Guarded By the Bikers (Broken Halos MC #10)

Chapter 1

LUCIA

The metal of the USB drive bites into my palm, a jagged little shard of hope in a house built on lies.

I jam it into the port on Dominic’s laptop, the mahogany desk humming beneath it with a low, mechanical throatiness. My heart is a frantic bird trapped in a cage of ribs, hammering against my lungs.

Outside the heavy oak door, the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of Enrique’s boots vibrates through the marble floorboards of the corridor.

Ten seconds. Maybe twelve. He’s my brother’s most loyal hound, a man who smells like cheap whiskey and cheaper loyalty.

He’d kill me for even breathing on this computer, let alone stripping its secrets.

The progress bar on the screen crawls with agonizing indifference. Ten percent. Twenty.

This drive is everything. Five years of playing the “quiet sister,” the “mafia princess” who stays in her wing and asks for nothing.

Five years of tracking shell companies, offshore routing numbers, and the digital paper trail of the millions Dominic stole from my inheritance.

It’s my escape. It’s Tyra’s future. Without it, we’re just pretty ornaments in a tomb of gold leaf and blood.

What Dominic never calculated: the sidelined sister has twelve years of invisible classroom hours behind her.

Every IT contractor who passed through this compound, I watched.

Every network configuration meeting I was excluded from, I listened through walls.

I learned encryption from a manual I ordered under a shell account, delivered inside a shipment of Tyra’s art supplies.

I built the extraction script in forty-minute windows between Dominic’s scheduled check-ins, on a burner laptop I sourced through three separate grocery delivery accounts over eight months.

He gave me margins and silence and the assumption that quiet means contained. He gave me exactly what I needed.

Sixty percent.

The footsteps stop. The brass handle jiggles. I go bone-still, my breath hitching in the back of my throat. I can almost feel Enrique’s stare through the wood, that predatory instinct he has for weakness.

“Lucia?” His voice is a gravelly rasp. “Your brother is looking for you.”

“I’m looking for a book, Enrique,” I call out, my voice a cool ribbon of bored silk. I don’t let the tremor in my knees reach my throat. “Unless Dominic wants me to read him a bedtime story, he can wait five minutes.”

A pause. A heartbeat where the world stands still.

Click.

Transfer complete. I yank the drive, shoving it deep into the lace of my bra where the metal stings my skin, a cold brand against my breast. I grab a random leather-bound ledger from the shelf just as the door groans open.

My phone buzzes against my thigh. A text from three hours ago, finally punched through the compound’s VPN blocker.

STEPH:

r u serious about tonight

I type back with one thumb while my pulse is still hammering.

LUCIA:

Already done. Don’t wait up.

I silence the phone. Enrique stands there, his shadow long and suffocating across the Persian rug. He scans the room, his eyes lingering on the laptop screen I just dimmed.

“Get to your room,” he grunts. “He’s in a mood.”

“When is he not?” I brush past him, the scent of him making my stomach turn.

I move through the foyer, past the statues and the priceless art that feels like headstones.

I usually retreat to my apartment in the East Wing, but the adrenaline is a live wire in my veins.

I duck into my formal suite—the gilded cage Dominic keeps me in when he wants me close—and throw the deadbolt.

The compound smells like marble cleaner and forced silence. It always has.

Enrique runs the cleaning crew on a schedule tight enough to make the floors echo—every surface stripped of evidence that people live here, breathe here, break apart here.

Sound carries six rooms in every direction.

Privacy is architectural fiction. I learned early that the safest conversations happen inside my own head, in the half-second windows between footfall and arrival, in the space between the click of a door and the turn of a handle.

The compound does not feel like a home. It feels like a museum where the exhibits are not allowed to move.

My skin is humming, vibrating with a frantic energy I have nowhere to put. It’s a familiar, hollow ache. The kind that comes from years of being a bird in a cage, watching the world through gold bars.

I need to come down. I need to feel something that isn’t fear.

I cross to the window, looking out at the sprawling estate. The mountain road is a grey ribbon winding through the pines. Somewhere out there is a life where I’m not a pawn. Where I don’t have to copy files in the dark to ensure my daughter’s safety.

Speaking of my daughter, she’s in the garden with her nanny, her small dark head bent over a patch of wildflowers. I watch her for a moment, the ache in my chest tightening. She has her father’s eyes. Eyes I haven’t seen in five years.

My phone vibrates on the duvet. A message from Dominic.

I’ve hired three new bodyguards to staff your perimeter for the gala tomorrow night. They’re the best money can buy. Don’t be difficult, Lucia. Read the files. They arrive at 11:30.

I click the attachment, and the air leaves my lungs in a sharp hiss.

Dominic usually hires meatheads. Thick-necked thugs with no brains. These men… these are something else entirely. They aren’t just guards. They’re weapons.

The first is Nick. The leader. A silver-fox commander with a jawline that looks like it was carved from granite.

He’s older, mid-forties, wearing a charcoal suit that can’t hide the sheer, brutal breadth of his shoulders.

