Outlaw's Promise Read online

  Outlaw’s Promise

  Helena Newbury

  Foster & Black

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  1. Annabelle

  2. Annabelle

  3. Carrick

  4. Annabelle

  5. Carrick

  6. Annabelle

  7. Carrick

  8. Annabelle

  9. Carrick

  10. Annabelle

  11. Carrick

  12. Annabelle

  13. Annabelle

  14. Annabelle

  15. Carrick

  16. Annabelle

  17. Carrick

  18. Carrick

  19. Annabelle

  20. Carrick

  21. Annabelle

  22. Carrick

  23. Annabelle

  24. Annabelle

  25. Carrick

  26. Carrick

  27. Carrick

  28. Annabelle

  29. Carrick

  30. Annabelle

  31. Carrick

  32. Carrick

  33. Annabelle

  34. Carrick

  35. Annabelle

  36. Carrick

  37. Annabelle

  38. Carrick

  39. Annabelle

  40. Annabelle

  41. Carrick

  42. Annabelle

  43. Annabelle

  44. Carrick

  45. Carrick

  46. Annabelle

  47. Carrick

  48. Annabelle

  49. Carrick

  50. Carrick

  51. Annabelle

  52. Carrick

  53. Annabelle

  54. Carrick

  55. Annabelle

  56. Annabelle

  57. Carrick

  58. Annabelle

  59. Carrick

  60. Annabelle

  61. Annabelle

  62. Annabelle

  63. Carrick

  Epilogue

  © Copyright Helena Newbury 2016

  The right of Helena Newbury to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

  This book is entirely a work of fiction. All characters, companies, organizations, products and events in this book, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any real persons, living or dead, events, companies, organizations or products is purely coincidental.

  This book contains adult scenes and is intended for readers 18+.

  Cover by Mayhem Cover Creations

  Main cover model image licensed from (and copyright remains with) Joseph Cannata.

  Prologue

  This is my story.

  It’s about a big, scary, incredible biker they call Irish.

  It’s about Mac and Hunter and Ox and Viking and Mom (not my mom).

  It’s about a necklace and a promise. Family and loyalty. Sex and violence. Riding and sunsets.

  I was going to start it with him saving me.

  But to really understand it, we have to start with how I saved him.

  1

  Annabelle

  Twelve Years Ago

  I sat bolt upright in bed. What was that?

  There was only silence, now, but I could still feel the sound echoing around my bedroom. The furniture in my dollhouse was still rattling.

  I replayed the noise in my mind: a low growl, like a tiger getting ready to pounce. Then a crash of glass, a screech of metal and a final heavy thump.

  And it had come from right outside my window.

  I clutched my stuffed bunny, Perkins—just in case he was scared. He looked up at me with his one remaining eye and told me to be brave.

  I strained my ears but the house was silent. Good. He hadn’t woken up.

  Very carefully, I crawled across my bed to the window and looked out.

  Beyond the little field of wilted maize, the fence that separated our farm from the road was even more crooked than usual. Something big and dark had slammed up against it.

  It moved. I ducked back down below the window, then cautiously peeked again. A man, bigger than my step-dad. Bigger even than I remembered my real dad being, and he was a big man. The man was trying to get up, but he kept slumping back down with a grunt of pain. His legs wouldn’t support him.

  He needed help.

  I bit my lip and looked towards the room my step-dad shared with my mom. When I’d gone to bed, he’d been a good way down the bottle. Now he’d be in the heavy, coma-like sleep that would last until noon. If I woke him now, I’d be feeling it for a week. And I couldn’t wake my mom without waking him.

  I looked towards the window. It was down to me. I was only eight but there was no one else.

  I took a deep breath, unlatched my window and crawled out onto the flat roof below, then down the wooden trellis to the ground. My bare feet sank into soft grass and the desiccated leaves the wind had stripped from the maize. The summer sun hadn’t even started to creep over the horizon, yet, so I figured it must be the very middle of the night. Overhead, the sky was a glorious bowl of inky black dusted with a million stars.

  I crept down the path, Perkins dangling from one hand. I could see the motorcycle, now, huge and gleaming, lying on its side near the fence like a wounded horse, one wheel still spinning. The road glittered with glass.

  My steps got smaller and smaller as I approached the man. He seemed to have given up moving and just lay there on his back, staring up at the stars. I gawped at him, as fascinated as I would have been by an alien.

  He wore boots, but not the plain, dirt-brown work boots men around town wore: these were black leather, studded with gleaming metal. He had a helmet, too, a metal bowl that hugged his scalp but left his face free. And over his white t-shirt he had a sort of leather jacket...but someone mean had cut the arms off of it. The badge on the front said Hell’s Princes.

  I took a step back. Mom said hell was bad, even though my step-dad said much, much worse words all the time. What if this man was dangerous? What if he was here to hurt us and I was out here on my own with him?

  I squeezed Perkins’ paw for courage. “Are you bad?” I asked the man. Because in my mind, however evil he was, he still had to answer truthfully.

