King hadn’t let me out from under his arm for the next three hours. He carted me from group to group as he made his rounds, seamlessly dropping into conversation that I was his girl, and even that we were practically living together. It made me blush the first ten to twelve times because even though he didn’t mention it to them, I knew they were aware that I was his teacher. If they cared, which they genuinely seemed not to, they didn’t show it. Everyone was nice to me, or at least, polite. When I asked Tayline about it at some point that evening, she’d explained that as King’s woman, I was bestowed with a special level of respect.
He was their biker King-in-training and I was his Queen.
It sent a dark thrill through me to be marked with power like that.
I pressed a kiss to King’s neck as he spoke with the guys, turning in his arms to do so, before I made my way to the bathroom down the hall. It was occupied, and I could hear the grunts and moans from inside, so I quickly diverted down the hall back to King’s rooms farther down the hall. As I went, I passed a room with a light on and the door cracked, the sound of creaking floors and rustling papers inside sitting wrong with me.
I pushed into the room.
It was a study, a rather large and clean one actually, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a big black desk absolutely covered in clearly sorted papers and files.
Behind the desk, stood Lysander.
He was standing, but bent low over the desk with his phone at his ear. I recognized the cracked phone case because I’d bought him the Jungle Book-themed accessory for his last birthday (he had a surprisingly adorable weakness for Disney movies).
“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked.
His face was blank with shock for a minute before he broke into a smile. “Needed a quiet place to take a call.”
“You were barely around all night,” I accused him with a small pout.
I’d been looking forward to spending more time with him now that he worked for Hephaestus but, if anything, he was even more distant. King told me that he kept to himself at the garage but worked hard and had a natural talent with body work (whatever that meant).
“Still adjustin’,” he admitted with a grimace.
He’d been out for two years, but I knew it was hard for him to integrate back into society, especially when he’d never been great with people.
“I’m here to help, Sander,” I said softly.
He shrugged his shoulders awkwardly.
“Come here, you big lug,” I said with a laugh.
He did, bending his big body nearly double to take me into his arms in a tight hug.
“Love ya,” he told me, an unusual sentiment from him to speak aloud but one I’d never, not even for a minute, doubted in my life. “Do anything for ya.”
“I know,” I said, patting his back and breathing in his familiar tobacco and mint scent. “Ditto.”
A loud sound rent the night air and minutes later, we heard the thunder of many booted feet tramping outside the clubhouse. Shouting followed.
We broke apart to look at each other.
“Stay here,” he growled.
I turned around and ran out of the room. His curse and heavy steps followed me.
There were women speaking in a little huddle in the corner of the main room when I passed through and Tay called my name, but I raced through the door to the front yard where the commotion had come from.
There were men everywhere.
The Fallen brothers were spread out in some kind of loose formation over the asphalt that led down the chain link fence. It hadn’t been locked yet because of the party and through the open gates had come at least six enormous GMC trucks and ten motorcycles. An MC logo jumped out at me, painted on vehicles and patched on to the back of jackets.
Nightstalkers MC.
Most of the men looked dark in the low light, probably Mexican, and all of them wore guns exposed on their hips and sticking out of their boots.
It was not a friendly visit.
“Heard you were looking for us?” one of the strangers stepped forward.
They were all backlit by the high beam lights on their cars and bikes so it was hard to make out his features, but his Spanish accent carried clean and true over the lot.
No one responded to him.
So, he laughed. “Don’t be shy now, Fallen brothers! We wanted you to come looking, there’s no shame in pleasing us. In fact, that’s why I’m here tonight, to offer you a one-time-only deal. Curious?”
Again, no one spoke.
I spotted Zeus at the head of The Fallen. He was easy to spot, the largest, broadest man on the lot but he also had two silver guns in his hands, steadily pointing at the newcomers. They glinted in the artificial lights.
“I’ll tell you anyway because I can see the cat has got your tongues. We have come to take over your operations. You can give up now or we can take them from you. Trust me, you want to choose the first option.”
“Fuck you,” Mute, of all people, growled before lobbing a glob of spit at them.
“Fine,” the leader said with a dramatic shrug, it was clear that he loved this. “Don’t trust me, trust them.”
At his cue, three of his brothers stepped forward with an enormous cooler and placed it on the hood of the truck closest to the clubhouse. They blocked the light as the removed whatever it was from the cooler and then stepped back.
The Fallen didn’t react to the sight of the four severed heads placed in a row on the hood but I gasped and took a step back to find myself pressed up against my brother.