He looks like authority. He looks like the kind of man who would pin me against a wall and demand every one of my secrets before he took my mouth.

But it’s the way his trousers cling to his thighs in the candid photo that makes my mouth go dry.

There is a heavy, unmistakable weight between his legs, a thick, thick bulge that speaks of a man who takes what he wants and doesn’t apologize for the wreckage he leaves behind.

Then there’s Rafe. He’s a beast. He has a thick, dark beard and eyes that look like molten gold—predatory, intense, and completely feral.

A jagged scar slices down his neck, disappearing into the collar of a black t-shirt that looks ready to rip.

He looks like he’d growl my name while he pinned my wrists to the headboard, his body a wall of heat and scarred muscle.

He’s the kind of man who doesn’t use words when a bite will do.

The third photo makes my stomach flip and the heat between my legs pulse. Jude.

He’s wearing a black tactical shirt so tight it looks like a second skin.

I can see the hard, ridged outlines of his abs—an eight-pack that looks like it was forged in a furnace—and the way his biceps bulge against the fabric, veins mapped across the skin like a diagram of power.

He has dark hair, silver at the temples, and a gaze so clinical and sharp it’s terrifying.

I imagine him in a missionary position, those thick arms braced on either side of my head, his face a mask of cold focus as he slams himself into me until I can’t remember my own name.

The adrenaline from the heist needs a place to go, and right now, it’s pooling in the dark, wet heat between my thighs.

I haven’t been touched in five years. Not like this.

Not by men who look like they’d burn the world down just to mark me.

I’m a ghost in this house, but looking at these men—these “red flags” with silver hair and possessive glares—I feel a spark of something dangerously alive.

I want to be ruined. I want to be more than a princess.

I want to be a woman who is claimed until she’s nothing but a memory of skin and sound.

I strip. My silk trousers hit the floor with a soft shhh. I lie back on the Egyptian cotton, the USB drive forgotten on the nightstand, and reach for the small, black bullet vibrator I keep hidden under my pillow.

I close my eyes and let the whiskey-soaked fantasy take root.

I imagine Nick’s hand on my throat, his voice a low, gravelly growl as he tells me exactly how he’s going to use me.

I imagine Rafe’s rough, calloused palms marking my hips, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin of my shoulder.

And Jude… I imagine Jude’s relentless, rhythmic pace as he drives into me, his face inches from mine, his eyes boring into my soul while his body wrecks my senses.

The vibration grinding against my clit is a violent, buzzing demand.

I’m soaked. Slick and dripping hot, my thighs trembling as my pussy clenches tightly around empty air.

I’m coming apart at the visceral thought of being completely occupied by all three of them.

I imagine Nick’s hard mouth bruising mine, Rafe’s massive, calloused hands leaving territorial marks on my tits, and Jude’s thick, heavy cock buried in me to the hilt, stretching my walls until I sob.

The heavy, pooling ache between my legs is unbearable.

The vibration speeds up. I’m right on the edge, a cliff of sensation I’m ready to scream off.

I push the bullet harder against myself, my hips bucking off the cotton as the image of them takes over. I see Nick’s silver hair as he looks down at me with pure possession. I feel Rafe’s scarred chest crushing my breasts. I hear Jude’s breath hitch as he buries himself inside me.

The pressure builds until it’s a physical weight, a coil of steel snapping in my gut.

My vision goes white. I scream into the empty room, my body convulsing in a grand, violent orgasm that leaves me shaking, sobbing, and utterly destroyed.

It’s a tidal wave that sweeps away five years of loneliness in one shattering moment.

My phone pings.

I’m still coming down, my muscles locking, my breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. My hand fumbles for the phone, my fingers slick with my own heat, trembling so hard I can barely hold the device.

A message from Steph:

Okay but that reply was CRYPTIC. Are you actually okay? Call me.

I blink through the haze. My heart is still hammering a frantic rhythm. I need to reply. I need to tell someone I’m alive.

Another notification pops up. A new group chat.

Created by: Nick.

Participants: Rafe, Jude, Lucia.

NICK:

We’re at the gate. If you have questions or specific security requirements, put them here.

I see the text box. I think I’m replying to Steph. I want to tell her I’m finally okay, that I just had a release I’ve been craving for years.

I type with a manic, shaky energy, my thumbs sliding over the glass.

I’m okay. Better than okay. I just had one of the best orgasms I’ve had in years masturbating to the images of my three new bodyguards. I honestly don’t know if I want to run away or get on my knees for all three of them the second they walk through the door.

I hit send.

The silence that follows is deafening.

I look at the screen. The bubble isn’t green. It isn’t a private message to Steph. It’s blue. It’s in the group chat.

Read by Nick.

Read by Rafe.

Read by Jude.

The blood drains from my face so fast I feel dizzy. I try to delete it, but the app locks as the “delivered” symbols turn into “read” receipts.

The filthiest text of my life wasn’t sent to Steph. It was sent to the three men I am fantasizing about.

Downstairs, the front door groans open.

They’re here.

And they know exactly what I want them to do to me.