I Ran Home With My Baby to My Brother's Biker Friends, and the Three Who Tormented Me Said I Was Theirs to Guard novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Move
Zo parks a rented van at the Saints' yard at 1 a.m. and carries her baby past Dirk Ziegler into the clubhouse; her phone says MARCEL.
I parked the rented minivan in the salvage yard lot at one in the morning, with the heater dying and my daughter asleep in the back.
Snow was coming sideways off the lake.
My lip had split open two states ago and frozen shut again somewhere past the last gas station.
My left palm was wrapped in a napkin, soaked through, from tearing a window screen out of its frame.
I had called my brother a dozen times since I left.
Every call went to the same recorded woman.
"The person you are trying to reach is not available."
I turned off the engine, and the cold started coming in through the floor.
Across the lot, the old grain-elevator office stood lit in two windows.
The sign on the gate said NO VISITORS AFTER DARK.
It had said that since before I could read.
My brother's motorcycle club kept its clubhouse behind that sign, and the last time I stood in this lot I was fifteen.
A man named Dietrich Ziegler had walked me to the street by the back of my coat while my mother's funeral guests watched.
I had hated him for nine years.
He was the only door left on this lake.
The side door of the elevator office opened, and a tall man in a leather vest came out into the snow.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps.
He looked at the van, and then at the driver's window, and then at my face.
Dirk.
He was thirty-four now, lean and hard, with cropped dark-blond hair and a scar that cut through his left eyebrow.
His eyes went to my lip, and stayed there longer than they should have.
I rolled the window down.
"You can't be here," he said.
He said it flat, with no heat in it at all.
"I'm looking for my brother."
"I know who you're looking for."
Two more men came out behind him.
The first was Nik Lindqvist, broad and blond, with a beard and a chipped front tooth.
He saw me, and he laughed once, short and surprised, as if I'd told him a joke.
The second was Mason Ekstrom, young and sandy-haired, in a tow-company jacket under his vest.
Mason did not laugh.
He looked at the back seat of the van and went very still.
"Zo," he said, quietly.
Nobody had called me that in years.
"There's a baby in there," Mason said.
"Her name is Zuri," I said.
"She's seven months old."
Dirk's jaw moved.
"Cyrus isn't here," he said.
"Where is he?"
"Not your business, and not ours."
"Dirk," Mason said.
"Not now."
I looked at the clubhouse door, at the light on the steps and the snow filling in my own tracks.
I thought about the four hundred dollars, and the bathroom window.
I thought about my mother's grave, which was the only other place I had a name.
I opened the van door and got out.
The wind took my breath.
Nobody moved to help me.
I went around to the sliding door, popped it, and unbuckled Zuri from the car seat in her gray blanket.
She stirred against my neck and made a small cross sound.
I lifted her out and held her on my hip, and I felt every one of those three men watching me do it.
I swung the diaper bag onto my shoulder with my good hand.
The strap slid and caught on my coat.
Then I walked up the lot toward the steps, toward Dirk Ziegler, with my daughter's head under my chin.
I didn't slow down.
"My brother is on your patch," I said.
"I'm his blood."
Dirk didn't step aside.
"I'm not leaving my daughter in a car in January."
"It's November," Nik said.
"It's January in that van," I said.
"Move."
Something went across Dirk's face.
I couldn't read it, and I didn't try.
He turned his body, just enough, and I went past him close enough to smell cold leather and gun oil and woodsmoke.
At the door, the diaper bag strap slipped off my shoulder.
Dirk's hand came up, caught the bag by its strap, and lifted it clear of me.
His fingers did not touch my coat, my arm or my hand.
He held it out to the side, a wall's width away from me, as if I were something on a hot stove.
I noticed that.
I told myself he was being careful with the baby, and I went in.
The clubhouse was a long hall with a bar at one end, pool tables, and a stove ticking in the corner.
Beyond them stood a long table of scarred oak under a hanging lamp.
Every man in the club knew whose chair sat at its head.
I walked to it, pulled it out, and sat down in the president's seat with Zuri on my lap.
Mason came in behind me with the door still open and snow on his shoulders.
Nik leaned in the archway with his arms folded and his chipped tooth showing.
Dirk set my diaper bag on the table with one finger, like evidence.
"Get out of his chair," he said.
"Make me," I said.
His eyes were the color of a lake in March.
He didn't touch me.
He stood there a full second, and then my coat pocket buzzed against my hip.
It buzzed again, long, in the quiet room.
I took the phone out, and the screen lit up in the middle of the table where all three of them could see it.
MARCEL.
I turned it face down on the club's own oak and put my hand flat on top of it.
"That's my husband," I said.
"He's a police sergeant."
I looked up at Dirk.
"He'll be here by morning."
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