Chapter One – Chelsea
“To new friends!” I exclaimed as I lifted my shot glass.
“To new friends!” Star joined in, and the words were echoed around the group as we all tapped our glasses together and then threw back our noxiously strong shots. I pulled a face as the alcohol hit my system, and I saw Lee staring at me from across the bar.
“Hey, careful,” he warned me. “You might need to slow down...”
“She’s celebrating,” Abbey protested as she put her arm around her boyfriend.
“Yeah, exactly,” I shot back as I waved down the bartender to get another drink. “I’m celebrating. You’re not going to get in the way of that, are you?”
“Just tell your dad I tried to stop you,” Lee remarked, and I laughed.
“I’m telling him you brought me a beer the moment I got here,” I reminded him, and he rolled his eyes and shook his head, clearly giving up. He knew there was no way I was going to slow down tonight, and as far as I was concerned, I was just getting started.
It was my first night back around these parts since graduation, and I would be damned if I didn’t have a hell of a good time.
I had spent the last three months up to my ears in my studies, focused on doing the very best I could in my communications degree. When I did something, I never half-assed it, and as the first member of my family to ever go to college, I wasn’t going to screw up this opportunity.
I had worked hard all the way through high school to get into the college of my choice, Atwood Central University, and moved across the state to live on campus for the last few years to complete my studies. I had known since I was young that I would need space from my father and his lifestyle at some point if I was going to establish myself on my own terms, and this seemed to be the best way to do it. Not that I didn’t love my dad. Of course I did, but the Dogs and everything they were involved in... shit, it’s not exactly what every little girl dreams of doing with her life, you know?
Dad had always made sure that I knew I had a home here in the Dogs. He’d started working for them before I was born, when he’d found out that my mother was pregnant with me. She'd made a break for it pretty much as soon as I had come along, and that was the last I had heard from her. He had been left to raise me all by himself. The Dogs gave him the flexibility and the money to make that happen, and he had been a sworn member for as long as I could remember. Lee, Chuck, Jax, the whole group—I had grown up around them, and they were family to me just as much as he was.
But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that was distinctly and disturbingly aware of everything they did. And I didn’t exactly love that part of my father’s life. I knew that he wasn’t a bad or a cruel man or an evil one, but I still... I knew people were scared of them. Scared of the dogs. And I knew they had good reason to be. I had heard stories, caught snippets of battles that had been fought just out of my range of vision, and honestly, it scared me, knowing what my dad was involved in.
The longer I spent away at college, surrounded by normal people, the starker the contrast between their lives and mine had become in the process. How could it not? I mean, I had spent my childhood hanging out at biker bars, holding on to my dad as he drove us through the streets to our tiny apartment after a fight broke out and I had to be evacuated before they started pulling guns. The girls I shared my dorm with, they were sweet, normal, and they’d grown up in this quiet, comfortable suburbia that I knew nothing of.
A few times, I had experimented by sharing the stories of what I had been through growing up, and they had practically freaked out. And that wasn’t even the heavy stuff. Shit, if they knew the truth, I was sure they would have been horrified. They just didn’t get it. My father loved me, of course he did, and he was just doing everything he could to make sure I got the life I wanted.
It was all he’d ever known, growing up with a father in a gang himself. He didn’t know how to make his life work outside the confines of this business. Sure, he could see it wasn’t exactly the kind of life he wanted for his daughter, but he had never learned the skills to do anything else. What else could he have done with his life that would have provided for me? As far as he was concerned, this was the best he was capable of.
I glanced over toward my father, and he flashed me a grin. But as he got out of his seat, I noticed him wincing. Not the first time since I had arrived home, though he tried to hide it from me. He just couldn’t keep going at the same pace he had been all this time, and when he ran out of steam, I didn’t know how he was going to be able to support himself. I didn’t want him to feel like he couldn’t rely on me for support, but I needed him to know that I had a different life in mind than the one he had been living all this time.
“You have to go out tonight,” he had insisted a few hours before we’d arrived at the bar. I shook my head.
“I’m tired, Dad, I don’t know…”
“If you think I’m going to let my daughter go without celebrating her graduation, you’ve got another thing coming,” he’d told me firmly. “I want to show you off, Chelsea. Come on…”
I had been hoping to stay home and start piecing together my next steps.
I was going to start a business. That was my plan. An advertising firm. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but if there was one thing I had learned from my dad over the years, it was how to hustle, and I was going to use every inch of that knowledge to get exactly where I needed to go. I would build a life outside of the criminal world. And, sure, I would never forget my roots, but that didn’t mean I had to be tied down by them, right?
And my roots were exactly what I was getting back to tonight as I spent some time at the newly rebuilt Kennels and caught up with all the guys. And their new girls, too. It seemed like everyone had been settling down since I had last seen them. Star, Jax’s new girlfriend, had welcomed me with this huge hug, and she’d been by my side all night, buying me drinks, celebrating my graduation, quizzing me on what college had been like. From what I heard, she’d never had a chance to go herself, but I hoped she would one day. It sounded like something she really wanted to do.
