Hawk’s Secret (Forsaken Angels MC #2)

Chapter 1

ONE

brEE

Lena's coffee order hadn't changed since we were nineteen.

Oat milk latte, extra shot, cinnamon on top.

Twelve years, every coffee shop, every town, every version of her life.

Boyfriends came and went, apartments changed, hair colours shifted with the seasons.

But the coffee stayed the same. I loved the stubbornness of it, the way she planted her flag in the smallest, most ordinary thing and refused to budge.

She was my most dependable friend, and I appreciated that about her.

I ordered mine black. I'd been ordering mine black with nothing extra or fancy for about three weeks, because the budget didn't stretch to anything fancier.

I told Lena it was a health kick and she believed me because Lena believed the best version of everything I said.

She always had. Fifteen years of friendship and the woman still took me at face value, still laughed at my jokes without looking underneath them, still assumed that the bright, funny version of me was the whole picture.

Today, that trust was going to cost her something. She just didn't know it yet.

"You look tired," she said, sliding into the booth across from me. She said it the way she said everything, with warmth, with care, her forehead creasing in a way that made me want to crawl under the table and confess every terrible thing I was about to do. "Are you sleeping?"

"Like a baby." I wrapped my hands around my mug. The ceramic was warm. My fingers were cold. They'd been cold for weeks, this low-level chill that lived under my skin no matter how many layers I wore. "A baby with insomnia and a caffeine dependency, but still."

She laughed. Easy, unsuspecting, the laugh of someone who had no reason to doubt me. I filed the sound away, tucked it into the same mental box where I kept every good thing I was about to ruin.

"So," she said, tearing open a sugar packet she didn't really need because the latte was already sweet enough. Her little habit and it was another one of her little anchors. "What's going on? You said you wanted to catch up, but you've got that face."

"What face?"

"The face you make when you're about to ask me something and you've already rehearsed it in the car."

Twelve years. She knew me in ways that should have made this harder. In ways that did make it harder. I'd practised this conversation four times in the mirror, twice in the shower, once while driving here. I knew exactly how to steer it, exactly how to make it sound like an afterthought.

I hated myself for how good I'd gotten at this.

"I lost the temp gig," I said. True. Mostly. I'd stopped showing up because the hours conflicted with other things I was being forced to do, but the result was the same. "Rent's due in two weeks and I've got about four hundred dollars to my name. I need work."

Lena's face did the thing it always did when someone she loved was struggling. The concern was instant, total, the kind that made you feel guilty for receiving it because you knew it was real.

"Bree. Why didn't you call me?"

"I'm calling you now. Figuratively. Over coffee." I took a sip. Bitter, thin, the cheapest thing on the menu. "I'm not asking for money. I just need a lead. Anything going, anywhere. I can waitress, bartend, stock shelves, whatever. Do you know of anyone hiring?”

The thought formed on her face before she said it.

Her eyes lit up the way they did when she had an idea, and I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat because I'd put that idea there.

I'd planted it, carefully, over weeks of casual mentions and small, strategic complaints.

I was good with people. I'd always been good with people.

And right now, being good with people was the ugliest skill I had.

"Angel's Rest," she said. "The bar. Hawk mentioned they're short-staffed."

There it was.

My chest did something complicated at the sound of his name.

It always did. Fifteen years of the same involuntary response, the same kick behind my ribs.

I'd spent my entire adult life turning that kick into a joke, a running bit, the kind of thing Lena teased me about at sleepovers when we were teenagers and still brought up now.

Bree's crush on my brother, ha ha, remember when she tripped in front of him at the Fourth of July barbecue, classic.

The laugh track was so thick, so rehearsed, that nobody ever looked past it.

What was underneath was fifteen years of wanting a man I couldn't have, wrapped around a secret that was eating me alive.

"The bar?" I said. Casual. Light. The performance of a woman hearing an idea for the first time. "Would they even hire someone they don't know?"

"They know you indirectly. You're my best friend, I’ll talk to Hawk.

" She was already pulling out her phone, already ready to make it happen, because that was who Lena was.

