Killer (Serpent Sinners MC #9)

1. Chapter 1

Colt

The roar of the crowd hit before the pain did.

I stepped through the ropes and the noise swallowed everything—screams, bets being shouted, the thud of bass from speakers pumping some aggressive hip-hop through the warehouse.

The underground ring smelled like blood and sweat and desperation, the kind of place that existed in the margins where money changed hands and nobody asked questions.

I'd fought in worse. That wasn't saying much.

My opponent was already waiting. Big guy. Fast hands. Good footwork. Probably had a family and a job and reasons not to end up broken on a warehouse floor just over the Mexico border at midnight on a Thursday. None of that mattered to me right now.

The bell rang.

I didn't move into a defensive stance. Didn't circle. Didn't feel for distance or calculate angles the way I'd been trained. Instead, I walked straight at him, hands down, chin up—an open invitation. His eyes lit up because he thought he'd won already. He threw a hard right at my temple.

I let it land.

The impact was bright and immediate, a white flash that drowned out everything else.

For maybe two seconds, there was nothing but stars behind my eyes and the sensation of my head snapping back.

No memories. No interrogation room. No restraints cutting into my wrists or the taste of water in my lungs or the feeling of losing control so completely that I'd stopped being a person and became just a collection of nerve endings and terror.

Just impact. Just now.

I didn't slip the next punch. Or the one after that. His left hook caught my ribs, and I felt the air leave my chest. Felt the way my body wanted to fold around the pain. I didn't let it. I stayed open, stayed stupid, stayed available for more.

Behind me, somewhere in the darkness beyond the ring lights, Ditch was watching.

Sweet too. Doc. Maybe some prospects. I'd invited them here three weeks ago when I couldn't stand another night of silence in my apartment, another night of waking up gasping with my hands clenched into fists.

Told them I wanted to train. Told them it would help.

They knew better now. They knew what this really was.

Another memory tried to surface—the black-site, the interrogation, the way my hands had been strapped down so tight the circulation cut off and my fingers went numb—but I drove forward and took a straight shot to the face that reset everything.

Blood filled my mouth. Copper and salt. The pain was cleaner than any thought.

My opponent was breathing heavy now, working, trying to end it. He was a good fighter. But he didn't know that I wasn't here to win. I was here to hurt. The difference mattered.

I got inside his guard and landed a brutal combination to his body.

Ribs. Liver. Ribs again. He grunted with each impact, trying to create distance, but I didn't let him.

I followed him across the ring, eating shots on purpose, my hands high and lazy while his fists came at me fast and hard and desperate.

The waterboarding had been worse.

That thought came through clear, bright, unavoidable.

The sensation of water filling your lungs while your body screamed that you were drowning, that there was no air left in the world, that this was how it ended.

Over and over. Thirty seconds of it. Forty-five.

A minute. Until they stopped and let you cough and gasp and remember what breathing felt like, and then they did it again.

I pivoted into a hook that I didn't defend. It rocked my world.

Somewhere in the crowd, someone was yelling.

Probably a bettor who'd put money on me.

Probably confused about why their investment was stumbling backward, why the champion wasn't acting like a champion.

I didn't care about their confusion. I didn't care about anything except the clean, pure pain that was drowning out everything else.

The sleep deprivation had been its own kind of torture.

Lights never off. Sounds designed to keep you wired—high-pitched frequencies, random noises, interrogators talking at you from nowhere.

You stopped knowing what time it was. Stopped knowing how long you'd been there.

Three days? Three weeks? Your brain started making things up just to have something to hold onto.

Started creating memories that didn't happen. Started forgetting things that did.

I shook my head to clear it and caught another punch.

My opponent was getting frustrated. I wasn't supposed to absorb punishment like this.

I wasn't supposed to just stand there and take it.

It broke some unspoken rule of boxing—that you were supposed to want to win, supposed to care about surviving.

He threw a desperation combo that landed clean on my shoulders and chest, and I felt something give in my ribs that probably shouldn't have given.

Good.

The pain centered me. Focused me. Kept me from thinking about the interrogation room, about the way the questions had always come in the same order no matter how many times they'd asked.

About my name. The MC. Locations. Names of brothers.

How much I knew about the operation. Over and over.

And the sick realization that they already knew the answers.

That they were testing me, not questioning me.

That some of the people asking questions wore state police uniforms when they brought me in but didn't when they interrogated me, which meant there were people inside the system making this happen.

