need coins to cross the Rivers Acheron and Styx, I’m not going to be caught short.

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