Chapter 2
KEVLAR
The surveillance room was cold and still. Exactly the way I liked it. No windows or outside distractions. Just me and the soft hum of a dozen machines, each monitor flickering with quiet footage from around Riverstone. Silent, unblinking witnesses to every movement inside our territory.
One long wall was devoted to the feed rotation of several businesses owned by my motorcycle club, the Hounds of Hellfire.
A diner, garage, tattoo studio, bar, and more.
The other angles shifted depending on the intel we had.
Right now, I had half a dozen loops running on just one location—The Fuel a pattern always emerged. And by trying to be overlooked, they stood out.
I sure as hell knew what it meant when they all kept orbiting the same fucking diner and nowhere else.
I didn’t have confirmation these visitors were scouts for the weapons pipeline I’d been tracking near the state line, but my gut was twitching.
It had been too quiet for months. Under-the-radar traffic with no obvious deals going down.
Then there was a shift. Chatter about expansion.
Noise in the dark. And the way they moved—skirting the edge of our jurisdiction—seemed like someone was trying to test our defenses, looking for weak spots without triggering a full-on response.
If that was their plan, they were fucking idiots.
The Hounds of Hellfire didn’t do weak spots. We didn’t leave messes. And we didn’t warn twice.
We weren’t the kind of MC that gave second chances, not when it came to our territory. The Hounds owned most of Riverstone, Georgia, but our sphere of influence—and protection—expanded into the surrounding areas.
Some of our activities were above board, others were buried deep beneath. We ran legitimate businesses, but that was just the surface. Below it ran a deeper current. One we controlled.
Ours was a different kind of power. A brotherhood with a code, a chain of command, and justice that didn't answer to the law.
We weren’t just bikes and brute force, no matter what people thought.
The club had legitimate businesses—more than most outsiders ever clocked—and Ace kept the money moving with a brain that should’ve been illegal.
Investments, markets, and shells within shells.
Everything stayed solid, quiet, and profitable.
The real work happened where the light didn’t reach. Behind the scenes, we were the last resort for the people nobody else could help.
We didn’t get paid to put bodies in the ground.
We erased people instead. Men and women with enemies, abusers, or governments on their backs came to us for a rebirth.
If you needed a new identity, a life scrubbed clean, and a past buried so deep no one would ever find it, with no fingerprints left behind—we were the ones you called.
It started as favors, the kind you didn’t advertise, before growing into something efficient and ruthlessly clean.
Some paid. Others didn’t. Those rare freebies were carefully chosen and done under the table. They always deserved.
King had built our reputation from the inside out. Our president’s years in the CIA had made him a ghost and a gatekeeper. When he’d taken the gavel, he brought the skills and contacts to make sure our services didn’t leave a trace.
It took an army of skill to pull off. The prez’s forgery skills were a fucking art.
We had a tech genius who built identities like puzzles—flawless code, embedded history, and clean data trails.
A brilliant lawyer who could bend the system into knots and make it look like a straight line.
Experts in fire, explosives, finance, and logistics.
A cleaner. A former thief. A crew of men trained to handle everything from surveillance to retrieval.
Each patch had his specialty. Mine was security.
I was an expert in munitions, tactical containment, and physical defense. If someone came too close to the things we protected, I made sure they didn’t come again.
I was the shield. If you crossed into our world without permission, I was the last fucking thing you saw. I didn’t make threats. I made ghosts.
So when someone came to us in need of our skills, and King gave the nod, we’d make them disappear.
WITSEC had nothing on us. And we did it without the government leash.
Cuing up another time stamp, I pulled up footage from two nights ago, and my eyes scanned every inch of the diner’s interior. My posture was relaxed, but every cell in my body was dialed in.
That was when I saw them.
Four men walking in. Their movements weren’t aggressive, but they were synchronized. Average height, average build. Nondescript clothes. Like all the others, everything about them was designed to be forgettable. But there was something wrong about how they moved. Controlled and too damn clean.
I’d seen that kind of posture before. Quiet alert. But I hadn’t seen these men before, not in this town. They weren’t in any of our flagged feeds. And they sure as hell weren’t local.
I kept watching.
That was when she stepped into view.
I didn’t recognize her at first. But since I knew Susan, the other server on duty that night, that meant the woman on the screen was Maren Whitlock.
She appeared at the edge of the footage, stepping into the light as she greeted the men. The glare from the overhead fixtures caught her just right, and it felt like the rest of the screen went dark.
Fuck.
The air in the room shifted. Or maybe it was just me.
She was something else.
