Contracted to the Bikers (Never Just One #8)

Chapter 1

Sloane

The bell above the elementary school doors rings shrilly as parents and kids spill out into the late afternoon sun. It’s the kind of early fall day that tricks you into thinking everything is normal, even when you know it’s not. Normal is a word I don’t trust anymore.

Jessy bursts out the front doors a second later like she’s been fired from a cannon. “Mommy!” she bellows as she catches sight of me, waving and calling goodbye absentmindedly back to her friends as she races over to me.

I brace just in time before a six-year-old missile slams into my stomach.

“Careful,” I laugh, steadying her. “You’re going to knock me over.”

She grins up at me with two front teeth missing and freckles scattered across her nose like someone flicked paint at her face. “I learned about Velociraptors today,” she tells me breathlessly.

I smile back indulgently. My daughter Jessy is in a big-time dinosaur phase, which means this must have been her favorite day of school yet. “Did you, now?”

“They’re really smart,” she says seriously, ponytail bobbing as she nods her head. “You’d have to be really clever to escape.”

I raise an eyebrow. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Jessy slips her hand into mine as we walk toward the parking lot.

Around us, parents are loading kids into minivans, teachers are calling goodbyes, and somewhere a whistle blows from the soccer field where kids have afterschool practice.

The scene is distinctly ordinary, painfully so, which is exactly why the knot in my stomach hasn’t loosened in thirty days.

It’s been thirty days since I put the notorious crime lord Valentin Escar behind bars.

It seems like a lifetime ago and a blink of an eye since the courtroom went silent as the verdict was read—guilty.

Escar was found guilty on twenty-three different counts, including money laundering, racketeering, conspiracy, and every other charge the prosecution could stick to him.

He’d hidden his cartel money behind a chain of luxury car dealerships and a maze of shell companies so intricate that most prosecutors wouldn’t have touched it. But I did.

I spent eighteen months untangling his web of lies and corruption.

Eighteen months of subpoenas, financial records, wire transfers, corporate filings, and shell corporations nested inside other shell corporations like some kind of criminal Russian doll.

At times, it felt like I was the only one going up against him: Assistant District Attorney Sloane Mercer versus a cartel-laundering network.

My hard work and sheer bull-headed determination not to give up or give in to threats and bribery, like so many before me, somehow paid off and miraculously, I won.

The memory of the day they read the verdict flashes through my mind like a courtroom photograph. Escar standing in the defense stand, his lawyer whispering urgently beside him. His cold eyes never left mine, filled with promise:

This isn’t over.

I squeeze Jessy’s hand a little tighter as we reach the car, pushing the memory away to the same place I file all of my work stresses when I am off the clock and with my little girl. I never want to bring the horrors of my job home with me, to tarnish her innocence with the cruelty of this world.

My practical family sedan sits at the far end of the parking lot where I parked it this morning. The metal is warm from the sun, the windshield catching bright afternoon light. There’s no sign of anything unusual. Nothing’s wrong.

“Mommy?” Jessy says, tugging my sleeve.

“Hmm?” I reply, distracted as I scan the area for danger, a habit I’ve not shaken since the trial. During it, the witnesses and I had police escorts twenty-four seven to make sure we weren’t taken out before we could ever get to trial.

“Trixy,” Jessy whines.

I look down and see she’s not holding her T. rex plushie that she insists on carrying everywhere.

“You left it inside?” I ask, tamping down my irritation. There’s no way she’ll leave her favorite toy at school overnight.

She nods miserably, looking at the ground and scuffing her shoes on the tarmac. “In my desk, I think. The teacher makes me leave him in there during class.”

I glance back at the school doors. There are still teachers inside, and kids continuing to pour out. It’s not too late to go back for it. I breathe a sigh of relief.

“Okay,” I say. “Go grab it. I’ll wait here.”

She lights up instantly. “Okay!”

Jessy releases my hand and sprints back toward the building.

I watch her go. Every parent does that instinctively, their eyes following their child until they’ve disappeared somewhere safe.

