Della Kroft
Della Kroft
Junie Barlow came home from nursing school to bury her brother. The Lost Hounds Motorcycle Club paid for the coffin. Their president, Alaric Draeger, forty-eight years old, stood in the church doorway with a bruise on his jaw and never came in. She takes the only job in town that will have her - bartending at the club's bar - and spends six months listening to drunk men tell her two different stories about how her brother died. The truth is worse than either. He was selling club routes to pay her tuition. Alaric let him. Alaric didn't get there in time. In January she moves into the clubhouse to keep the books. Alaric tells her to leave four times. She stops counting. In April the rival crew comes for the clubhouse, and Junie is the one on the roof with a rifle. And Alaric is the one who carries her brother's dog out of the fire and takes a bullet doing it.