A fixer. A connector. A woman who saw a problem and immediately started building a bridge.

"He'll vouch for you. It's casual work, cash, tips are good.

You'd be perfect behind a bar, Bree. You're the most likeable person I've ever met. "

The compliment burned. Likeable. The word people used for women who made you comfortable, who remembered your drink order, who laughed at the right moments, who made you talk without realising you were being listened to. Likeable was a weapon, and I was about to aim it at every person Lena loved.

"You'd really ask him?" I said.

"I'll call him tonight. Consider it done."

She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. Her fingers were warm. Mine were ice.

"Thank you," I said. I meant it in the way she'd understand, grateful friend, tight spot, helping hand.

I also meant it in a way she'd never know, because she was giving me the thing I needed to survive the next month without the rest of my life falling apart, and the cost of that gift was something I'd carry in my chest for as long as I lived.

We finished our coffees. She told me about her week, about the guy she was sort-of seeing, about the new yoga class she'd joined that was "basically just lying on the floor for an hour, which, honestly, I could do at home.

" I laughed in all the right places. I was warm, engaged, present.

I was the version of myself she'd always known, the version everyone knew, the bright girl, the easy laugh, the one who filled a room and made you forget she was working.

Underneath it, I was drowning.

She hugged me goodbye in the car park. Held on a beat longer than usual, the way she did when she was worried but didn't want to say it. I held on too, pressed my face into her shoulder.

"I'll call Hawk tonight," she said again. "Promise."

"You're the best."

"I know.” She smiled.

She drove away and I sat in my car for three minutes, counting seconds on the dashboard clock, giving myself exactly that long to feel everything I'd been holding back.

The guilt. The self-loathing. The specific, nauseating shame of using the one person who trusted you completely as a stepping stone into the life you were about to betray.

Three minutes. Then I drove to the meeting I'd been dreading since six that morning.

The car park behind the hardware store was empty at nine-thirty on a Tuesday night.

I'd been told to park in the far corner, under the broken streetlight, which I'd done, because I did what I was told now.

That was who I'd become. A woman who followed instructions from a man she was terrified of, because the alternative was worse.

He was already there. Straddling his bike, arms folded, engine off, waiting.

Young, maybe twenty-five, twenty-six. Lean, wiry, the build of someone who'd been hungry his whole life and had decided the world owed him for it.

His jacket was open and I could see the edges of a tattoo crawling up his neck, new ink, the kind you got when you were trying to prove something to someone.

He wasn't patched. Not yet. He was a prospect, earning his way in, and I was his audition piece.

His name was Colt. What I cared about was the phone in his back pocket and what was on it.

"You're late," he said.

I was two minutes early. He knew that. He said it anyway, because establishing control was how he started every conversation, every meeting, every interaction we'd had since the night he'd shown up at my apartment door with a grin on his face and a video on his screen that had turned my blood to ice water.

"It's done," I said. I stayed by my car. Kept the distance. Four car lengths between us, which wasn't enough, would never be enough, but it was all I had. "I talked to Lena. She's calling Hawk tonight. I'll have the job by the end of the week."

"Good girl."

The words scraped across my skin. I kept my face neutral, my body still, my hands in my jacket pockets where he couldn't see them shaking.

I'd learned, in the weeks since this started, that Colt fed on reactions.

He wanted the flinch, the fear, the visible proof that he had power over me.

Giving him nothing was the only small rebellion I had left.

"What do you want me to do when I'm in?" I asked.

"Listen. That's it. For now." He swung off the bike, took two steps toward me, then stopped.

Close enough that the light from the neighbouring car park caught his face, the enjoyment there, the satisfaction of a man playing a game he was winning.

"The Forsaken Angels run their business out of that bar.

Church happens in the back. Brothers talk.

You'll hear things. Names, places, schedules, routes.

You write it down and you bring it to me. "

"And if they don't talk around the new girl?"

"They will. You’ll be good at making sure you fit in.” He smiled. The kind of smile that made the air around him feel thinner. “You’ll be useful and make sure they don’t suspect a thing, and they’ll let their guard down.”

