Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Doom
Present Day…
The clubhouse smells like strong coffee, combined with the dry desert air pushing through the cracked kitchen window carrying dust and the faint sweetness of someone's cookfire down the street.
I'm the first one up, which isn't unusual.
Sleep and I have an arrangement—I give it a few hours, it gives me nightmares, and we both move on with our day.
The kitchen is mine at this hour. The industrial lights buzz overhead while I crack eggs into a bowl and whisk with a fork because Ruby's stand mixer is off-limits and I learned that the hard way last month when she caught me elbow-deep in her KitchenAid and gave me a look that would've dropped a lesser man.
Pancakes. It's always pancakes.
I don't know when I became the guy who makes breakfast for a clubhouse full of outlaws, but here we are.
The batter's simple—flour, eggs, milk, a pinch of sugar, vanilla if there's any left.
I found a bottle of Mexican vanilla at a market in the centro a few weeks back, the real stuff, dark and thick and nothing like the clear extract they sell in American grocery stores.
I've been rationing it like ammunition.
The griddle heats on the six-burner while I tie my red bandana around my head and roll my neck until it cracks.
The courtyard outside the kitchen window is still dark, the line of bikes parked nose-out along the south wall catching the first gray light.
Beyond the compound walls, Chihuahua is starting to stir.
A rooster somewhere in the neighborhood is losing its mind.
A truck downshifts on the main road.
The air coming through the cracked window is cool for now, carrying dust, mesquite smoke from a neighbor's cookfire, and the diesel from the garage where Compass left something running last night.
I pour batter onto the griddle and watch it spread. Four circles, evenly spaced. The edges start to bubble.
In an hour this kitchen will be chaotic.
Ruby will come in and reclaim her territory.
Compass will stumble down looking like he slept under a bike.
Lashes will appear in the doorway, one hand on her belly.
She's showing now, four months maybe five, a woman whose body is doing something she didn't choose but is choosing to see through.
She always takes two pancakes and eats them plain, no syrup, sitting at the far end of the table where she can see both doors.
I don't comment on it. I just make sure the first two off the griddle land on her plate.
Boulder and Kelsey will show up with the girls eventually—Xiomara chattering in her mix of Spanish and English while Itzel watches everything with those careful, quiet eyes that remind me too much of someone I'm not going to think about this early in the morning.
I flip the pancakes. Golden brown. Right where they should be.
Brick will come down from the room he shares with Imani, already running through the same thing I'm running through, which is the compound outside Juárez where Imani's father has been locked up for months and the plan we've been building to pull him out.
But that's later. Right now it's just me and the griddle and the hiss of batter on cast iron.
And somewhere across the city, in a club-provided apartment near the university campus, Nova is waking up.
I scrape the spatula under a pancake harder than necessary and flip it onto the stack.
I've been thinking about Nova too much. Way too much.
More than any prospect who wants to keep breathing should be thinking about a woman connected to the Montana charter.
Roxy's daughter. Dracus's kid.
A woman with three fathers who would happily put me in the dirt if I touched her wrong, and a mother whose reputation alone could get me blacklisted from every charter on the continent.
I pour more batter and stare at the bubbles forming in the center of each circle like they've personally offended me.
She's been in Chihuahua for a month now. Nursing program at the university, rooming with Mei in the apartment the club set up near campus.
Reinforced locks, security system, panic button wired straight to the clubhouse.
I volunteered to do regular check-ins.
Amara approved it without hesitation—standard protocol for club members' families.
But there’s nothing standard about the way my pulse kicks when Nova opens that door.
By late morning, I'm on the rooftop with Brick and Rooster.
The rooftop is where Brick and I do our thinking—it's got sight lines to the compound gate, the street below, and the brown hills east of the city where Chihuahua bleeds into open desert.
A couple of beat-up lawn chairs live up here permanently, along with an overturned milk crate we use as a table.
Right now that crate is covered in satellite printouts of Diego's compound, the pages weighed down with a socket wrench and an empty Modelo bottle so the wind doesn't scatter them across the rooftop.
The sun is high and the concrete under my boots is already radiating heat. I can feel it through the soles. By noon this rooftop will be unbearable, which means we've got about an hour before we cook up here alongside the recon photos.
