Chapter One
Nano
One week before the Death Dogs attacked.
The clubhouse reeked of whiskey, weed, and sex.
The holy trinity of a Saturday night at the Brotherhood of Bastards’ compound.
The air was thick with it, a humid fog of debauchery that clung to my skin, hair, and clothes.
I could taste it on my tongue, that metallic-sweet combination of sweat, smoke and sin as I sat at the bar and nursed my third beer, watching the chaos unfold like I always did.
Detached.
Observing. A ghost in my own fucking life, drifting through scenes that should have stirred something in me but didn’t.
Not anymore. Not for years. And that was the rot beneath the surface, the secret I kept even from myself. I was supposed to be one of them, a brother, a Bastard. But this... this spectacle, this casual cruelty that once ignited a fire in me now left a cold, hollow ache.
To my left, Morpheus had some blonde bent over the pool table, her tits pressed against the green felt while he pounded into her pussy from behind.
His cut, the leather vest with our club patch, still on because Morpheus never took that shit off, even when he was balls-deep in club cunt.
The bitch was moaning loud enough to wake the dead in Mount Moriah Cemetery, but nobody gave a shit as her nails scratched at the felt, leaving little tears in the fabric that he would bitch about later, but Morpheus was lost in her cunt, grunting and slapping her ass hard enough to leave handprints.
That was what club whores were for.
Stress relief, entertainment, and decoration. They knew the score when they walked through those doors. They knew they weren’t girlfriends or old ladies. They were playthings, and most of them got off on it.
Or so they told themselves.
Or so I told myself. Because sometimes, when I looked at them, at the glazed-over eyes, the forced smiles, I saw a flicker of something else.
A desperation. A silent plea I couldn’t quite decipher, or perhaps, a plea I was too afraid to acknowledge.
It was easier to believe in their supposed enjoyment than to confront the abyss of exploitation that yawned before me.
Heretic and Scythe were playing cards at a corner table, a brunette on her knees between them taking turns sucking their cocks while they argued about who was bluffing.
The brunette’s head bobbed back and forth like she was at a fucking tennis match, as both brothers grinned like idiots, barely paying attention to the wet heat of her mouth.
She had good technique. I would give her that.
Enthusiastic, no teeth, lots of spit. Professional-grade head.
“Full house, motherfucker.” Heretic slapped his cards down with a triumphant smirk, and Scythe groaned, tossing his cards across the table.
“Bullshit. You’re cheating.”
“Can’t cheat when you’ve got your dick in a cunt’s mouth. You’re distracted as fuck.” Heretic grabbed a handful of the brunette’s hair and pushed her head down further onto Scythe’s cock, making her gag. “See? Can you think straight now?”
They both laughed, that rough brotherhood sound that came from years of bleeding together, riding together, killing together.
And the brunette just kept working, mascara running down her cheeks in black rivers, drool dripping from her chin.
She didn’t complain. Didn’t stop. Just serviced them both like it was her goddamn calling.
And I watched.
A part of me, the part that still remembered a time before this life, screamed to intervene.
To pull her up, to tell her to get the hell out.
But that voice was a whisper against the roar of years of conditioning, against the ingrained loyalty that demanded I never questioned the brothers, never showed weakness.
If I moved, if I spoke out, I wouldn’t just be ostracizing myself.
I would be betraying them all. I would be the one ostracized, the one marked.
And then who would be left to find a different way?
The thought was a heavy chain that anchored me to this seat, to this silence, to this complicity.
I had tried, once, to speak up against something similar.
The memory of Scythe’s cold, assessing stare, Heretic’s casual dismissal, and the ensuing weeks of subtle threats and veiled warnings, was a constant, chilling reminder.
Choice was a razor’s edge, and I refused to be trapped on the wrong side of it.
Near the back, Garrote had two girls going at it on the couch while he watched, stroking his dick with slow, deliberate movements.
One redhead, one with jet-black hair that looked almost blue under the dim lights, their tongues tangling together, hands roaming over each other’s bodies as if they were searching for buried treasure.
Garrote was giving them instructions. “Yeah, bite her fucking nipple. Make her scream. I want to hear it.” And they obeyed like trained dogs, like good little performers putting on a show.
The redhead bit down, and the black-haired girl cried out, arching her back, as Garrote’s hand moved faster.
This was normal.
This was Tuesday.
This was the Brotherhood of Bastards in all its grotesque glory.
A carnival of flesh and violence.
A brotherhood bound by blood and bad decisions.
I took another pull from my beer, the cold liquid doing absolutely nothing to cut through the oppressive heat in the room.
The bass from the speakers thumped relentlessly through my chest, rattling my ribcage with every beat.
It was some old Pantera track Wanderer had put on the jukebox about twenty minutes ago.
He was at the other end of the bar now, laughing his ass off at something Cerberus said, both of them three sheets to the wind and getting louder by the minute.
The whole clubhouse reeked of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and sweat.
I wasn’t much of a partier. Never had been, even back in high school when everyone else was getting shitfaced at keggers in some farmer’s field.
I preferred the muted hum of my computers, the clean logic of code, the pure satisfaction of breaking through firewalls and watching supposedly secure systems bend to my will as if they were made of tissue paper.
Out here, in the chaos and noise, I was just another body.
