Ranger (Via Daemonia Motorcycle Club 24)

Prologue

Two Months Ago

Liam “Ranger” Fremont stared, completely dumbfounded, at the short, matte barrel pointed directly at his chest. After eight years in the Army, six with a scroll on his shoulder, he thought he’d seen everything.

He knew he wasn’t in love with Cameron Powell, but he liked her.

She was fun, and most importantly, she wasn’t boring.

Maybe a little selfish, maybe a little rude, but he never knew what the day would bring when he was with her.

Did his club brothers feel the pull of boredom?

The tedious languor of civilian life? Or maybe they didn’t because they were all hitching up with women who filled that void the military had left behind in their lives.

Cameron didn’t complete Ranger, not like Harper did for Lucky, Tessa did for Bear…

but she created filler, like putty, that made the void less noticeable in day to day life.

And maybe Ranger was tired of being alone.

He knew Cameron wanted more. He’d been finding wedding ring inquiries on both their phones in the past few weeks.

Ranger might enjoy her company, might like the feeling of having someone, but he wasn’t an ass.

He had no intention of using her, and a wedding was certainly not in his future.

He was still struggling to get over the last wedding he’d attended—where his best friend and club president spontaneously married his sister after kicking her intended groom out of the church.

Ranger was in no way rooting for Ritchie the Douchenozzle to marry his sister and become his brother-in-law, but as much as he loved and respected Ghost, he had a hard time stomaching the idea of Ghost and Becks together.

Being his best friend, Ranger knew exactly what Ghost liked in the bedroom, and fucking hell, Ranger did not want to think about his baby sister in that way.

Just…no. The very thought made him sick to his stomach.

So yeah, maybe he’d been giving Cameron the wrong sort of signals since he’d gotten back from Alabama five weeks ago.

But a gun? He had not seen that coming. A couch width apart from him, she held the Glock 19 steady, without the tremble of an amateur not prepared for the gun’s weight.

They’d been dating on and off for over a year, and he’d never known she’d ever held a gun before, let alone owned one or stored it in her couch.

Ranger had been distracted by his phone’s alarm.

Something was happening with the club. That explosion—and his experience told him it was a large one—was way too close for comfort.

Without needing to even look at his phone, Ranger knew people were dead.

Civilians, maybe even club members. He needed to get to his phone, get in contact with Ghost, and figure out what was going on.

And while he bent to pick up his phone off the end table where he’d left it, he vaguely registered her hand slipping between the cushions next to where he’d set her on the couch, and then the light from the lamp hit the slide at just the right angle.

Cameron had a gun pointed at his chest with the safety off and her finger on the trigger. What the fuck was happening?

For approximately half a second, he considered that this was a joke, some sort of fucked-up prank.

But Cameron wasn’t a prankster. She hated witticisms, and especially Ranger’s tendency to make Dad Jokes, despite the fact that he wasn’t a father.

He didn’t care what anyone else said, they were not cheap humor.

So if this wasn’t a joke, then this was real. An explosion had just gone off down the street from the apartment building they were standing in and Cameron had a gun pointed at him, while Becks stood behind the island getting Cameron an icepack for what they’d believed was a hurt ankle.

Becks!

The sight of the gun did not send fear through his veins, but the knowledge that a loaded weapon was in the hands of an assailant with unknown motives, feet from his possibly pregnant baby sister, sent terror through Ranger unlike anything he'd ever felt before.

And despite the fact that he knew Cameron, in this moment, she was entirely unknown to him.

He did not know her objective or her motivation.

Could this really be because he’d told her to stop looking at wedding rings on his phone last night? He very much doubted it.

“This is just too good to be true!” Cameron exclaimed, far too excited with a gun in her hand. “Now be a good boy, Ranger dear, and drop the phone. You, too,” she added to Becks in the kitchen. “My bomb, it seems, went off early, but I now have something even better! I have both of you.”

Both of them? And did she just say her bomb?

Ranger dropped his phone to the floor. “What is this about, Cami? What do you mean your bomb went off early?” He tried to keep his voice as steady as possible, not daring to take his eyes off the weapon aimed at his chest. He couldn’t have put himself in a worse possible defensive position, not even if he had a death wish.

