“I don’t want to be free,” I snap. “This is the kind of thing I’ll never be free from. I killed my brother.”
Without warning, he shakes me. Hard.
“You listen to me, okay? You’ll go on living. Do something good with your life.”
“How would you know about goodness?” It’s rude. But I don’t want to be lectured tonight. I just want everything to stop.
Surprisingly, instead of reacting with anger, he smiles. Actuallysmiles, and I swear to god, it stops my very soul in its tracks.
“All that sass and venom. You’d make a good queen one day.”
He releases me and, still grinning, edges away. I don’t want him to go, so I say the first thing that comes to mind as he throws a leg over the rail, onto the first rung of that ladder.
I press my back against the tower to prove that I’m not going to do anything stupid like edge near the railing again. “What? Are you offering to make me your queen?”
His grin widens like he thinks I’m a silly little girl, but I don’t miss the glint in his eyes. A glint that hits me straight to my core.
“Darlin’, I said you’d make a good queen. Not that I’d ever have you as mine. I got enough fucking complications in my life. You have the sass and spunk in you to take you far. Get the hell out of this town. Go study somewhere. See some of the world. You’re not meant for my kind of life.”
His husky laugh joins the echo of his boots and hands as he deftly climbs his way back down the water tower.
Long after the roar of the bikes disappears into the night, I sit up on the tower. Dawn breaks, and I watch the sun creep its way into the graying sky, staining it with brilliant shades of pink, purple, orange, and red.
I know.
I don’t know how I know exactly, but for all this time, I was made for him. My dark angel. My redemption. He came to me as though from death itself. He came to save me from it. To claim me. Not for the underworld, but for this life. We collided tonight like the clash of two different temperatures, one storm meeting another.
I am his. I will be his.
Chapter One
Steel
Three Years Later
My home is always gonna be with my brothers.
Our clubhouse gets used. Hard. We drink there, fight there, fuck there, fix bikes there, and crash wherever we drop when the night finally burns out. It’s where we do church, where we bleed, where we celebrate, and where we tear into each other and put ourselves back together. It’s not fragile and it sure as hell ain’t holy, but it’s ours. You don’t just drag any stranger through the doors. You don’t let heat follow you home.
That’s where The Canteen comes in.
The Canteen is where we let things get loud. Where outsiders mix with locals. Where we drink too much, pick up women, and start fights that don’t need to come back to our front step. It’s neutral ground. Cops expect trouble there. Rivals expect trouble there. Nobody’s surprised when shit goes sideways between the front door and the back exit. And when it does, it stays off club property—off our bikes, off our beds, and off the place we sleep with our weapons close and our brothers closer.
So yeah. The Canteen serves a purpose.
Doesn’t matter that it’s poorly lit. Or that the pool tables are pretty much falling apart, with less green on the tops than there are pockets of bare wood sticking through. It doesn’t matter that the floorboards are uneven and filthy or that thebooths are highly suspect. Hell, even the chairs seem to be coated with a layer of grime, but that kind of shit doesn’t bother anyone.
The town knows that the bar is frequented by Steel Riders and even though it doesn’t belong to us, I do give a hefty donation to the owner, a middle-aged greasy little man named Hecker, who actually gives a shit about the rat hole. He bartends six nights a week and takes the seventh off because no, the place ain’t closed on Sunday.
A high-pitched laugh echoes through the gloom, the thick clouds of pot and cigarette smoke, and whiskey-induced conversation. The cackle belongs to Ginger, a woman who looks exactly like her name sounds. She’s pushing forty, but life hasn’t been kind to her. She’s Brick’s old lady, a huge twenty-five-year-old bastard who likes to claim he’s Irish, but we all know he was born and raised in Kansas. Says he likes redheads because they remind him of home. Ginger ain’t a natural redhead. She has been dying her hair for a good ten years. It’s so brittle it looks like it could snap right off. She’s nice though, for the most part, and I guess that’s what actually matters.
When I started the MC, there were some ground rules. First, we take ‘em all. Reformed addicts, ex-cons, ex-military. Doesn’t matter to me, as long as the guy’s heart is in the right place and he pledges allegiance to his brothers. That might sound corny as shit, but trust me, when it comes down to taking a bullet, it’s not fucking corny at all. So yeah, if a guy is willing to lay down his life for his brothers at the end of his prospecting with the club, then he’s in.
All I demand is loyalty, and that means that brothers are responsible for each other’s lives. Which means no one gets fucked up on hard drugs. Each man pulls their weight in the club and out of it. We stay on the right side of the law as much as wecan. No murdering and no violence unless we go to war, and we haven’t done that for nearly a decade. And most importantly, old ladies—and women who hang around the bars hoping to become one—are treated like human beings. No abuse. No forcing a lady. Fucking ever.
I’m not running a bunch of thugs. I run a brotherhood, a place where men can come together to find the family they never had. God knows I wouldn’t be here without my brothers. It saved my life, becoming a fucking misfit family, and I have seen it save just about every single one of these men’s lives in return.
I look up just as Ginger laughs again and says something about fresh meat. Her words capture my attention, because most people know to steer clear of the place, especially on a Friday night. I narrow my eyes and lean forward, one hand curled around my half-full glass of whiskey, the other twitching on my knee, always ready, even when there isn’t any call to be ready for shit. I was born into violence. The club has been the least violent part of my life, but that shit is in my blood, and my blood runs fucking thick.
