Chapter 6
Zeus
The parking lot is already buzzing when I lead London outside. Brothers are loading coolers into truck beds, strapping down chairs, firing up bikes. Everyone is getting ready to head out to our picnic spot on the shore of Lake Erie for a day of burgers, beer, and bullshit.
London squints against the morning sun, scanning the goings-on with watchful eyes.
I make a head gesture toward my bike and head that way. She follows, keeping pace despite her shorter legs.
I grab my spare helmet from the saddlebag and hold it out to her. "Here."
London looks at it, then at my bike, then back at me. "I'm riding with you?"
"That a problem?"
"No, I just—I've never been on a motorcycle before."
"Nothing to it. Get on, hold onto me, lean when I lean. Don't fight the bike."
She takes the helmet.
"Zeus, bro,” Mayhem calls across the lot. His brows are damn near touching his hairline as his gaze moves from London to me. "You riding with us today?"
"What's it look like?"
His grin is too wide. "Looks like a goddamn miracle."
"Fuck off."
Laughter ripples through the brothers in earshot. But that reaction pales in comparison to the looks I get when I mount my Harley and London climbs on behind me.
"You need to hold on tighter,” I tell her.
She presses closer. Her chest meets my back. Her thighs bracket my hips. Not only does it feel like every nerve ending in my body fires at once, but the tension I've been carrying for months starts to ease up a bit.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Prophet nudge Jinx who stops mid-sentence, beer halfway to his mouth, and stares. Mayhem’s jaw hangs open, and he elbows Fuzzy. Even Fury, strapping a cooler to a truck bed, pauses to gape.
Half the fucking parking lot is staring.
I know what they're seeing. They’re seeing the guy who's been a black hole of rage and misery for months, who hasn't participated in a single club outing since “the incident,” not only showing up, but putting a woman on the back of his bike.
In our world, putting a chick on your bike is a statement. A claim, a declaration that she's yours and nobody else's.
London is the first woman ever to ride on the back of my bike. A part of me, a large part if I’m being honest, wants her to be the last.
Which is fucking stupid. I just met her.
And she’s Fiend's daughter.
There's a thought I should sit with—the wrongness of it, the complication, the guilt. I should feel guilty. I killed this girl's father, and now I'm staking a claim on her in front of my brothers like she belongs to me.
But the guilt doesn't come. What does appear is a savage, territorial certainty.
I fire her up, and as my Harley roars beneath us, London's face presses between my shoulder blades.
I pull out of the lot and into the street, taking my position as Road Captain. In my mirrors, dozens of bikes fall into formation behind me. The thunder of engines rolls through the morning air.
The highway opens up, and I push the throttle. Wind tears at my arms, fills my lungs. London's body leans into mine on a curve—pure instinct—and I cover her clasped hands with one of mine for a second, pressing her fingers against my stomach before returning my grip to the handlebar.
She doesn't pull away.
For forty minutes, there's nothing but road and wind and the heat of London’s body against mine. And my head goes quiet. The guilt, the nightmares, the constant replay of that night—that nightmare—all of it fades to a low hum instead of the scream it usually is.
Lake Erie spreads out like a sparkling blue-grey blanket. The shore is rocky where we pull in, but the club's claimed this stretch for years—a cleared area with fire pits, flat ground for grills, and enough space for forty bikes to park.
London peels herself off my bike on unsteady legs and pulls the helmet off, letting her dark hair tumble free. Windblown and flushed, she stares at the water with her lips parted and her eyes wide.
"Come on." I jerk my chin toward the group already setting up.
She stays close to me. Not clingy—more like a satellite maintaining orbit, keeping me in range even as she glances at the other brothers with cautious interest. I'm hyperaware of where she is at every moment. How far. Who's near her. Whether anyone's looking at her wrong.
No one is. They know better.
After a couple of hours of food and noise and watching London get pulled into conversation by the ol' ladies, she drifts back toward me. I'm standing at the water's edge, hands in my pockets, staring out at the flat horizon where sky meets lake.
She stops beside me. Neither of us says a word.
We just start walking. Side by side, we follow the shoreline away from the noise.
The party fades to background—music thinning, laughter dissolving into the sound of water lapping against rocks.
The wind off the lake is chilly, and I watch her pull that ratty jacket tighter around herself.