The doors swallow her up. My heart thuds in my chest, and I force myself to push down the irrational fear I always have when she’s out of sight. She’s at school, it’s safe here.

I pull my phone from my bag and check the time while I wait for her to return. It’s 3:32 PM, and my inbox is filled with messages from clients. Since the trial ended, my caseload has doubled. Half the city seems to want the prosecutor who took down Valentin Escar.

I should feel proud. Instead, I feel watched.

It’s been a month of strange phone calls which is why I feel like I can’t relax.

A black SUV followed me twice last week.

Then there was a man who stood outside the courthouse for three hours without moving.

The police say there’s no evidence that Escar is behind this, but I’ve been a prosecutor long enough to know what retaliation and punishment look like.

My eyes flick automatically around the parking lot. There’s a minivan, a pickup truck, and a silver sedan. Nothing unusual. Still—

Jessy is taking longer than usual. My stomach tightens.

I take a few steps closer toward the school, deciding to look for her.

That’s when I hear it. So quiet it’s almost imperceptible, I would have missed it if I wasn’t on high alert all the time—the sound of a faint metallic click.

At first, I think that it’s just a car cooling in the sun, but then the sound changes into a sharp electronic chirp.

My brain registers it a half-second before my instincts and training take over.

“Bomb. Get down!” I yell, praying no one is close enough to the blast.

The explosion tears the world apart. Light detonates in front of me, white, blinding, and violent.

Heat slams into my face like a furnace door thrown open.

The sound isn’t a bang so much as a ripping roar that swallows everything.

The force throws me backward. Gravel tears at my skin as I hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from my lungs.

For a moment, there’s nothing but ringing, a high, shrill scream inside my skull.

The world spins through smoke and fire. My car is a twisted, burning skeleton of metal. Flames claw upward around its husk, black smoke pouring into the sky. Someone is screaming. It takes me a second to realize it’s me.

“Jessy!”

I scramble up, my legs are shaking, my lungs burning from the smoke.

Parents are shouting, children are crying, and teachers are herding the remaining kids back inside the building with the practiced terror of teachers who have been prepared for the worst but never thought it would happen.

Not here, not to them. The sounds of shouts overlap each other as people process what’s just happened.

“Call 911!”

“Oh my God—”

“Stay back!”

“Are you alright, Miss?”

My ears are still ringing, but one thought cuts through the chaos like a blade.

Jessy. Where is my daughter? I pray she’s still inside where it’s safe.

I realize with a sickening shudder that Jessy was supposed to be in that car.

If it hadn’t been for her stupid plushie, we’d have been in it driving home…

My heart slams against my ribs so hard it hurts. I run toward the school doors. “Jessy!” I shout. “Jessy!”

A teacher bursts out of the front entrance just as I reach it. I let out a cry of anguished relief when I see the small figure with a green dinosaur clutched to her chest behind her.

“Mommy!” Jessy launches herself into my arms.

I drop to my knees and squeeze her so tightly she squeaks. “You’re okay,” I whisper into her hair, my whole body shaking. “You’re okay, you’re okay—” I repeat the words like a mantra, trying to convince myself more than her.

She pulls back just enough to look at me. “Mommy, the car exploded.”

“I know.”

Sirens wail in the distance now. The smell of burning metal and gasoline fills the air.

I look over Jessy’s head toward the flaming wreckage of what used to be my car.

Thirty seconds, that’s all it took, all it would have taken for us to be inside when the bomb went off. If she hadn’t forgotten her toy—

The thought makes my stomach twist. I know with complete certainty that my car wasn’t picked at random, this wasn’t an accident.

The police will have to believe me now, I think bitterly, angry at myself for not pushing more, for dismissing my instincts that something was wrong, that they were preparing to retaliate.

I press Jessy against my chest, feeling her small heartbeat against mine. I thought I was fighting injustice as a lawyer. I was just doing my job when I took down Valentin Escar, but now the war I thought ended in that courtroom just followed me to my daughter’s school.

The war is far from over, and this time, it’s personal.