His hand came down on my shoulder to hold me there. “Don’t move and don’t draw attention to yourself.”
I nodded slightly.
“These are the Presidents and Mafia leaders who chose the second option,” the leader said with faux sadness. “It would be a shame to add to my collection. You can’t imagine how hard it is to find a cooler big enough to hold them all.”
His hyena-like yip and cackle pierced through the night.
“Enough,” Zeus’ low, thunderous voice stopped everything, even the cackle, even my breath as it tried to leave my body. “Get the fuck off our land. By now the fuckin’ police will be on your heads and I doubt you want to be around with your sick as fuck severed heads when they arrive.”
“Now, you must be Zeus Garro,” the man clapped. “I’m so excited to meet you. Heard so much.”
“I’m going to give you five minutes to roll out,” Zeus said, calmly.
There was a pout in the man’s voice when he said, “Oh, you really are no fun. They warned me. Okay, if you want to do it this way, let me tell you how it is going to go. You’re going to look for us again, harder this time. You won’t find us. Meanwhile, kids are going to keep overdosing from that awful fentanyl that keeps finding its way into drugs these days and who are people going to blame? Well, the villains they know. So, while we slowly pull your business out from under you, your own city will start to run you out of town. It really is a simple plan but you’d be amazed at its efficacy.”
I shivered at his pleasant voice reciting his plan like some kind of evil villain in a Bond film. The scary thing was that I believed he could do it.
The sound of sirens merged with the night air and quickly grew closer.
“You got less than two fuckin’ minutes,” Zeus drawled.
The man laughed manically again. “You think we’re scared of the police? Of course, we have some in our pockets. Are you saying you don’t? It’s a surprise you lasted this long, it really is.”
The Fallen brothers hummed with tension and I could tell they wanted to rip the rival gang apart with their bare hands but they had to follow Zeus and he was smart enough to know better.
The sirens drew even closer.
“Well, this was fun. I can’t say I have much hope for your continued survival but buena suerte and happy fucking hunting!” he crowed.
Gunshots sliced open the dark night, shot upwards for the effect and nothing else, the way one might use fireworks or trumpets. As one, the Nightstalkers rounded themselves up and peeled out of the lot in under two minutes.
As soon as they were gone, the brothers moved. Some went to the gate, closing and locking it up tight while others whipped out their phone flashlights to shine it on the tire treads left behind in the gravel and grass. Others disappeared past Sander and me into the clubhouse.
King came to me.
“Should have taken her back inside,” he growled at my brother.
“It was too late, he would have noticed her,” he responded.
King seemed to find that acceptable because he started ignoring Lysander and paying attention to me. I wrapped my arms tight around him as he kissed the top of my head.
“That was totally fucked up,” I murmured into his shirt.
“Yeah.”
“I thought The Fallen didn’t have rivals.”
“They didn’t.”
“Who was that guy?”
“The crazy motherfucker who thought he was a fuckin’ Bond villain? That was Luis Elizondo, the Prez of Nightstalkers MC.”
I shivered.
“Let’s get you inside,” he said, pulling away to lead me into the clubhouse.
I followed. “What’s going to happen now?”
“Now, I’m going to put you to bed.”
“You’re not going to join me? Why aren’t we going home?”
He stopped at the mouth of the hallway to the backrooms and tugged me into his arms for a hard kiss.
“Love that you called it our place,” he said against my lips when he was done kissing them.
“Well,” I grumbled, “you’re there all the freaking time.”
He laughed and moved forward again with me under his arm.
“I want to stay here tonight. I’m going to sit in on a meeting in church to talk with the brothers about what to do with those fuckers.”
“What does that mean?” I asked again.
He pushed open the door to his room and immediately started to undress me. I let him, searching his face as he stripped me and retrieved an old EBA sweatshirt for me to wear.
“King?” I asked again when I was dressed and he’d swung me into his arms to literally tuck me into his bed.
He sighed as he sat on the edge of the mattress and smoothed my hair back from my head. “It means that my plans to fuck you twenty-four-fuckin’-seven for the next two weeks of school break are going to be a little different than I thought. It’ll have to be twenty-two-fuckin’-seven so I can spend some time helpin’ with this mess.”
“Will you be in danger?” I asked.
The adrenaline rush, the alcohol and the amazing orgasms I’d had earlier were combining under the gentle stroke of King’s hand in my hair, to make me sleepy.
Too sleepy to pay attention to the way his lips thinned as he lied to me.
“No, babe. Everything’s gonna be fine.”