  His head whipped around and he groaned in pain. His dark brows rose in amazement as he saw me: three feet of white nightdress and frizzy red hair. “What?”

  I already had my answer. His eyes weren’t like my step-dad’s, cold and gray and bloodshot from whiskey. They were blue like the sky when the storm clouds have just cleared and everything’s fresh and new. Those eyes didn’t want to hurt anyone.

  Both of us looked up as a low growl vibrated along the road. The same growl his bike had made, but now it was a harmony. More than one of them. His friends?

  He looked back at me in panic. “Go inside!” he snapped. “Go!”

  No. Not his friends.

  For the first time, I noticed he was pressing one hand to his side, as if he’d been running and he had a stitch there. But when he shifted his palm a little, I saw the red oozing out. And he looked towards the approaching engines when he did it. “They hurt you?” I asked.

  He looked at me again, sighed and went to snap at me again. But he seemed to catch himself at the last second and his face softened. It didn’t matter that he had black stubble all over his cheeks, which my step-dad said was for losers. It didn’t matter that he was so big, with muscles as big as my head swelling his arms. I didn’t feel that he’d ever hurt me, not even when he was mad. “Get outta here,” he told me. There was something odd about his voice, an accent that sounded like ancient, weathered rocks banging together to make silver s
parks. “They might hurt you, too.”

  My stomach knotted and I crushed Perkins’ paw in my hand and stepped back. I didn’t want to get hurt. The sort of hurt they’d done to him looked worse than the kind my step-dad did. I took a few stumbling steps back towards the house.

  Then I stopped. I didn’t want him to get hurt, either.

  I looked at the road. The approaching bikes were still out of sight, down at the bottom of the next valley, but the growl of their engines was getting louder.

  I put Perkins carefully down on the ground, walked over to the man and took hold of one arm. Then I heaved. He twisted a little where he lay, but I couldn’t lift him.

  “What are you doing?!” he snarled, pain twisting his face. “Get out of here!”

  I ignored his protests, stepped back and thought.

  I’ve always known I’m weird. I’m too interested in how things work. Right back in elementary school, the teacher would have to shout to get my attention because I’d be staring at the door-closing mechanism, or looking at the construction machinery across the street. My mind just seemed to lock onto those things, the smoothly-sliding pistons and hard metal like ice cream and candy for my brain. My mom said I was like my dad, who’d designed engines. My step-dad just said I was stupid.

  All I knew was, the man was too heavy to lift but I could see in my head how I might be able to drag him along the ground if I could just make him slippery. There was a big green sheet of waterproof sheeting in the tool shed and I fetched that, then unfolded it next to him. I took hold of his belt—it wasn’t a leather belt but a shining silver chain—and used that to roll him onto the sheeting. He groaned as I did it and some Very Bad Words came out when his injured side pressed into the ground, but then he was on the sheeting and I bunched as much of it in my little fists as I could and started to drag him along the path to the tool shed.

  The sheeting made him slide easily but he was still heavy. I was puffing and panting by the time we reached the shed, my bare heels digging into the dirt for traction. When I had him all the way inside, I left him there and hurried back along the path and out onto the road, picking my way carefully through the glass.

  I’d never seen a motorcycle up close before—certainly not one like this, all chrome and black-painted steel. Tipping it up onto its tires was the hardest thing I’d ever done and I could barely keep it stable as I started to push it towards some bushes that hung out over the fence.

  The bushes were only a dozen feet away but it felt like a mile. I sweated and heaved and tried not to think about how loud the engines were behind me. I distracted myself by staring at the bike: at its springs and levers and gleaming engine. A machine like that was pure heaven, to me. I wanted to run my hands all over it. I wanted to dissect it, to learn how every little part worked.

  Then the front wheel hit the bushes and I let go, the bike’s momentum taking it the rest of the way. By the time it slumped sideways against the fence, it was completely out of sight.

  The engines were close, now. Too close. The growl had changed to a roar, beneath which lay heavy, overlapping thump thumps. As I started back towards the tool shed, I could hear the man cursing and calling for me. He’d managed to half-sit up, clutching at his side, and his eyes were wide with panic. He was scared for me, which was frightening...but made me feel warm, as well. I hadn’t seen that look in years. My mom used to make it when my step-dad yelled at me but these days she just went quiet and looked away.

  I was out of breath but managed to pick up the pace and run the rest of the way to the tool shed, plucking Perkins off the ground as I passed. I slammed the door behind me and sat down on the ground next to the man’s outstretched feet.

  The roar of engines built and built and the louder they got, the more frightened I got. As they crested the hill, the noise shook the shed, little bits of dust and dirt falling from the ceiling. It was too loud to talk, too loud to think...what if they hurt me like they hurt him?

  Headlights blazed across the side of the tool shed, blasting through the cracks in the wood and painting white lines across the man’s face. He looked down at me and his face tightened in anger: not at me but at the men outside. And he held out his arms for me.

  That’s when I realized I had tears in my eyes and was mashing Perkins against my chest really, really hard. I flew into the man’s arms and he cuddled me against his shoulder.

