Forge's Fire (Wild Savages MC #1)

1. Inessa

ONE

INESSA

The last time my father sent me somewhere as a gift, I was eighteen and the man was fifty-two.

I sat in a restaurant in Houston's Galleria district wearing a dress that cost an obscene amount of money, smiling at a man who looked at me like I was a cut of wagyu he'd ordered rare.

My father watched from a corner booth, nursing vodka, making sure I performed.

I performed, because that was what was expected of me.

That was ten years ago. I'm twenty-eight now, and the dress is different but the performance is the same.

The drive from Houston to Baton Rouge takes four and a half hours if you don't stop. And I wasn’t going to stop.

My father's black Escalade is behind me, driven by Yuri, who is both my escort and my minder.

My father Viktor Volkov doesn't send his daughter anywhere without insurance that she'll behave.

I pull off I-10 onto River Road and the GPS dies.

The industrial stretch south of downtown is all cracked asphalt and rusted fencing, chemical plants belching steam into the Louisiana humidity.

The cotton warehouse appears on my left like something out of a horror film, massive, windowless on the ground floor, corrugated metal patched over brick.

Motorcycles line the front lot. Harleys, mostly.

A few custom builds that even I can tell are expensive.

The Wild Savages MC.

I know the file my father gave me. Fifteen patched members.

President, Sullivan Moran, road name Forge.

Thirty-nine years old. Former bare-knuckle fighter.

Killed a man in the ring eight years ago and retired.

Took the gavel two years later. Runs an underground fighting circuit called the Pit out of the warehouse basement.

Betting revenue estimated at two million annually, plus the laundering pipeline through the port.

My father wants all of it.

I check my lipstick in the rearview mirror. Red, because my father told me to wear red. Red like meat, I think. Red like bait.

I step out of the car and the heat hits me like a wall.

Late May in Louisiana is a different animal than Houston, Houston is dry heat, engine heat, the heat of a city built on concrete.

This is wet heat. Living heat. The air is thick, sweet, rotten at the edges — river mud and magnolia and diesel and something green underneath, the smell of a land that grows things faster than you can cut them down.

My heels click on the broken pavement. My dress sticks to the small of my back.

Sweat beads at my hairline before I've taken three steps.

Yuri falls in behind me, carrying the leather folder that contains my father's terms. His footsteps are heavier than mine, the deliberate tread of a man who weighs 240 pounds and wants you to know it.

He's been my minder since I was twenty-two.

He's never once asked if I'm okay. That's not his job.

His job is to make sure I do what my father needs and report back.

The clubhouse door is propped open with a cinderblock.

Inside, it's dark, the sudden dimness after the Louisiana sun makes me blink, my pupils adjusting. The smell hits me all at once. Stale beer, motor oil, cigarette smoke baked into the walls over years. Underneath it, something else entirely. Leather, cleaning solvent, and the metallic scent of gun oil. I realise this isn’t a bar.

This is an armory that happens to serve drinks.

A bar runs along the left wall, dark wood, scarred, a row of stools with torn vinyl seats.

Pool table in the back, the green felt patched in two places.

A jukebox in the corner that probably hasn't worked since the nineties.

Framed photos on the wall — group shots, men on motorcycles, the visual history of a club that's been here longer than I've been alive.

A man with a beard halfway down his chest looks up from polishing a glass, and his eyes go wide.

He takes in the red dress, the heels, the bratva muscle behind me, and his hand drops below the bar — reaching for something, a weapon or a phone, the reflex of a man who recognizes trouble when it walks through his door.

"I'm here to see your president," I say. "My name is Inessa Volkov. He's expecting me."

The bartender sets down the glass. He doesn't blink for three full seconds. His eyes go from me to Yuri to me again, calculating, assessing.

“Get Forge," he says to someone behind me.

I stand in the middle of the Wild Savages' clubhouse in my red dress and my red lipstick and wait for the man I've been sent to seduce, manipulate, or sacrifice, whichever my father needs first.

I've had ten years training to prepare for this.

I've also had three years to prepare for a second purpose altogether. My exit fund, $340,000, skimmed from Viktor Volkov's accounts in increments small enough to look like rounding errors — sits in a bank in the Cayman Islands under a name my father has never heard.

But I’m not here to take Sullivan Moran's club despite my orders.

I'm here to ask for his help getting away from my father.

The door at the back of the bar opens, and the room changes.

He doesn't walk in so much as the space reorganizes around him.

Six-two, maybe six-three. Broad through the shoulders in a way that says he earned it with his fists, not a gym membership.

Dark hair, cropped short. He's wearing a black t-shirt straining to contain his muscular arms, jeans, boots, it’s nothing special.

Everything about him is ordinary except the way people move when he moves.

The bartender steps back and the prospect at the pool table straightens up.

A man at the bar picks up his beer and relocates without being asked.

Forge looks at me and I forget every word of the speech I rehearsed in the car.

His eyes are dark. Not brown, dark. Like someone turned the lights off behind them. He scans me the way a fighter scans an opponent. My stance, weight distribution, what I'm carrying, where my hands are. His gaze lands on Yuri behind me and his jaw tightens.

"Volkov's daughter," he says. Not a question.

"Inessa." I extend my hand because my father taught me that manners are weapons. "Thank you for agreeing to meet."

He looks at my hand for a beat. Two beats. Then he takes it.

