Hades (Gods of Mayhem MC #1)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Hades

Diamond Creek, Nebraska...

Morning light cut through the hole where the front door of the Silver Shadows’ clubhouse used to be, illuminating the carnage like a spotlight on hell itself.

An hour after the last gun fired, bodies still lay where they fell, piled over each other like discarded meat.

The stench of death hung thick in the air.

The coppery tang of blood mixed with piss and shit from loosened bowels felt like it coated the back of my throat with every breath.

They called me Hades, not because I ruled with fire and brimstone, but because I understood death better than most. As VP of Gods of Mayhem MC, I ruled over the dark places where secrets festered and rotted, where the dead told stories the living were too fucking scared to hear.

Brothers wearing allied cuts dragged corpses out one by one, leaving crimson trails across the scarred wood. No one would remember these fuckers’ names. No one would record their deaths. Enemies didn’t deserve a proper burial.

Instead, their bodies would burn in a pit until the flesh melted off their bones, and the fat rendered down to nothing. Then the bones would turn to dust in the kiln King had built out at the back of the property, ostensibly for the club whores to make pottery.

That was the official party line, anyway.

In reality, it was the perfect way to dispose of a problem so it couldn’t come crawling back out of the ground to bite us in the ass.

We knew all too well what happened when you didn’t bury the evidence deep enough.

Bodies had a way of surfacing when you least expected them.

Bloated and rotting and screaming truths no one wanted to hear.

Sirens wailed in the distance, shattering the silence.

“We gonna end up in a fucking cell because of this shit?” I asked, wiping the blood off my hands onto my jeans. The denim was already soaked through, stiff with gore.

“No. King’s brother has us covered. Those sirens should be ambulances to take the wounded we can’t help here,” Asclepius said, his voice steady despite the gore coating his hands up to his elbows.

“NO!”

The guttural roar came from a familiar voice that could command a room or shatter it. I spun around to find my best friend and president, Zeus, on the ground, cradling his father’s body. The sight hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest, knocking the fucking air straight out of my lungs.

I rushed over and dropped to my knees in a puddle of congealed blood, feeling it soak through my jeans, warm and sticky against my skin. I stared down at the corpse of my former president. A man who’d taught us everything we knew about being Gods of Mayhem.

Lucas ‘Kronos’ Cooper lay in his son’s arms, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, glazed over with the milky film of death.

His throat was sliced ear to ear, exposing the white of his severed windpipe and the glistening meat beneath.

Blood had poured down his chest, thick and dark, already crusting at the edges.

“No!” The whispered plea came from Asclepius, Kronos’ younger brother and Zeus’ uncle, as he collapsed beside me. His knees made a sickening thud against the wooden planks. “Who did this?” He picked up Kronos’ hand, already cold to the touch, and checked for a pulse we both knew wouldn’t be there.

Atlas tapped me on the shoulder. “We have to take the body.”

“NO!” Zeus growled, the sound more animal than human. Raw and wounded and fucking feral.

Atlas shifted beside me, his cut soaked in blood that gleamed in the dim light. Some his, most not. As sergeant at arms, third in command, he was the fixer when shit turned south. The one who carried the burden of cleaning up after us.

“Zeus, we don’t have much time.” Atlas’ voice was quiet but filled with the kind of steel that came from carrying the weight of our world on his shoulders. “If the cops show up and see Kronos like this, none of us are walking the fuck out of here. Let me take care of it. Let me do my fucking job.”

“Give him a little more time,” I told Atlas, knowing we’d have a fight on our hands when the moment came.

I sat beside Zeus as he stared at his father’s body, at what was left of the man who’d been larger-than-life.

I reached over and closed Kronos’ eyes, feeling the cooling skin beneath my fingertips. “Kane, I’m so fucking sorry.”

“This wasn’t our goddamn fight. This wasn’t our fucking war,” Zeus ground out, his voice breaking on the last word. “We never should have been here.”

“Your sister was here. Both of them.”

“Fuck them. They should have come home.”

I closed my eyes, knowing this would change my best friend, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Losing a parent broke you in a way you never came back from, shattered something fundamental inside that could never be put back together right.

That kind of hell festered and rotted until it consumed everything.

And I ruled that hell. I understood it. I would walk him through it because that was what brothers did.

No one spoke. Brothers moved around the room silently, dragging bodies, cleaning up blood with mops and bleach.

The air held the smell of chemicals mixed with death, creating a nauseating cocktail that would linger for days, in the wood, our clothes.

In our fucking lungs. I sat next to my best friend, my brother in every way that mattered, even blood.

At ten years old, Kronos had given us both a pocketknife for Christmas. We’d used them to cut our palms and slap our hands together, mixing our blood.

Blood brothers.

Bound by pain and loyalty.

One more time, I placed my blood-covered hand on my brother’s shoulder, feeling the tremor run through him, the barely contained violence and grief warring inside him.

We didn’t need words—not between us. I sat by his side as he silently said goodbye to the man who’d meant the world to us. A man who was so big, so loud, so fucking alive that I couldn’t shake the feeling I was caught in a nightmare, waiting to wake up and find this was all some fucked-up dream.

The others hovered a few feet away, ready to honor their former president the only way they could. By getting him the fuck out of here before the law showed up.

Zeus finally nodded. He wiped the hair from his father’s face with shaking fingers, smearing blood across Kronos’ forehead, and leaned down to kiss him goodbye.

When he looked up at Poseidon, his eyes were hollow.