I’d never really noticed her before.
In all the footage I’d scrubbed, I’d missed her somehow. The lighting was low, and the servers had just been in the background since they didn’t need to be watched. But now that she was in the spotlight, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
She’d been working at Fuel & Flame for a month now. I knew because I’d signed off on her background check myself. We vetted all our people—every bartender, mechanic, and server. Nothing slipped through the cracks. She was clean, young, and kept mostly to herself, as far as I could tell.
I remembered that she’d grown up here, but in the years since I’d moved to Riverstone and patched with the Hounds, our paths had never crossed. Probably had a lot to do with the fact that she was nineteen and I was thirty-five.
Way too fucking old for her.
But my body didn’t seem to give a shit about that.
Her figure was soft, all gentle curves and subtle sway, her hips flaring sweetly beneath the snug black fabric of her work pants in a way that made my jaw clench.
Her shirt clung to the shape of her tits—full, high, and perfectly fucking bitable.
A thick, long braid, the color of deep auburn fire, was slung over one shoulder, resting exactly where I wanted to put my mouth.
But her face…fuck.
Round and untouched by the weight of this world. Pale skin with a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks, like someone had kissed her skin with the sun and then walked away.
The lashes around her wide blue eyes brushed the tips of her cheekbones when she blinked down at the menus in her hand. She had a cute little nose and a kissable mouth. Full, soft, and pink.
My cock punched to full attention.
Shit.
My hand tightened around the arm of my chair.
Blood pumped hard in my veins, heat coiling low in my gut like a detonation fuse lit from the inside.
I hadn’t felt this kind of immediate want in a long damn time—if ever.
My dick was already straining in my jeans, heavy and aching, and all I’d done was look at her. Just one frame.
I reached for the keyboard and froze the screen, ignoring my dick as I leaned in closer.
I wasn’t a man who got distracted by pretty women. Not on the job. Not in the field. Not ever. But something about her had hooked deep and fast, dragging me under.
Although pretty didn’t even begin to describe her.
She was beautiful. But not just in a sweet way. Something about the softness of her made my hands itch. Not to hurt or destroy, but to possess. To cradle. And also to mark.
I wanted her naked and spread out beneath me, her braid undone, and my fingers delved into the silky strands. I wanted to taste every inch of her heated skin. To feel her breath stutter against my mouth while she writhed under me, bare and begging, back arched, whispering my name in ecstasy.
My hands itched to grip her hips, pin her down, and claim her. Hard, slow, and thorough. Until she forgot every man who came before me.
Fucking hell. Pull it together, man.
I swallowed hard, furious at myself for reacting like this to a surveillance recording. But the instinct was primal. Bone-deep.
Exhaling slowly through my nose, I hit play again.
She said something to the men, and they marched to a booth without any reaction. A few seconds later, she approached with menus and an innocent smile. Nothing seemed amiss until she went to check on them after they’d been served their burgers.
Her posture changed midway through their approach. She paused, just for a second, her shoulders stiffening and her smile faltering as her chin dipped.
Whatever those men were hiding, she felt it.
I rewound, slowed the footage, and watched her again.
It was just a slight change, small enough that most people wouldn’t catch it. But I did.
And so did one of the men in the booth.
He looked up, caught her hesitation, and stared longer than necessary.
Not flirty. Not friendly.
Assessing.
My jaw flexed as I paused the footage again. Zoomed in. And right then, I knew.
She hadn’t seen anything. Not really. But she was unforgettable. Alone, unprotected, and soft.
And she’d looked right at them. Registered that something about them wasn’t right.
That was enough.
The subtle awareness marked her. Even if she couldn’t explain it and just shrugged it off as a weird vibe, those men wouldn’t.
They’d clocked her. And if they were who I suspected, the threat would be taken seriously. They wouldn’t want her talking. Couldn't have her describing them to the local sheriff. Or worse, drawing our attention.
The pulse at my temple throbbed as fury lit behind my eyes.
They’d just marked her as a threat. A liability. Someone to be handled.
They’d come back. Or send someone.
To silence her and erase the only witness who could describe a face that didn’t belong.
My hands curled into fists on the desk.
Fuck that.
Maren didn’t even know what she’d walked into, and she wouldn’t until it was too late. Unless someone stepped in first to make damn sure that whatever these bastards were planning didn’t reach her.
My spine locked, and every protective instinct I had kicked in like a wall of fire. Possessive didn’t even cover it. This wasn’t about territory, witnesses, or club business anymore.
This was about her.
She was mine.
She just didn’t know it yet.