Prologue
Connor Burns
Ihad oil on my hands, my bike between my legs, and blood on my mind.
Images of defeated Bandits, my own bare hands delivering the killing punch, screamed across my brain. Guns were useful for self-defense. Guns were useful for long-range attacks.
Guns did not do the trick as well as fists could for death. Guns took out the enemy much too quick; there was simply no suffering unless done by accident. A purposeful shot could kill instantly.
But fists? Fists sent a message and delivered a killing blow. A solid punch provided me what I wanted and what I needed.
And right now, after seeing what Cole had shown us, though my fists grabbed the handlebars of my bike, they yearned to wrap around the necks of some Bandits and suffocate the life out of them.
Or, perhaps, this new enemy that may not be so new.
Around me, the rest of the Black Reapers’ officers and Cole drove. We moved like a military unit down the interstate and into the heart of Albuquerque—with deliberate speed, but also never once moving out of formation and never once getting confused. We operated as a hive mind, and having been fully initiated did not so much create that as it did affirm that.
The instant we all got to Cole’s downtown bar, Reapers, we all parked our bikes on the side of the road, hopped off, and sprinted in. Not a soul among us worried about a parking ticket, nor would we give a shit if we came out to one.
For what mattered right now was seeing with our own fucking eyes what Cole had shown us a photo of.
I was the third person in behind Brock and Steele, although Mason more or less came in with me at the same time. The reaction from everyone who hurried in was the same. Stunned at the size of the graffiti on the wall, the clearing of the tables to get to it.
And the two words that had made Cole look very, very nervous when he’d first walked in.
“Fallen Saints.”
The literal writing on the wall. And it did not look good.
“What does this mean, Cole?” Brock said. “I thought you said you wiped them out.”
Their previous enemies.I didn’t care much for a backstory; if Cole did not like them, I did not like them. If Cole needed to kill them, I would kill them. I did not need a psychological profile of every soul whose ass I beat to make myself feel good about it.
“The Black Reapers and Fallen Saints were mortal enemies for years running back in Springsville,” he said. “It went as far back as before my brother and I became adults, in fact. Like the Bloods and the Crips.”
Shit, didn’t know it would be that bad.
“Near the end of a couple of years ago, things reached an ugly head. There had always been violence, but for the most part, we kept it contained and between us. But then public areas got involved, shootouts occurred, the town became unsafe…I mean, you all saw theLA Timesarticle, right?”
Brock nodded yes. I gave no response. I didn’t spend my free time reading newspapers; what happened in the big cities or in politics had absolutely no fucking bearing on how I lived my life. If some pearl-clutching politician here tried to enact some law on MCs, I was sure someone more intelligent like Zack or Brock would let me know what was up.
“Well, for those who don’t, Springsville became something of the crime capital in Southern California. Which, considering Compton and Watts are in the same area, is really saying something. But one night, we raided their compound. We took out their leader. My wife, Lilly, was the daughter of their leader. She said that two of them had survived, but they had fled north. Not southeast. All I can conclude is that we must have missed some.”
I had known Cole now for almost a full year, and though we didn’t interact much—I was just a fucking enforcer, not a club president or any other fancy title—I’d always seen him as stoic, even-keeled, maybe a little prone to being too generous or kind, but overall a guy hard to fluster.
But now? By no means was he being a pussy. But the concern was obvious. And if a biker got concerned, the shit was a real fucking threat.
“Maybe the fucking Bandits are trying to intimidate us,” I said, the idea popping to mind as I said it. “Maybe they did their own research on us, figured out we came from SoCal, and are trying to use our past to try and fuck with us.”
“Perhaps, but I doubt it,” Cole said, his eyes still gazing at the vandalism, barely turning back to the rest of us. “The Bandits always struck me as small-town pests, not something that could be part of a larger crime ring.”
Larger crime ring. Well, fuck us in the ass. We might have to pull in help from California if we’re dealing with a fucking crime ring here.
Cole was right, though. While we were no FBI agents, trailing people across state lines, Santa Maria was not fucking New York City, and it wasn’t even a quarter the size of Albuquerque. It was as small town as America got, and the only thing that made it stand out relative to other small towns was its proximity to a major city.
If one could ever call something in New Mexico major.
“This is bad. This is really bad.”