Another brother in a sea of leather cuts and Brotherhood patches.
But in my room, behind my screens with my fingers on the keyboard, I was a fucking god.
And the thought of that god—the one who could dismantle any system with a few keystrokes—being reduced to this, to a lump of flesh and simmering resentment, felt like a betrayal of my own damn self.
“Hey, handsome.”
Her voice was smooth, sultry, with just enough rasp to make my dick twitch involuntarily.
I turned my head slowly and stared directly at a pair of tits that could make a man believe in Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.
They were barely contained in a tight black tank top that looked like it had been spray-painted on, full and round and perfect.
Nipples hard enough to cut glass that pressed insistently against the thin fabric.
A wave of something akin to disgust, or maybe just weariness, washed over me.
This woman, this... bait. She was part of the show, another commodity in the club’s twisted bazaar.
My gut churned. I wanted to turn away, to pretend I hadn’t seen her, to retreat into the sterile certainty of my digital world.
But a small, dark part of me, the part that craved something, anything, to puncture this suffocating monotony, stirred.
It was the same part that had led me to this brotherhood, to these decisions.
It whispered, “Don’t be a coward. Play the game. You’re not as pure as you think you are.”
And the worst part was, it was right.
The thought of rejecting her, of being the one on the moral high ground in this cesspool, felt as fake as Garrote’s manufactured cruelty.
To refuse would be to admit that I was truly alone, utterly disconnected from the primal, messy, and frankly, often ugly, reality of this life.
It would mean admitting that the god in my room was a lie, and that out here, I was just as susceptible, just as flawed, as everyone else.
And I wasn’t ready for that.
Not yet.
My eyes traveled up, taking their time. Pouty lips painted dark red, the kind of red that left marks on collarbones and inner thighs.
High cheekbones that could’ve been carved from marble.
Big doe eyes framed with thick lashes, heavy with mascara and promise.
Long dark hair that fell in waves over her shoulders, catching the dim light from the neon beer sign behind the bar.
She was new. I would have remembered a body like hers walking through the doors.
A flicker of something akin to unease, a familiar tremor that always accompanied the arrival of a new contender, rippled through me.
It was a foolish instinct; I knew. We were all just cogs in this machine, interchangeable.
Yet, a part of me, the part that clung to a desperate, buried sense of self, recoiled.
“You look lonely,” she purred, sliding onto the stool next to me with practiced ease. Her movements were fluid and deliberate. Her perfume hit me as her hand landed on my thigh, warm even through my jeans, as her fingers trailed slowly toward my crotch with clear intention. “Want some company?”
I said nothing. Just watched her with that same detached interest I watched everything else.
The kind of observation that came naturally after years of keeping my distance.
The distance, I had convinced myself, was a shield.
A necessary armor against the gnawing emptiness that threatened to consume me.
But her touch, even through my denim, sent a jolt through me that was both unwelcome and undeniably potent.
It was a betrayal of my own carefully constructed apathy.
She was pretty.
They were all pretty.
That was why they were here. The Brotherhood didn’t hire girls who weren’t at least an eight, and this one was pushing a nine with the right lighting and enough alcohol in my system.
A bitter laugh, trapped in my chest, threatened to escape.
Nine. I was barely a seven on a good night, and only when I had silenced the critical voice that whispered lies about my worth.
“I’m Serena,” she said, leaning in close enough that her perfume enveloped me. Something sweet and cheap, probably from one of those discount stores where everything came in pink packaging. “I’ve been watching you all night. You’re different from the others.”
“That right?” My voice came out flat, uninterested.
I had heard variations of this line before.
Different girl, same script. The script that always promised something more, something real, but inevitably led back to the same hollow transaction.
I wanted to believe her, to latch onto the idea that I was special, but the years of disappointment had carved deep trenches of cynicism into my soul.
She didn’t seem deterred. If anything, my indifference seemed to encourage her.
Her hand moved higher, fingers walking up my thigh with practiced confidence, before she cupped my cock through my jeans.
I was already half-hard from the atmosphere—the pulsing music, the dim lights, the general air of debauchery that hung over the place like expensive cologne—and her touch made my dick swell further.
A wave of shame washed over me. This physical response, so primal and involuntary, felt like a surrender.
A concession to the very things I loathed about myself and this place.
I hated that my body could still be so easily manipulated, so readily swayed by a stranger’s touch, when my mind screamed for resistance.
“You’re the quiet one,” she whispered, her breath hot against my ear, her lips barely grazing the sensitive skin there. “The one who sits back and watches. I bet you see everything, don’t you? I bet you know exactly what everyone in this room wants before they even know it themselves.”
Smart girl. Or maybe just observant. Either way, she’d read me better than most people managed to.
Better than my brothers who kept trying to pull me into their conversations about sports, whores, and other shit I didn’t give a damn about.
Better than the other whores who had approached me earlier with their rehearsed routines.
A part of me, a desperate, lonely part, craved the validation her words offered.
But the larger part, the part that knew the price of such attention, recoiled.
To be seen was to be vulnerable.
“I bet you’ve got a big cock,” she continued, squeezing my dick through the denim with just enough pressure to make her point. Her other hand traced circles on my chest. “I bet you’d like me to suck it. Right here. Right now. Let everyone watch while I choke on your dick. Give them a real show.”