Chapter One
RAZE
The mountains don’t bow out of respect. They bow because they remember what happens when they don’t. I'm a dragon shifter who lost his fire, who now breathes ice as cold as the snow capping these mountains. I have a grudge with this wilderness, and it knows to yield to me.
As President of The Kings of Anarchy MC, New Hampshire, I own this stretch of the world the same way I own my men, through blood, silence, and the kind of violence that teaches lessons no one forgets. The Appalachians cage me in frozen stone and snow, mile after brutal mile of wilderness designed to keep the rest of the world out and my kind buried.
The cuts were Scar’s idea. In the late seventies, human biker clubs were multiplying everywhere, carving up territory that was already ours, and it had been ours for centuries before the first of them ever kicked an engine to life. We could keep killing them as they crossed our borders, or… we could look like one of them.
Turns out humans stop asking questions when you give them a category to put you in. We took the name, took the structure, and suddenly, hunters and cops went looking for human criminals instead of whatever weactuallyare.
Smart.
Practical.
The kind of thinking that keeps a brotherhood breathing across centuries.
Big Daddy and the national club charter called what came next, exile.
Sent us to rot in the mountains after I burned too hot, pushed too far, gave them a problem they couldn’t explain away with leather cuts and road names.
I call it territory.
The cold rips along my scales like broken glass, as I tear through the November sky on wings meant to burn, not freeze. Frost crusts over armor forged for fire, ice spiderwebbing along my blue scales where flame should live. Every breath drags out white, sharp, and fucking useless, a mockery of what once rolled from my lungs in roaring heat.
The sky doesn’t welcome me.
It parts because it has learned better.
Below, the forest sprawls thick and black, skeletal trees clawing at nothing, stripped bare, and starved by winter’s advance.
No roads.
No lights.
No witnesses.
That was the point.
A place where a chapter like mine could rot in peace, far from curious eyes and louder mouths.
A place where monsters don’t have to pretend to be men.
They shoved us into the mountains because I burned too hot.
Because my fire didn’t stop when it should have.
Because arrogance and rage make poor companions when paired with power.
So, the witch broke me.
Now the clubhouse squats against the mountain’s spine like a scar that never healed. Stone, steel, and timber soaked in old sins. From the air, it looks less like shelter and more like a warning, its heart buried deep beneath rock and wards. Down there, beneath layers of magic and ice, my fire still lives.
Trapped.
A living flame sealed inside a crystal dome at the center of the clubhouse, dwindling year by year, breath by breath, waiting on something I don’t believe in anymore.
Peace.