Which meant I couldn't trust anything.

I drove forward again, and this time I let my opponent throw everything he had at me.

His hands were fast, technical, beautiful in their precision.

Each punch was designed to hurt. And they did.

My vision blurred in my left eye. My right shoulder went numb.

My hands were bruised and my face was a landscape of cuts and swelling, and it still wasn't enough to make me stop remembering.

Nothing was enough.

I was winning anyway, which was the cruelest part.

I wasn't trying. I was barely defending.

I was actively throwing myself into harm's way, and I was still better than him.

Still faster. Still stronger, even broken.

Even shattered. My body didn't know how to be anything other than a weapon, and it was using that against me whether I consented or not.

The bell rang.

Third round. He was breathing like he'd been running. I was breathing like I'd been drowning. My ribs felt like they'd been wrapped in glass. My face was a mess. But the memories had quieted to a manageable hum, and that was all I'd been after anyway.

I pressed forward again. No strategy. Just forward. Just pressure. Just letting my body do what it'd been trained to do while my mind stayed fractured across time—partly here in the ring, mostly back in a place I couldn't escape.

He threw a wild left hook that I saw coming a second too late. I didn't slip it. I didn't block it. I took it full on the temple and my whole world tilted sideways. The crowd erupted because they thought he'd got me. For a second, I almost fell.

But falling felt too much like surrendering.

I planted my feet and I came back with a cross that landed on his chin like fate.

He hit the canvas hard. The sound of his body on the mat cut through the crowd noise, and for a moment everything went quiet.

His head wasn't moving. His eyes were open but not focused.

The referee started counting and I watched from across the ring, breathing hard, my hands still up in case he rose.

He didn't.

They were pulling him out. Someone was checking his pupils. Someone else was waving me over to the referee, trying to get my hand raised, trying to make this moment into a victory. I didn't feel victorious. I felt numb and tired and hollow, like I was running on fumes and borrowed time.

Ditch caught my eye from the crowd. He didn't look proud. He looked worried. He looked like a man watching his brother die in slow motion and not knowing how to stop it.

I didn't know how to stop it either.

The locker room was cold and bright and empty except for me.

My cutman had tried to talk to me. I'd waved him off.

In the distance, I could hear the next fight starting, hear the crowd shift their attention to fresh blood and fresh violence.

Nobody cared about me anymore. I was old news, a damaged machine that still somehow functioned.

I sat on the bench in front of my locker and I started to shake.

It wasn't shock. It wasn't adrenaline crash, though that was part of it.

It was the moment when the pain started to fade and the memories rushed back to fill the space it left.

It was the realization that I'd won again, which meant I'd do this again next week, and the week after that, because winning meant I had to keep coming back to lose.

Meant I had to keep walking into that ring looking for oblivion and instead finding competence.

My hands were bruised purple and swollen.

My ribs screamed when I breathed. My face was a mess of cuts and swelling that would take weeks to heal, and even then I'd barely look human.

I remembered being restrained in that interrogation room and the way my body had looked in the mirror afterward—bruised, broken, foreign to me. Like it belonged to someone else.

My vision blurred.

I didn't know if it was tears or blood or just the way my eyes had started to betray me.

I leaned forward and I rested my elbows on my knees, and I tried to breathe through the vice grip that was suddenly crushing my chest. In.

Out. In. Out. The way the therapist had said to do it. The way that never actually helped.

Ditch pushed through the locker room door without knocking.

He took one look at me and he stopped. Nobody said anything.

He didn't ask if I was okay because we both knew I wasn't. He didn't try to make this better because we both knew he couldn't. He just stood there in the doorway, taking in the wreckage, and his face got this hard, disappointed look that somehow hurt worse than any punch.

"Not again," he said quietly.

I didn't answer. Couldn't answer. I was still shaking, and I still couldn't remember how to breathe normally. The memories were still circling like sharks—the interrogation, the water, the restraints, the feeling of being so utterly helpless that you stopped believing in the possibility of rescue.

"We can't keep doing this, Colt." His voice was low and firm. "You're going to kill yourself, and I'm not going to watch."

He walked out before I could respond.

The door closed behind him and the silence was absolute.

I was alone again in this cold, bright room, and my body was finally starting to give up.

The pain that had been holding me together was starting to fade, and there was nothing beneath it except exhaustion so deep it felt like it might actually pull me under.

I leaned back against the lockers and I closed my eyes.

And I kept shaking.