Chapter 1 #3
The desert swallowed me whole, hot wind tearing through my hair, leather tight across my shoulders, Edge Rourke’s bike growling between my thighs like a beast I had no right to ride.
Maybe that was the point.
Maybe tonight I wasn’t asking permission.
Maybe tonight I wasn’t hiding behind an Arizona name, a school uniform, or the careful silence everyone mistook for weakness.
Tonight, I was Destiny.
Not the stripper name.
Not Mandy’s mistake.
Not Edge’s secret.
Destiny Rourke.
And those spoiled little saints at the bonfire were about to learn exactly what kind of girl they had been stupid enough to set on fire.
By the time I reached the edge of town, my hands were shaking so hard I had to pull over behind an old feed store and breathe.
Not because I regretted taking the bike.
Not yet.
Regret required distance. Regret required sense. Regret required the kind of good judgment I had left somewhere between Brielle’s smirk and the dollar bill taped to my locker.
Edge’s bike rumbled beneath me, alive and furious, like it knew it had been stolen and couldn’t decide if it respected me for it or wanted to throw me into the desert for my arrogance.
My thighs trembled from holding it steady.
My heart beat too fast. The wind had whipped my hair into a wild black curtain around my face, and when I looked at my reflection in the dark glass of the feed store window, I didn’t see the girl from Desert Saints Prep.
I didn’t see the quiet almost-graduate with straight A’s, nursing school acceptance folded in her desk drawer, and a future she had been protecting like a candle cupped between both hands.
I saw trouble.
I saw leather, dark eyes, red mouth, smudged liner, and a smile that looked too much like all the old photographs people kept dragging into the light.
For one second, I saw Mandy.
My stomach twisted.
“No,” I whispered.
The bike growled under me.
I swallowed hard and reached into my pocket for my phone. There were already nine missed calls.
Three from Regan.
Four from Edge.
One from Tarak.
One from Bullet, which meant Edge had gone from worried father to full-club problem in record time.
A text from Regan sat at the top.
Destiny Rourke, answer this phone before your father chews through concrete.
Another came in while I stared.
Baby girl. Whatever you’re doing, stop long enough to tell me you’re breathing.
That one almost got me.
Almost.
Because Regan didn’t deserve this. None of them did.
For all their suffocating, all their watching, all their locked gates and silent shadows and men posted where they thought I wouldn’t notice, they loved me.
They loved me in the only ways they knew how, which meant badly sometimes, loudly often, and with enough fear to make a prison look like protection.
They had every reason to hate me.
That was the truth I never said out loud.
Not because of me, maybe. Not because of anything I’d done.
But because my mother had been a storm that tore through their lives and left wreckage with my face.
Mandy had broken Tarak. She had haunted Edge.
She had lit fires in places people were still afraid to rebuild.
She had made Regan’s family history into something twisted and raw.
And still, they didn’t pass her sins down to me.
Regan had looked me in the eye and packed my bags.
Edge had claimed me like I was a miracle instead of proof of an old betrayal.
Tarak had swallowed grief every time he saw me and still called me family.
The club had protected me, watched me, fed me, smothered me, loved me.
And I had hidden all of it from them.
Every whisper.
Every screenshot.
Every joke about my mother spreading her legs between clubs.
Every boy asking if I needed help figuring out which biker was my daddy.
Every girl calling Destiny a stripper name.
Every fake dollar bill. Every printed article.
Every old picture of Mandy circled in red like she was a crime scene and I was the evidence.
I hid it because I knew what they would do.
Edge would storm the school.
Regan would destroy the mothers first, then the daughters.
Tarak would get quiet in that scary way that made men cross themselves even if they weren’t Catholic.
And then everyone would know.
Everyone would say, See? Biker trash. Violent. Dangerous. Exactly like her mother.
So I had kept my mouth shut.
Because I had steel in my blood, if nothing else.
Tonight, that steel felt molten.
My phone buzzed again.
Tris.
Where are you? Jake says if Edge murders us before graduation, he’s haunting you specifically.
A laugh broke out of me, shaky and sharp.
I typed back one-handed.
Feed store. Two minutes.
The reply came fast.
Don’t move. And don’t die before I see the outfit.
I shoved the phone away and looked toward the road.
Headlights swung around the corner a minute later, too fast, dust kicking up behind a beat-up blue truck that had definitely seen at least three states and one police chase it refused to discuss.
