Prologue
Cage – Age Eighteen
I gently bite my bottom lip as I eye my cut in the mirror—a cut I’ve just received and always wanted but now I’ll have to hand it back if the paperwork in my left hand says I am going to be a dad. Disappointment seeps deep into my pores, at eighteen, I’m looking at DNA test results, fucking paternity results and in about six and a half months, I'll be a parent.
Fuck, fuck, fuck,fuck!
I can’t bring a baby up within the club, I just fucking can’t, not right now.
I lower my head and squeeze my eyes shut.
The Carnage MC is my birthright. I’m supposed to take over the club from my father, Chains, when I turn twenty-three who reluctantly took the role from my grandfather last monthbecause the old man was killed. It is a job he never wanted but knows I’m not old enough to take over yet.
Once I’ve learned the ropes from my dad, I’m supposed to lead this club and take it higher. I spent the last year of high school prospecting, doing grunt work. I did more than my friends—my brothers—because of who my father is and now I’m going to have to walk away from the club, from my legacy, my fucking life.
“Fuck, Dad is going to kill me,” I mutter as I look at the test results again and scrunch them up. I’m not fucking stupid—I know I was trapped but the joke is on her, because she won’t get my property patch. Nope. Instead, I’ll have to look around Hill Crest’s tattoo shops because once I hand in my cut, the club won’t continue to fund my own shop – Carnage Tats – that I’ve just opened.
I sigh. Toya and I had been, I guess fuck buddies is the right term, since we were fifteen and things were going well. Don’t get me wrong, we fucked other people and never put a label on us but if I couldn’t be bothered with the club bunnies or with the employees at Carnage Angels, the clubs strip club, she was there. She was easy and I got my rocks off, but I drew the line last month when I walked in on her with our sixty-year-old English teacher, her grandfather’s cousin. They’re basically related, and the age was a hard no.
Honestly, it was a relief to get rid of her, she became possessive of any girl that paid me attention, including my own sisters. She was calling several times a day demanding to know where I was and who I was with.
I told her to fuck off when she ran after me, her clothes barely covering her, but the next day, she cornered me in school when I was flirting with some cheerleader. With a fucking smirk on her face, she explained she was pregnant and that she didn’t know ifI was the father or if it was one of two other men. By the glint in her eyes, she was hoping it was me.
Well fuck me, the results are in, and I’m the fucking dad.
I huff as I scrunch the letter harder in my fist. Even though I won’t be making Toya mine, I won’t bring my child up around the club.
We’ve been in a war with the Chargers—a fucked-up gang of around thirty men. They want what our MC has and will do anything to try and get it, including scaring the townsfolk. They hope that’s how they’ll gain the respect our club has which is never going to fucking happen.
We don’t scare people, we raise money, we help out, we gain their respect by being fucking respectable to them.
Fuck, I’ve lost count of how many men, men I saw as family, as uncles, including my own grandfather, that we’ve lost because of them. Don’t get me started on the women. Whether they were affiliated with us or not, the assholes had attacked them without care, even if they had just spoken to us. They went after anyone they believed belonged to a brother.
Slowly, the club has been picking its gang off one by one but they’re like cockroaches and won’t fuck off. I can’t stand back and say they wouldn’t attack a child.
I need to put my baby first, not the club, and I have to make sure Toya knows I won’t be making her mine. She needs to understand she won’t become an old lady.
I know that’s what Toya wants. I know that right now she’s probably celebrating, believing she’s getting that, but she isn’t.
I told her last week, if the kid is mine, I'll be handing in my cut.
I shake my head, fold the scrunched up letter, place it in my cut, and breathe deeply.
I need to find my dad and then my mom, who will most likely skin me alive.
Sighing, I walk out of my old room and down the hallway of the eight-bedroom Victorian home my dad built behind the clubhouse when Mama told him she was pregnant with me. Just as I get to the front door, ready to head to the clubhouse—where my parents and my two little sisters, Whitney and Angie, are most likely—I pause, hearing a splash.
I frown. Only Angie uses the pool, but she knows not to go in it without someone here, and she never came to get me…
Huffing, I walk through the large living area and towards the open-plan kitchen, where a breakfast bar separates the two rooms, ready to give Angie a piece of my mind.
The girl isn’t the best swimmer. Last year, I had to drag her out from the deep end. She was lucky she didn’t drown but since then she wants nothing more than to learn but that doesn’t mean learning when no one is here.
Fuck, I thought she’d be at the clubhouse.
“He'll never find out!" I hear as I enter the kitchen and I frown recognizing the voice and confusion swims—what the fuck is Toya doing here? I told her club property is banned for her, that she wasn’t welcome, that she wasn’t fucking safe!
Growling, I storm toward the backyard, the door wide open as her voice carries, “As far as Cage is concerned, I lost the baby. He’ll feel so bad that he’ll have no choice but to make me his woman. I won’t let you destroy that for me, I won’t let you tell him I had an abortion!”
