Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 56395 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 282(@200wpm)___ 226(@250wpm)___ 188(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56395 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 282(@200wpm)___ 226(@250wpm)___ 188(@300wpm)
Jacqueline Rutledge came to Sable Canyon to honor her grandfather and build her horse rehabilitation dream. She never expected Stryker to help when trouble came for the ranch. Or that he’d move into her house and make it clear no one gets to Jacqueline without going through him first
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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.