"Two guard rotations." Brick taps a blurry image with his index finger. "Six-hour shifts. The east gate has a camera, but it's angled wrong. Covers maybe sixty percent of the approach."
"Sixty percent is a lot of fucking percent," Rooster says. He's leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed, toothpick between his teeth, squinting against the glare. Rooster doesn't talk much period, but up here he's got opinions. Most of them involve not dying.
"Not if we come from the wash." I lean forward and trace a line along the southern edge of the compound with my finger.
The satellite image is grainy—pulled from a contact of Imani's who still has access to the Torres network's intelligence feeds—but the terrain reads fine.
"Dry riverbed runs the length of the south wall.
No cameras, no flood lights. Fence is chain-link, not reinforced. "
"How do you know it's not reinforced?" Rooster asks.
"Because I drove out there last week and looked."
Brick goes still. Not angry still—the kind of still that comes right before angry. "You drove to Juárez. Alone. Without telling anyone?"
"Recon." I lean back in my chair. "I told you I was going out."
"You said you were getting parts for the Dyna."
"I did get parts for the Dyna. And then I kept driving."
Brick pulls his hand down his face. He does this when he's trying not to lose his shit, which with me is often.
We've been through enough together—Colombia, the auction, the extraction, the flight home with five rescued people and a belly full of adrenaline and grief—that he doesn't bother being diplomatic.
"Doom. We plan together or we don't plan at all. That was the deal."
"I planned. I reconned. Now I'm sharing the intel.
" I keep my voice flat. "The south approach is clean.
Two men on the east gate, one roving patrol on the north side with a pattern he repeats every fourteen minutes like clockwork, and a blind spot on the southwest corner where the wash meets the fence line.
Bolt cutters through the chain-link, we're inside in under ninety seconds. "
"And Mateo?" Brick's voice drops. This is the part that matters. This is his fiancée's father, a man being drugged and held in a concrete room by someone he trusted. "What did you see?"
"Building in the center of the compound. Single story, cinder block, one door, no windows on the south or west faces. There's a generator running—I could hear it from the wash. Whatever Diego's doing in there, he needs power for it."
We all know what that means. IV drips. Sedation. The kind of setup you use when you want to keep someone alive, but not conscious. Imani's told us enough about Diego's methods that nobody at this table needs it spelled out.
"We need to tell Amara," Brick says.
"And if she says no?"
"She won't say no. Not when she sees this.
" He taps the satellite images. "We present the approach, the guard rotation, the recon, the blind spot.
We give her a clean plan with a clean exit and she'll greenlight it.
Amara's not stupid. She knows leaving Mateo Torres in Diego's hands is a liability the club can't afford, especially with Alejandro breathing down everyone's neck about it. "
"And if she says to wait?" I press.
"Then we wait." Brick meets my eyes. He's not backing down and neither am I, and for a second we're just two prospects staring each other down on a rooftop in Chihuahua while the sun turns the concrete into a frying pan.
Rooster pulls the toothpick from his mouth. "I'll set it up with her after lunch. Give me an hour to put together something that doesn't look like two prospects went rogue and a third one's covering for them. If we're bringing this to her, we do it right."
He stands up, stretches, and heads for the ladder.
Brick stays. The wind picks up and flutters the edge of one of the satellite printouts. He reaches over and sets the socket wrench more firmly on top of it.
"How's Imani doing?" I ask. Because I know he won't say it on his own.
He rubs a hand over his face, slower this time.
"She's strong. Stronger than she should have to be.
But she's not sleeping worth a damn. Gets up at two, three in the morning and sits in the bathroom with the door closed so she won't wake me.
She reads those old letters her father wrote her from prison.
The ones from before all this." He pauses.
"She thinks I don't hear her. I hear her every damn time. "
I don't say anything.
There's nothing I can offer that would help, and Brick's not the kind of man who needs words.
He needs his woman's father home and alive. That's what we're going to give him.
"Tonight?" Brick asks after a while, changing gears the way he does when he's done sitting with something heavy. "You heading to Nova's?"
"What about it?"
"Checking the locks again?"
"Yeah, security protocol."