Chapter 2
DYLAN
The desert exploded ten miles outside Santa Fe.
One second, the road ahead was nothing but blacktop, starlight, and the steady red glow of taillights from San Diego cutting through the night in formation.
The next, the horizon bloomed orange.
Not sunset orange.
Not bonfire orange.
Violence orange.
The kind of sudden, ugly light that punched upward into the dark and made every man on a bike sit taller.
I felt it in my chest before the sound hit.
Then the boom rolled across the desert.
Low. Heavy. Wrong.
My hand tightened on the throttle.
Ahead of me, Rocco, our VP lifted one fist, and the formation tightened like a living thing. San Diego didn’t scare easy. You didn’t ride under a Royal Bastards cut, especially out of our chapter, unless fear had already been carved out of you and replaced with something uglier.
But explosions changed the air.
They reminded men that metal, fire, and bad timing did not give a damn about pride.
Nate pulled up on my right, his bike growling beside mine. He tipped his chin toward the glow spreading behind a low ridge of brush and cactus.
“What the hell was that?” he shouted over the engines.
I looked past the road.
Smoke was climbing now, black against black, lit from beneath by fire. More light flickered behind it. Not one burst. Not one accident. Something else was burning.
“Could be a wreck,” Nate said.
Could be.
Could be cartel too.
That thought moved through me cold and fast.
We had seen enough along the coast to know fire was not always fire. Sometimes it was cleanup. Sometimes it was a message. Sometimes it was bodies, evidence, cargo, or people who had become inconvenient to men with no souls left to lose.
San Diego was headed for a sit-down with Santa Fe because too much had been moving lately.
Shipments that weren’t supposed to exist. Girls disappearing from border towns and turning up nowhere.
Men whispering about routes through desert land nobody watched closely enough until somebody started bleeding on it.
And now the night had split open in front of us.
Rocco signaled again.
Keep moving.
The main pack rolled on.
A meet was still a meet. Trouble ahead didn’t erase trouble waiting. If this was bait, the worst thing we could do was send the whole chapter chasing fire through the desert like fools begging for an ambush.
But my VP looked back once.
At me.
Then at Nate.
He didn’t have to say it.
Check it.
Don’t die.
Catch up.
I tipped my chin.
Nate cursed. “Of course it’s us.”
“You wanted excitement.”
“I wanted tacos after the meeting.”
We broke from formation and cut right onto a rough access trail half-swallowed by scrub. My headlight jumped over dirt, rock, cactus, and dry brush. The fire glowed brighter with every second, throwing shadows over the land like something alive was moving out there.
The trail wasn’t meant for bikes like ours.
It barely counted as a trail at all.
We pushed anyway.
Dust kicked up under my tires. Mesquite scratched at my jeans. A branch snapped against my boot. I leaned hard around a patch of loose sand and kept my eyes moving.
Desert at night was a liar.
It looked empty until it wasn’t.
Looked still until something struck.
Looked dead until it swallowed you whole.
The first kid came out of nowhere.
He stumbled into the beam of my headlight, hands up, eyes blown wide as moons. Polo shirt torn. One shoe gone. Blood on his cheek from a cut too clean to be anything but glass.
I braked hard.
Nate swung wide beside me.
The kid screamed.
Actually screamed.
Like I was the monster in the dark.
“Relax,” I snapped, cutting the engine low enough to hear him. “What happened?”
He stared at my cut.
Then at Nate’s.
Then back toward the fire.
“She’s crazy,” he gasped. “She’s crazy. She lit it up. She lit everything up.”
“Who?”
He shook his head too fast. “I don’t know. I don’t know, man. She was like—like a ghost or something. Like that dead lady. They said she was cursed. They said?—”
Nate muttered, “Rich kids and drugs. My favorite.”
The kid gagged, doubled over, then bolted past us into the dark.
I watched him go.
“Dead lady?” Nate asked.
I didn’t answer.
Something had shifted under my skin.
We moved closer.
More kids spilled from the direction of the clearing.
Not cartel. Not victims dragged out of trucks.
High schoolers. Prep schoolers, if the pressed shirts, expensive boots, and daddy-money vehicles meant anything.
They ran like their world had caught fire because, from the look of the smoke, it had.
A girl in a white dress sobbed into her phone.
A boy with blood on his arms kept yelling about his Bronco.
Another girl was on her knees in the dirt, screaming that someone had to call her mother before the cops did.
Nate looked at the chaos and shook his head. “This is why I hate teenagers with money.”
“They’re all lit.”
“Drunk?”