Empty in a way that made my chest tighten.

“He’d kick my ass if he saw me crying like a bitch over his death. ”

No one said a word. No one pointed out that grieving the father you worshiped your whole life didn’t make you weak. But Zeus was right. Kronos wouldn’t want us wasting time on emotion when there was still work to do, still blood to spill, still vengeance to claim.

Poseidon and Ares stepped forward and crouched down beside us. I nodded to Kraken to grab Hercules, and the four of them waited for direction, patient as pallbearers.

“Zeus.”

“No.”

“It’s time, Zeus.”

“I said no, goddamn it.”

“Brother, we know you’re hurting. We’re all fucking hurting. But we need to prepare him for transport. We need to take him home.” My voice was steady, the voice of someone who’d guided too many souls to their final rest.

“How, Brock? How the fuck do I let him go? How do I say goodbye?” Zeus looked at me, his eyes red-rimmed and swollen, tears cutting tracks through the blood splatter on his face. “How the fuck do I tell my mother?”

“We’ll do it together, brother.” I gripped his shoulder harder. “I’ll walk through hell with you. You know that.”

“Whoever killed him better be fucking dead already,” Zeus vowed, his voice turning cold, hard. The kind of cold that promised violence and pain.

“If not, we’ll bury him ourselves,” I assured him, and I meant it. I’d drag the killer down to the underworld myself and make sure they never saw daylight again.

I nodded to our brothers. A tarp lay on the ground, and I watched as they carefully picked up Kronos and gently laid him on it.

The plastic crinkled obscenely loud in the heavy silence.

Together they lifted him, grunting with the effort, and carried him out the door to a vehicle waiting to take him to the funeral home where he’d be prepared for the journey home to Texas.

Nebraska wouldn’t be his final resting place. Our dead, our heroes, deserved to go home.

I wrapped my arm around Zeus’ shoulders as he cried silently, his body shaking with suppressed sobs while his men carried his father away. “We’ll find out what happened, Kane. I promise you that.”

And I would. Because I understood the underworld better than most. I knew how to dig up secrets others wanted buried. I’d find the truth, even if it destroyed us all.

Hours later, the clubhouse was mostly empty, the bodies of the men who thought they could take what wasn’t theirs hauled away. I gathered my brothers to assess their injuries, cataloguing the damage.

Someone had shot Eros in the gut outside. Hydros had gone in the ambulance with him to watch over him at the hospital, making sure no one asked too many questions. Apollo took a bullet in the back, the round lodging near his spine. Perseus had gone with him, his face pale with worry.

The others had minor wounds. A few gunshots, knife wounds, and broken bones that Asclepius handled with the efficiency of a field medic. He worked in silence, stitching flesh and setting bones while I sat and did nothing.

Well, if nothing meant keeping my president from losing his fucking shit and going on a killing spree. Which was still a distinct possibility. Zeus sat in the corner, staring at his blood-covered hands, his mind somewhere dark and distant.

Later in the day, when I finally had a moment to myself, I stepped outside into the warm air and called Hermes, our road captain. I filled him in on what happened, keeping my voice low and controlled.

Then I called my father.

“Brock? How bad is it?”

“It’s bad, Dad. Eros and Apollo are both in the hospital, in surgery. Perseus and Hydros are with them.”

“Any deaths?” My father barely muttered the words, almost as if he already knew the answer and was bracing himself for the worst.

“I’m sorry, Dad. Kronos is gone.”

My father went quiet on the other end of the line. Lucas Cooper and my dad, Nelson Davis, were best friends. Together with three other friends, they founded the Gods of Mayhem back in 1981. Five friends who had nothing but each other, building their names on blood, booze, and bitches.

But empires built on blood had a way of drowning in it.

“How?” my father asked, his voice tight. Controlled in a way that made my instincts scream.

“Throat cut,” I said bluntly. “Ear to ear.”

The silence stretched so long I thought the call had dropped. When he finally spoke, his voice was different. Colder, like something had shifted inside him. “You’re bringing him home, right?”

“Yeah, the body’s being prepared. We should be home in a few days.”

“What about Rhea?”

I kicked at the rocks under my feet and looked at the clubhouse, at the hole in the wall that let in too much light for the darkness we lived in. “She doesn’t know yet. King sent the women and kids somewhere safe. We don’t know where.”

“Don’t tell her how he died.” It was an order, not a request. Sharp and final. “He was a casualty of war. They both knew the risks of staying.”

“Dad—”

“No, son. Trust me. Do not tell her how he died.”

Lying to Rhea never sat right with me. She’d always been there, offering the kind of care and support that made her feel like a second mother.

My own mother left when I was still a child, walked out the door one morning and never came back, like we meant nothing to her.

Like I meant nothing. Rhea stepped in to fill that void.

She bandaged my scraped knees, fed me when my dad was too drunk to cook, held me when I cried over the mother who’d abandoned me and my little brother, Malcolm.

“Brock!” my father shouted, snapping me back to the present. “Promise me.”

“Fine. We won’t tell her.”

The call disconnected without a goodbye, leaving me standing there in the oppressive heat with more questions than answers.

Why was my dad so fucking adamant about keeping the details from Rhea?

She’d see the body when she viewed it. No way in hell would Rhea Cooper put her husband in the ground without seeing him one more time.

Without saying goodbye.

And when she saw that gaping wound across his throat, she’d know.

She’d fucking know.

I shoved my suspicions aside and walked back into the clubhouse to find pure chaos.