Useful. Another word that had been gutted and refilled with something rotten. I was useful. I was the perfect weapon, and the man who'd crafted me into one was standing six feet away, drunk on the first real power he'd ever held in his miserable life.

Colt wasn't sanctioned. I'd figured that out early, when the questions he asked were too scattered, too ambitious, too obviously the work of someone without a playbook.

The Iron Jackals' leadership hadn't ordered this.

This was freelance. A prospect trying to earn his patch by delivering intel on a rival club, using information he'd blackmailed out of a woman who'd made the mistake of sleeping with his friend at a party two years ago.

His friend, Tyler. The hang-around. The man who'd taken me home after too many drinks and bad judgement, who'd been fun and forgettable, who I'd woken up next to with a headache and nothing else.

Nothing except the video he'd filmed of us having sex without my knowledge, without my consent, while I was too drunk to notice the phone propped on the dresser behind a stack of books.

The video was explicit. My face was visible. My voice was audible. It was everything.

Tyler had shown it around because that was what men like Tyler did.

Bragged, shared, passed his phone to other men in bars, said look what I got with a grin that made him feel bigger than he was.

Colt had seen it, recognised me, known about my connection to Lena, to Hawk, to the Forsaken Angels.

And the two of them had looked at that footage of my body, of my most intimate, most vulnerable moments, and seen a ladder they could climb.

Tyler had handed it over willingly. He wanted to move up from hang-around to prospect, and I was his offering. Colt wanted his patch, and I was his proof that he could deliver. Two men, two ambitions, my body as currency.

The first time Colt showed me the video on his phone, standing in my doorway with his foot in the gap so I couldn't close the door, I'd thought I was going to be sick.

He'd watched me watch myself on that screen, watched the colour drain from my face, and laid it out simply.

Get a job at Angel's Rest. Feed him information.

Or the video goes to my family, friends and online, where it lives forever, where it follows you into every job interview, every relationship, every room you walk into for the rest of your life.

I'd said yes. What else could I say?

"Same time next week," Colt said now. He was walking back to his bike, done with me for tonight. "Have something for me by then. Names, faces, routines. Whatever you've got."

"Fine."

He threw a leg over the seat, paused, looked back at me over his shoulder.

"And Bree?" He waited until I met his eyes. "Don't get creative. Don't get brave. You know what's on this phone, and you know what happens if you stop being useful. I'd hate for it to get out into the world with you performing like that."

The engine kicked to life. He pulled out, his headlight sweeping across the empty lot, across my car, across me, standing alone in the dark with my hands buried in my pockets and my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ached.

The taillights shrank. Disappeared. Silence filled the car park, thick, heavy, pressing against my ears.

I got in my car. Put my hands on the wheel. Sat there.

The brightness was gone. Stripped away, left behind in the coffee shop booth with Lena's warm hands and easy laughter. This was the other side. The side nobody saw, the side that lived in hardware store car parks and shame and a man's voice telling me what I was worth.

I was going to walk into Angel's Rest by the end of the week.

I was going to smile, make friends, learn names, pour drinks for men who'd fought wars and built a brotherhood and earned each other's trust with blood.

I was going to stand behind that bar and be the bright, likeable, easy girl everyone thought I was, the girl Lena had vouched for, the girl Hawk had known since she was sixteen.

And I was going to betray every single one of them, but I had no other choice.

The dashboard clock ticked over to ten. I started the engine and pulled out of the lot.

I drove home, and I let myself think about Hawk for exactly thirty seconds.

The way I always did, at the end of these nights, when the shame was so big I needed something else to hold against it.

His face. His hands. The low sound of his voice when he talked, patient, steady, the kind of voice you could anchor yourself to in a storm.

I'd been in love with him since I was sixteen years old. Fifteen years of wanting, compressed into a joke, performed for an audience, never once spoken aloud in the voice it actually lived in.

And now I was going to use that wanting as a doorway into his world and burn it down from the inside.

Thirty seconds. That was all I gave myself.

Then I put him away. Locked the box. Drove home.