“And more.”
It was in their eyes. Too wide. Too bright.
Faces stretched with panic, sweat, and whatever powdered courage or desert hallucination had been passed around that party.
Half of them looked like they were running from fire.
The other half looked like they were running from whatever they thought they had seen inside it.
I caught one boy by the shoulder when he stumbled too close.
He flinched so hard he almost fell.
“Anyone hurt?” I asked.
His gaze flicked to my hand like he forgot what language was.
“Hey.” I shook him once. “Anyone still back there?”
“Cars,” he babbled. “Cars are burning. Brielle’s Bronco blew up. She did it. She said she was fire. She said—she said they wanted Mandy’s daughter.”
My blood cooled.
The name hit like a hand around my throat.
Mandy.
Not my history.
Not my ghost.
But I knew enough.
Everybody in the Royal Bastards knew enough.
Santa Fe had old wounds, and Mandy was one of the ones men still talked around instead of through. Tarak. Edge. Regan. The daughter who had appeared out of nowhere like the past had grown skin and come home.
I had only seen that daughter once.
Three years ago.
I had been bleeding on Santa Fe’s clubhouse floor, too proud to fall down and too desperate to admit I might. She had stepped toward me with a towel in her hand, fifteen and furious, all big eyes and sharp bones and anger too heavy for a kid’s body.
Edge had stopped her cold.
Not because she was weak.
Because she was his.
I remembered the way she tossed the towel on the table instead of handing it to me.
I remembered the look on her face when he ordered her upstairs.
I remembered thinking that girl knew what it felt like to be caged.
Then I had dropped my eyes because she was fifteen and I was old enough to know where the line was.
I had never forgotten that.
“Who?” I asked the boy, my voice sharper now.
He swallowed.
“Destiny,” he whispered. “Destiny Rourke.”
Nate’s head snapped toward me.
I released the boy.
He ran.
For one second, the whole desert seemed to go quiet under the roar of fire.
Then a siren wailed in the distance.
“Dylan,” Nate said carefully.
I was already moving.
We cut away from the fleeing kids and deeper toward the burn line, but not straight into the clearing. Cops were coming from that side. Fire trucks too. You could see the first red-blue flickers bouncing off smoke beyond the rise.
I didn’t care about rich kids crying over melted graduation presents.
I cared about the tracks.
A bike had gone off the main trail.
Fresh.
Bad line.
Too fast.
The dirt was torn up where the tire lost purchase, then gouged deep where metal had hit earth and dragged. Brush was snapped low. Cactus broken. One long scar cut through the sand toward darker scrub beyond the spill of firelight.
My stomach tightened.
“Nate.”
“I see it.”
We killed the headlights.
Darkness dropped hard.
I pulled a penlight from my pocket and moved on foot, following the wreck path. Nate stayed behind me, one hand near his gun, eyes on the smoke and the kids and the chaos behind us.
The desert didn’t give her up all at once.
First, I found the bike.
Half-hidden in brush, tipped hard on its side, chrome scraped, one handlebar bent. Even in the weak light, I knew it didn’t belong to some prep school boy pretending to be outlaw for a night.
This was a serious machine.
Black. Heavy. Mean.
The kind of bike a man loved enough to kill over.
Nate hissed through his teeth. “That Edge’s?”
“Looks like it.”
“Of course it is.”
Of all the nights.
Of all the fires.
Of all the stupid reckless girls in all of New Mexico, it had to be Edge Rourke’s daughter on Edge Rourke’s bike, crashed out in the desert while half of Santa Fe was about to descend on a felony bonfire.
Another siren joined the first.
Closer now.
I swept the penlight past the bike.
More broken brush.
A smear of blood on pale stone.
My chest went tight.
“Destiny,” I called quietly.
Nothing.
I moved faster.
A sound came from ahead.
Small.
Not a word.
Not even a cry.
A moan dragged up from the dark, thin and broken enough to make something ancient and violent wake under my ribs.
I pushed through mesquite and found her curled behind a clump of brush like the desert had tried to hide her and done a piss-poor job.
Hair first.
That was what my light caught.
Thick black hair spilled over dirt and thorns, so dark it turned blue where the stars touched it.
Wild. Tangled. Beautiful in a way that didn’t belong in a crash scene.
Then the leather jacket. One sleeve torn.
One shoulder scraped pale with dust. Blood at her temple.
Blood at her lip. Her skin glowed warm even under all that dirt and shock, caramel latte touched by firelight, soft in contrast to the hard world around her.
Her face was delicate.
That was the dangerous part.