Prologue
Killjoy
“You sure you don’t wanna stick around this year?” Crawler, my brother, asked me the moment we cut our engines. He flicked his kickstand down and dismounted.
“Nah,” I replied, and he smirked at me as if he’d been expecting it.
It was the same old song and dance every year. No matter where I found myself mid-November, I dropped everything and headed for Gray Fort, Tennessee. The Steel Paragons MC compound wasn’t my home, but it was sort of one of many. Since I wore the Nomad patch, I didn’t belong anywhere, and that was how I liked it.
If I wanted to grow roots, I woulda been born a tree.
We’d just finished our annual family run. Two weeks of ridin’ and fuckin’ our way down the east coast and back up again, leavin’ a trail of one-night stands without names. Separately, of course. We might be backcountry Tennessee born and bred, but we don’t fuck our kin.
It was a hell of a tradition, but it was the only one we had. Well,Ihad, since he lived here and did the big holiday shindigs with the MC and family.
And he tried so hard to get me to stay every year.
Not my style.
I had a little cabin in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere, and a bunch of bikes calling my name to work on them. I was gonna be a hibernating biker for the next two months, and I couldn’t fuckin’ wait.
CHAPTER ONE
Danny
I pulled off the side of the road—if you could call the narrow dirt lane a road—and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
Because, see, the cabin I’d rented for two weeks was up ahead, or at least it was supposed to be, but the road had only been plowed to this point. I could even see where the plow turned around to go back down. And since I hadn’t passed a snowplow on the way up here, I could only assume it was done for the day.
I squinted at the very reflective white snow.
Done for the season, by the looks of it.
Okay.
I squinted again, attempting to blindly reach for my sunglasses in the console between the seats as I stared at the black dot on the horizon. Shoving my sunglasses on only dulled the magnified reflection of the sun, but it was enough to see that there was indeed adoton the horizon, and I bet thatdotwas my cabin.
Where were the snow-covered trees? The idyllic Christmas holiday vibes, the picturesque frozen lake, and all those things that I was pretty much promised? I thought I saw some trees further in the distance, but it was not quite the image I had in my head from what I remembered seeing in the email.
I twisted in the seat, thankful that my little Corolla couldn’t carry much, because it would appear I would be lugging my shit alllll the way to that dot, which I really hoped would turn out to be the cabin.
This was not the way I wanted to start off my super amazing and supposed to be empowering solo holiday.
“Stop complaining,” I told myself. “Checklist.”
And so, I started going through the checklist.
Snow? Check.
Solitude?I looked around.Double check.
A new start?
Okay, could I still call it that even if I wasn’t sure how I was going to label this as a new start?
A holiday to remember?
Well, I couldn’t check that one off yet, but I was going to do my best to make it one. After all, I had a whole back seat of Christmas decorations and five bottles of champagne to ring in the new year. That ought to set the mood. Was five excessive? Probably, especially if it was just little ole me drinking them. But I was smart, because I didn’t think I was going to make it two weeks to New Year’s Eve without drinkingsomething.
