Chrome and Mistletoe (25 Days of Christmas: Bikers & Mobsters)

Prologue

Killjoy

“You sure you don’t wanna stick around this year?” Crawler, my brother, asked me the moment we cut our engines. He flicked his kickstand down and dismounted.

“Nah,” I replied, and he smirked at me as if he’d been expecting it.

It was the same old song and dance every year.

No matter where I found myself mid-November, I dropped everything and headed for Gray Fort, Tennessee.

The Steel Paragons MC compound wasn’t my home, but it was sort of one of many.

Since I wore the Nomad patch, I didn’t belong anywhere, and that was how I liked it.

If I wanted to grow roots, I woulda been born a tree.

We’d just finished our annual family run. Two weeks of ridin’ and fuckin’ our way down the east coast and back up again, leavin’ a trail of one-night stands without names. Separately, of course. We might be backcountry Tennessee born and bred, but we don’t fuck our kin.

It was a hell of a tradition, but it was the only one we had. Well, I had, since he lived here and did the big holiday shindigs with the MC and family.

And he tried so hard to get me to stay every year.

Not my style.

I had a little cabin in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere, and a bunch of bikes calling my name to work on them. I was gonna be a hibernating biker for the next two months, and I couldn’t fuckin’ wait.