And, yeah, I was a little tipsy tonight. Maybe more than a little tipsy. Being surrounded by all these people, it was hard not to let my guard down a little. And hell, I wanted to have a little fun. Nothing wrong with that, right?
I still hadn’t gotten it out of my father exactly what had happened to the Kennels that had stood before this. There had been some kind of attack on the old place, and that had left it in ruins. But it had been rebuilt on the same spot, and this place was better than ever—well, the floors were a little less sticky, at least. The atmosphere was still the same. A far cry from the dive bars I’d been frequenting at college, but in a good way. Plenty of the people I’d attended classes with would have been terrified to even set foot in a place like this, but it felt like home to me. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
As the night wore on, I felt my eyes starting to droop. The move back to my dad’s place had left me tired. He wasn’t out tonight, begging off to rest up after he’d helped me move all the boxes into my old room, and I wasn’t going to complain. I loved my dad, and he was far from controlling, but he didn’t want to see me getting drunk with my friends tonight. It wouldn’t have suited him. I had left this place his little girl, and coming back to it as a grown woman might have been a little much for his brain to take.
“I should be getting home,” I yawned as the clock ticked past one.
Star pulled a face. “Really?” she replied. “You don’t want to hang out a little longer?”
“Maybe another time.”
“I’ll hold you to that! Come on, let me walk you out. You want me to get one of the guys to walk you home?”
“I’m fine,” I replied, waving a hand. “I’ve lived in this city most of my life. I can handle myself.”
I pulled on my jacket and said goodbye to my friends and then headed for the door, Star right behind me. She seemed particularly protective of the other girls in this place, and I wondered just what she had been through that had made her so intent on looking out for us. I guessed I would find out; she seemed like the type who would spill her guts after a few glasses of wine.
“You sure you’re going to be okay walking back by yourself?” she fussed over me outside the bar.
I nodded. “Star, I’m going to be fine. I’ll be back at my dad’s place in, like, ten minutes. Honestly.”
“Okay, well, if you’re sure,” she replied. She leaned in and gave me a tight hug. “It was so good to meet you, Chels. We have to do this again sometime!”
“Agreed,” I murmured, my face in her blonde hair. She was such a sweetheart. I wasn’t sure exactly how she and Jax had ended up together, given the kind of shit that he had been caught up in, but still—they seemed like a good match.
She waved and headed back inside the bar, and I pulled out my phone to check my messages. I had signed up for a dating app recently, after I had gotten back, but I hadn’t had anything in the way of matches that interested me yet. I’d had a few hook-ups in college, but all of them had been pretty much letdowns. None of the guys I met there seemed to know what they were doing.
Or perhaps I was just used to a very different type of guy altogether...
Anyway. I needed to get home, drink some water, eat some toast, and brace myself for the hangover that was going to hit me the next day.
I wandered off toward the street and cut down an alleyway that would lead me to dad’s place a little quicker. Yeah, of course I knew I shouldn’t be fucking around like this, wandering down dark alleyways all by myself, but fuck it. I was a grown woman, and I knew I could handle whatever came my way.
I stared down at my phone, frowning at the screen as I swiped through some potential matches the app thought I would be into. Ugh. None of these guys looked cute to me. I mean, I was sure plenty of them were perfectly nice and all, but none of them made me feel that shiver of attraction that I ached for when I looked into a guy’s eyes, that edge, like he might be trouble but he was hot enough that it didn’t matter.
Suddenly, I heard something behind me, and my head snapped around. But there was nothing. I must have been hearing things. Maybe there had been something stronger than vodka in those drinks I had been putting away tonight.
I turned back and continued on down the street, tucking my phone back in my pocket so I could pay attention to what was going on around me. I was suddenly distinctly aware of the silence that surrounded me. Why was it so quiet? Had this place always been this quiet? I had spent so long living on campus, where there was always something going on, that the sudden silence clinging to me felt like it was crushing me.
And then I heard it again. That sound. That sound that drew my attention back behind me. Footsteps—I was sure of it—footsteps closing the distance between me and whoever was right behind me.
I stopped dead in my tracks and spun around again, planning to catch whoever it was off guard before they could get any closer. But, when I turned, there was nobody there. I was sure I had heard those footsteps. I wouldn’t have imagined something like that, I wasn’t paranoid that way.
I scanned the alleyway behind me. A pipe dripped into a dirty puddle a few feet from me, the wind rustling a trash bag that was sticking out of a dumpster. A door squeaked on its hinges beside me. But there was nobody there, nobody before me. I must have been imagining it—
And then, suddenly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I opened my mouth to cry out, praying that someone at the Kennels would be able to hear me, but before I could get a sound out, a rag clamped over my mouth. I inhaled before I could stop myself, a thick, noxious scent filling my senses, and a second later, the corners of my vision began to blur.
Terror was the last thing I remembered as the blackout hit my system, and I slumped back into the arms of my attacker, helpless.