Jake was driving, one arm hooked over the wheel, dark hair tucked under a ball cap.
Tris leaned halfway out the passenger window, whooping before the truck even stopped.
“Holy hell,” Tris shouted. “You stole the murder bike.”
“It’s not called the murder bike.”
Jake parked crooked across two spaces and climbed out slowly, staring at me like he was trying to decide whether to laugh, pray, or call a responsible adult. “That bike belongs to your dad, doesn’t it?”
I smiled.
Jake groaned. “We’re dead.”
“Not yet,” Tris said, hopping down from the truck. She wore cutoffs, boots, a cropped black tee, and enough turquoise to bankrupt a tourist. Her hair was braided down her back with red thread woven through it, and her grin was pure bad influence. “Look at her. She looks like vengeance got hot.”
“I hate both of you,” Jake muttered.
“No, you don’t.” Tris rounded the bike and took me in from boots to hair. Her smile faded a little when she got to my face. “Hey.”
I looked away.
Too late.
Tris knew me before I was a Rourke. Before Santa Fe. Before club gates and prep school uniforms and adults talking softly over my head. She knew the difference between angry and bleeding.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
Jake made a sound. “That was the least convincing nothing I’ve ever heard.”
“I said I’m fine.”
Tris crossed her arms. “You stole your father’s bike and summoned us to some rich-kid desert party dressed like you’re about to ruin three bloodlines. Try again.”
The laugh that came out of me wasn’t a laugh.
It cracked in the middle.
And just like that, the whole day rose up in my throat.
Brielle in the bathroom.
The printed picture at lunch.
The dollar bill on my locker.
The old newspaper photos. Mandy’s engagement announcement with Tarak. Mandy laughing on Edge’s bike. Mandy’s funeral. Edge standing at the cemetery like somebody had carved grief into a man and left him there for the whole town to photograph.
All of it.
Every stupid, ugly, humiliating second.
I started talking, and once I started, I couldn’t stop.
I told them about the whispers, about the screenshots, about boys making bets over which Royal Bastard had knocked up my dead mother.
I told them about the girls calling me club trash while wearing crosses around their throats.
I told them about the locker, the dollar bill, the jokes about my name, the way teachers looked at me like they knew but didn’t want the paperwork that came with helping.
I told them how they called Mandy a whore.
How they said my mother named me after a stripper.
How Brielle told me to go earn bucks at the bar if I wanted to fit in with my daddy’s people.
By the time I finished, Tris looked ready to commit violence with her bare hands.
Jake had gone very still.
That was worse. Jake loud was harmless. Jake quiet meant somebody was about to make a memory.
“Why didn’t you tell your dad?” he asked.
I wiped under my eye fast, furious there was anything wet there. “Because he would’ve made it worse.”
“Maybe they deserve worse.”
“They do,” I snapped. “But I don’t need Edge riding up to my school with half the Royal Bastards behind him like I’m some pathetic little girl who can’t fight her own battles.”
Tris softened. “Des, nobody would think that.”
“Yes, they would.” My voice came out raw. “That’s all they think. Poor Destiny. Crazy Mandy’s daughter. Edge’s secret baby. Tarak’s almost-stepwhatever. The girl everybody has to watch because maybe one day the bad blood kicks in.”
Jake’s face changed. “Who said that?”
“Everyone says it without saying it.”
The wind moved dust across the lot. Somewhere in the distance, traffic hummed. The sun was dropping lower now, turning the sky copper and blood orange, the whole desert glowing like it knew what I was about to do and approved.
I looked at my friends.
“They’re putting her sins on me,” I said. “Not the people she hurt. Not Edge. Not Tarak. Not Regan. Those are the people who have the right to hate her. Those are the people who could’ve looked at me and seen nothing but Mandy, but they didn’t. They loved me anyway.”
My throat tightened around the truth.
“They loved me anyway,” I repeated, softer.
Tris stepped closer. “Then let us take you home.”
“No.”
“Destiny.”
“No.” I wiped my face again, harder this time. “They wanted to know what kind of girl Mandy’s daughter is? Fine. Tonight they find out.”
Jake’s eyes flicked to the bike. “This is a bad idea.”
“It’s revenge.”
“Usually the same thing.”
Tris looked between us, biting her lip. “What exactly are we doing?”
I smiled then.
Not happy.
Not sane either.
“We’re going to their precious desert bonfire.”
Jake tipped his head back and stared at the sky. “Of course we are.”