His palm is rough. Calloused across the knuckles and the heel of his hand in a way that tells me the fighter never fully retired. His grip is controlled, not crushing, not gentle. Precise. The handshake of a man who knows exactly how much force to apply and chooses restraint.

My pulse does something I didn't expect.

"You want to do this out here?" he asks. His voice is low, unhurried. Southern, but not thick, like he grew up with it and learned to sand down the edges.

"Wherever you're comfortable."

Something shifts in his expression. Not a smile. More like the ghost of one. "Nobody's comfortable in here. Come on."

He turns and walks toward the back. I follow. Yuri starts to follow too.

Forge stops. Turns. Looks at Yuri with those dark eyes.

"He waits here," Forge says.

Yuri's hand moves toward his waistband. Instinct. Bratva muscle doesn't let the package walk into a room alone.

"He comes with me," I say. Performing.

"No." Forge's voice doesn't change volume or pitch. The word just lands like a stone dropped into still water. "He sits at the bar. He drinks whatever he wants. He doesn't come through that door."

This is the first test. Not mine, his. He's establishing that this is his house, his terms, his space. My father warned me about this. Let him feel powerful, he said. Men who feel powerful make mistakes.

I turn to Yuri and say in Russian, "Wait here. Order something. Don't cause problems."

Yuri watches me as though I've lost my mind. I give him the look I've been practicing since I was eighteen, the one that says I know what I'm doing, even when I don't.

He sits down.

I follow Forge through the door into a hallway that smells like cigarette smoke. He opens a second door into what I assume is a meeting room, the room where the club holds church I’d guess. Long wooden table, scarred and stained. Chairs around it and a gavel on the table.

He sits at the head. Doesn't offer me a chair.

I pull one out myself and sit across from him anyway. Cross my legs. Set my hands flat on the table because I learned from watching my father that open palms signal false honesty better than anything else.

"Your father wants the Pit's betting operation," Forge says.

"Yes."

"And the laundering corridor through the port."

"Yes."

"And he sent you to get it."

I meet his eyes and hold them realising that this man is no fool. "He sent me because he thinks I'm disposable."

The silence in the room is heavy. Outside, I can hear the muffled thump of music from the bar. A motorcycle starts up in the lot.

Forge leans back in his chair. His arms cross over his chest.

"That's honest," he says. “More honest than I expected.”

"I'm not here to lie to you." I reach into the leather folder and pull out a different document, not my father's terms, but a USB drive I've been carrying in my bra for three days, pressed against my skin like a secret.

I set it on the table between us. "My father thinks I'm here to take your club on his orders.

But I'm here to ask for your help getting away from him. "

Forge looks at the USB drive. Looks at me. Back to the drive.

"What's on it?"

"Three years of my father's financial records. Every shell company, every wire transfer, every payment to every politician and cop he owns in Harris County. His entire Houston operation, documented."

His expression doesn't change. But his eyes do, a sharpening, like a blade being drawn.

"Why?"

"Because I've been skimming from him for three years to build an exit fund, and last month his accountant found a discrepancy. I have maybe six weeks before he traces it to me. When he does, I'm dead. Not metaphorically, but actually dead."

Forge studies me for a long time. I can feel him calculating, the risk, the leverage, the potential trap. This is a man who thinks in systems. I can see it in the way his eyes move, tracking variables.

"You could go to the feds," he says.

"The feds would put me in witness protection and I'd spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder in some beige apartment in Nebraska. I don't want protection. I want freedom."

"And you think an MC can give you that."

"I think an MC that's been fighting my father for territory has more reason to want him destroyed than any federal agent with a pension to protect."

Another silence. He uncrosses his arms. Leans forward. His forearms rest on the table and I notice a tattoo on the inside of his left wrist, a hammer and anvil. Simple. Black. The forge that made him.

"You're either the smartest woman I've ever met," he says slowly, "or the most dangerous."

"Can't I be both?"

The ghost of that almost-smile again. "Probably."

He picks up the USB drive. Turns it over in his scarred fingers. Sets it back down.

"I don't trust you," he says.

"Good. I wouldn't trust me either."

"But I'm going to look at what's on this. And if it's real, if it's what you say it is — we'll talk."

"That's all I'm asking."

He stands. I stand. We're closer than I expected, he came around the table at some point and I didn't notice it. He's right there, a foot away, and I can smell him. Not cologne. Something earthier. Warm, male and dangerous in a way that hasn’t got anything to do with violence.

My body reacts before my brain has time to intervene. Heat crawls up my neck. My breathing shifts, shallower, faster. I'm suddenly aware of every inch of skin my dress isn't covering.

Stop it, I tell myself. He's a means to an end. Nothing more.

But when he looks down at me, and he has to look down, because I'm five-six in heels and he's a wall, his dark eyes hold something I didn't expect.

Not suspicion. Not calculation.

Recognition.

Like he sees something in me that he wasn't prepared to find.

"I'll have someone drive you to a motel," he says. "Yuri can follow. You're not staying here."

"My father will expect me to report tonight."

"Then report. Tell him whatever you need to tell him. But from now on, you talk to me directly. Not through muscle."

He opens the door. Holds it for me. As I pass him, my shoulder brushes his chest and every nerve ending I have fires at once.

I keep walking. I don't look back.

But I feel him watching me all the way down the hall.