  Then the shed went dark and the pitch of the roar changed as the bikes sped past. I slowly sat back down on the ground and we stared at each other as the noise faded away.

  I fumbled around, found the battery lantern and turned it on. Its hard white glow gave me my first good look at his face. He was maybe seventeen and he had the blackest hair I’d ever seen, thick and lush and shining. His face was pale and he was sweating. “Thank you,” he said. He closed his eyes. “Just let me rest a ‘sec. Then I’ll be out of your way.”

  That accent again, hard as rock and yet beautiful. “Are you Scottish?” I asked. “Like the Loch Ness Monster?”

  He opened one eye and half-smiled around the pain. “Irish.”

  I thought about that. “Like a Leprechaun?”

  “Yeah.” The eye closed. “Like a leprechaun.”

  I stared at his side. The blood was steadily soaking across his white t-shirt, like someone had spilled blackcurrant on a tablecloth. “My mom says you should wash cuts. Or you can get ill.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t go inside. Your parents might call the cops.”

  I bit my lip, considering. If he was scared of the police then he was bad and I was supposed to stay away from bad people. But...he didn’t seem bad. Maybe he was good bad. Like Batman.

  I got to my feet. “I can get stuff and bring it here.

  He blinked up at me, then looked towards the house. “Will you get into trouble?”

  “Only if I get caught.”

  He seemed to be about to tell me not to, so I ran over to the door before he could. Then I stopped, turned back and passed Perkins over to him. “Here,” I said. “If it hurts really bad, you can squeeze his paw.”

  The man looked down at Perkins in amazement, then looked up at me and the sweetest smile I’d ever seen crept across his face. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Don’t get blood on him.”

  “I won’t.”

  Then I was running, bare feet slapping the dirt. I climbed back up the trellis, slipped in through my bedroom window and listened: nothing, not even snoring. I raided the bathroom cabinet for what I needed: I’d watched Mom patch me up and, once or twice, when my step dad’s team lost a game, I’d helped her patch herself up. Then I went to the kitchen and grabbed a big bottle of water and some of my mom’s banana loaf.

  Back in the tool shed, the man had lifted his t-shirt and twisted so that he could look at his side. There were two long, straight slashes across his muscles, blood welling and running. He looked up as I entered as if worried I’d freak out, but I shook my head: I’d seen blood before.

  At first he tried to get me to give him the supplies so he could do it himself, but it was too awkward and he soon gave up and let me do it. I washed the wound out with water and then antiseptic: he hissed but managed not to yell. Then I pressed a gauze pad against it and stuck it in place with tape. “Did they do this to you?” I asked, jerking my head towards the road.

  He nodded. “I got away but they came after me. They were wearing me down and then I came off my bike.” He ran his hand over his newly-dressed wound. “Thank you. I’m Carrick.”

  Carrick. I’d never heard that name before. A foreign name from a mystical land. “I’m Annabelle.”

  I passed him the water and the banana loaf. He stared at them for a second. “God bless you,” he muttered, and devoured them.

  Over the next four hours he drank the whole bottle of water, plus another I fetched him, and worked his way through four thick slices of banana loaf. He told me about riding his bike, about the motorcycle club who’d just made him a “Pr
ospect”—a potential member—even though he was only seventeen. He told me about the—he had to think hard to find words suitable for my ears—eejits who’d cut him with a knife, a rival club. He showed me the Hell’s Princes patch on the back of the sleeveless leather jacket he called a cut. Sometimes he’d doze, drifting off in the middle of a sentence. But each time he woke, his color was better.

  When the sky started to lighten outside, he gingerly stood up. He was cautious at first, holding onto the wall for support, but he managed to stagger outside and retrieve his bike. As soon as he swung a leg over the saddle he seemed better, as if the bike and he had missed each other. “Will you be okay?” I asked.

  He nodded, then looked at me. “Will you?” He looked around at our ramshackle house and the field of dried-out maize.

  I thought about telling him my step-dad sometimes hit us. But my mom had always told me that I shouldn’t disrespect him, and telling other people our secrets probably qualified. So I just nodded.

  Carrick looked as if he wasn’t satisfied. He reached under his t-shirt and took off a slender gold chain. “Have this,” he told me. “For good luck.”

  It was a four-leaf clover in shining gold. I looked down at it in amazement as he settled it around my neck. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever given me.

  “And I want you to have something else, too,” he said. He felt in his pockets, found a gas station receipt and a stub of pencil, and wrote a phone number. “You saved me. Where I’m from, that means I owe you a boon. A favor. If you ever need me, you call that number. Okay?”

  I nodded and clenched the paper tight in my fist. Then he started the bike and the heavy thump thump turned to a roar as he pulled away. I watched the big bike until it was out of sight and then turned and ran back to the house before someone missed me.

  When I was fifteen, my mom died. I thought maybe our grief would bring my step-dad and me together but instead the resentment started to build. He’d invited my mom into his house but he’d never really wanted me.