I break the silence first.
"I'm sorry about your father," I tell her. "I know you came here hoping for a different outcome.”
She's quiet for a beat. "It's strange. Hard to explain what I feel.
Not the loss of a father—I never had one.
More like the loss of a possibility. The death of a maybe.
All those nights I lay awake imagining what it would be like to knock on his door, to see recognition in his eyes, to hear him say I didn't know about you, but I'm glad you're here… None of that will ever happen now."
The words hit hard.
"Your mother never told him about you?"
"I don't know. Her stories changed depending on the night and how much she'd had to drink." London picks up a smooth stone and turns it over in her fingers. "Some nights, she said he knew and didn't care. Other nights she said she never told him. I'll never know which version was true."
I want to know about her mother, about what she's running from, and about who messed up her face. "What about the rest of your life? You have people? A job? School?"
She tosses the stone into the water. "Nope."
"Nope to what?"
"All of it." She brushes sand off her palms and turns to face me. "What was my dad like?"
The subject change is deliberate. She doesn't want me digging into whatever sent her to our gate with a split face and everything she owns in a duffel bag.
I let her redirect the conversation. For now.
"Fiend.” I say the name, and it doesn't burn as much as I expect. "He could talk his way out of anything—or into anything." A ghost of a smile pulls at my mouth. "When I joined the club, he took me under his wing. Showed me the ropes. We were inseparable after that."
“You knew him well then.”
"Better than anyone in this club." And yet not well enough, apparently.
“Tell me about him. Please.” She kicks a pebble, watching it skitter into the water.
I stop walking. My hands ball in my pockets, and I force them open again.
I've spent six months refusing to think about Fiend as anything other than a traitor.
A rat. A dead man who deserved what he got.
But this girl is looking at me with those eyes—his eyes—and asking me to remember the man her father was before everything went to shit.
"He was funny." I hear my own voice, rough and surprised by what it's offering up. "Had this way of telling a story that made everyone laugh. Could spin a thirty-second event into a twenty-minute saga and have the whole room in stitches."
London's gaze lifts to my face, curious and starved for information.
I tell her about the time Fiend and I got lost on a run through Minnesota because he refused to use GPS—said real bikers navigated by instinct—and we ended up in a town of three hundred people where the only restaurant served nothing but lutefisk, which tastes like fish-flavored jello.
I tell her about how he'd pick up stray dogs and sneak them into the compound until Chaos made him stop.
About how he taught me to play poker and then cleaned me out every Friday for two years straight until I figured out his tell.
I tell her about the road trips—riding cross-country with nothing but the clothes on our backs and open highway ahead.
About the time Fiend convinced an entire bar of strangers he was a retired rodeo clown and scored free drinks all night.
About how he could fix any engine, pick any lock, charm any woman who crossed his path.
The words pour out, and with each one, a knot loosens—one I've been carrying for half a year, drawn so tight I forgot it was there. I've been so consumed by the betrayal, so fixated on the monster Fiend became, that I forgot about the friend he was before.
London listens. She doesn't interrupt or ask questions. She just listens.
"He sounds like he was a good person," she says when I finally trail off.
"He was…” My jaw tightens. “Complicated.”
My shoulders raise and lower in a shrug. “I guess nobody’s all good or all bad. We’re—all of us—a mix of both on a sliding scale."
She doesn't push for more of an explanation.
The sun drops lower, painting the sky in amber and rust. Down the beach, brothers are building a bonfire. Someone cranks the music louder.
I look down at London. Her face is warm in the fading daylight, and her eyes are soft. I feel different. Something inside me has shifted. I feel…not exactly hopeful, but like there’s a space where hope might grow if I let it.
"What?" she asks in response to my staring.
"Nothing." I hold out my hand. "Come on. Let's head back before they eat all the food."
She takes my hand. Her fingers are small inside mine, but they feel just right.
As we approach the bonfire, I catch a flash of platinum blonde. Kandi's perched on a log, drink in hand, but her attention isn't on the man beside her. Her gaze is locked on us, and her face is pure acid.
Fucking Kandi. The way she watches London—that sets my teeth on edge. I might need to have a very stern talk with her.
I steer London toward the food with an arm around her shoulders, grateful when she doesn't pull away.