Cameron rolled her eyes. “Fuck, I hate that name. ‘Cami, suck my cock’, ‘Cami, you feel so good around my dick’, Cami, Cami, Cami…” she mocked, clearly ignoring his second question. “My name is fucking Cam-er-on,” she said, emphasizing each syllable. “Becks, get your fat ass over here.”

“Stay there,” Ranger instructed Becks, his voice clipped and rushed. He was trying not to let on how fearful he felt in that moment, allowing the anger he felt at Cameron’s description of Becks’ body to help cover it up. “You can use the island for cover.”

He had no cover. With his back to the window, the couch to his left, and a cheap coffee table in front of him, he was as open and vulnerable as he could be.

Movies always had the action star diving heroically for the gun, rushing the assailant like adrenaline had suddenly given them super speed.

Hollywood didn’t know or care about the truth, or the fact that the Tueller Drill demonstrates that the average person can only close twenty-one feet in one-point-four seconds.

Which meant that at approximately seven feet with no cover and her finger on the trigger, he was directly in the kill zone.

Cameron’s hand casually raised her gun from his chest to his head. “Don’t test me,” she sneered. “I’ve had to live through fucking you for over a year. I would love the opportunity to see your brains splattered all over my apartment.”

Live through? What the fuck did that mean?

She was the one looking at wedding rings, not him.

To his knowledge, the sex between them was good.

Very good. Whether he was in a relationship—which was rare—or with a one-night stand, Ranger always treated his partner with respect and care.

He was never so hard up to bust a nut that he would mistreat the woman, or women, he was with.

“No!” Becks shouted, rushing around to the other side of the island with her hands raised pleadingly. “Don’t hurt him! Please!”

Ranger groaned inwardly, cursing Becks for putting herself in the line of fire.

She had cover. She’d been safe. Ish, he added realistically.

Other than the fact that Cameron had stated that she now had both of them, implying that she wanted something from them or needed them for something, there was nothing stopping her from shooting Ranger and then walking around behind the island to shoot Becks, too.

Becks wouldn’t be truly safe until Ranger got that gun out of Cameron’s hand, but now the chances of doing that had just gone from slim to none, and Cameron fucking knew it.

Ranger had seen evil. Seen men justify raping children for their own gratification, seen the powerful harm the innocent out of greed or sheer enjoyment, seen mothers abandon their babies to save their own lives…

Ranger knew evil, and there was no other word so apropos to describe the smile that appeared on Cameron’s face the moment Becks stepped out from behind the kitchen island.

“Cameron!” Ranger shouted, taking a step forward. He wanted to keep Cameron’s attention on him, but it was too late. The gun was already pointed at Becks’ head.

“Uh ah,” Cameron scolded, almost playfully. She never took her eyes off Ranger, not giving him the opportunity to rush her. “You stay right where you are, big boy. Right now, both of you are breathing because I can use the other as leverage, but never forget that I only need one of you alive.”

“For what?” Ranger demanded. Though frozen where he stood, his body was tight, a spring waiting to be released.

But Cameron waggled the pointer finger of her free hand at him. “Not yet. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

She grabbed her purse from the couch as she stepped even further away from him and closer to Becks, decreasing any possibility that he could get the drop on her. Becks wasn’t a fighter or a soldier.

Up until this very moment, Ranger had believed he could protect his little sister from anything. But how did he protect her from a bullet when he was all the way across the room? Scroll or no, he wasn’t Superman.

Cameron’s gun never wavered as she moved behind Becks.

Ranger watched, helpless, as Becks let out a pitiful whimper, tears running down her cheeks.

Desperation for a miracle, for anything, coursed through Ranger.

He’d faced down murderers, terrorists, endless deserts with no water in sight…

and he’d never been so scared, so fucking vulnerable, as he was in this moment.

“Now.” Cameron threw her purse at Ranger, which he caught easily. “Inside is a syringe and a tourniquet. Get them out,” Cameron instructed.

Ranger stiffened, not reaching into the bag. His hands curled around the cheap material. “I am not injecting my sister!”

“You think I’d let you get that close to me?” Cameron scoffed. “Oh, no, soldier boy, the syringe is for you.”