Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
LUCIFER
I was born hell bound. Murder and mayhem were my birthright, and I became a master of both. But, man, after years of riding the Devil’s coattails, I’m fucking tired.
The fluorescent lights of the hospital waiting room buzz overhead as Shadow paces the length of the vinyl floor for the hundredth time, his boots squeaking against the polished surface. This fucking hospital is becoming a second home to my club, and I don’t know how to stop it.
My gaze slides around the waiting room, landing first on my men who sit in a tense semicircle, all of them looking just as weary and restless as I feel.
It’s like we’re destined for carnage, and that destiny isn’t privy to just my men anymore.
Whatever we touch, and whomever we let get close to us, becomes an unwilling victim of it too.
I glance across the room to where my new business partner, Maddox, sits with some of his ranch hands, and I can’t help but wonder what he’s thinking.
He was desperate when he signed on the dotted line— a man hungry to save his family’s ranch and the legacy he’s been fighting his whole life to preserve.
Now, we’re a perfect mix of worn flannels and distressed leather, all of us doomed, and while he might not be wise to it yet, the other families in the waiting room are.
They look at the patch on the back of our cuts, and they edge away in fear, knowing there’s a black cloud following the Fallen Demons, and it’s wreaking havoc on the small town of Saddle Ridge, leaving death and destruction in its wake.
It started with the explosion at Rodeo Roundup, taking the lives of innocent locals and destroying beauty in its purest form.
This latest blow is a bit more personal, though.
The enemy narrowed the target, abducting Shadow’s woman from Maddox’s ranch.
But Landry Oil came for the wrong motherfuckers.
They played a game they had no business playing, and they paid the price.
Revenge doesn’t make any of this easier, though. We still sit helplessly as the people we care about suffer for our sins. If we keep going how we are, the body counts are gonna keep rising, and I can’t guarantee the graves we dig for our enemies won’t fill with the bodies of our own kind.
The doors to the waiting room swing open, and the doctor finally emerges.
“Meadows family?”
Maddox springs to his feet, joining Shadow in front of the doctor. “That’s us.”
The doctor reveals that Della has made it out of surgery and is stable. Shadow’s shoulders immediately slump with relief as Maddox claps him on the back. The doctor shares more details about Della’s condition, but I stop listening.
Without a word, I slip away. My boots echo against the linoleum as I make my way to the bank of elevators, jamming the button for the fourth floor.
While most of the units in any hospital are depressing as fuck, there is something about the burn unit that hits just a touch harder.
You don’t smell the charred flesh, but you hear the cries of the patients who are conscious.
They wail in pain while the staff cleans their wounds and changes their dressings.
It’s the soundtrack to hell, and it plays on a continuous loop.
The nurses at the station look up as I approach. Most of them fear me, and that has more to do with my behavior than it does my cut. I couldn’t get here until hours after the explosion had hit. I was covered in soot and hungry for information on the girl I couldn’t save.
The girl who wouldn’t have been working at that bar if I wasn’t such a selfish fuck.
Unhinged is what I was, and it fucking showed.
“You can’t go in there,” the head nurse said as she tried to block my path. “Family only.”
Something primal stirred in my gut at the sound of those words. I’m not a man who often hears the word no, and so I did what I do best. I crossed boundaries and broke rules.
“I’m her fucking husband.”
A desperate lie from the lips of a desperate and deranged man. A man too old and too damaged to be obsessed with a twenty-three-year-old girl.
But at least now they don’t bother trying to stop me when I visit.
I nod once as I pass their station and push open the door to room 412.
The machines beep and hiss, filling the silence that would otherwise be unbearable as I make my way inside.
My gaze instantly finds Jess in the center of the hospital bed, all swaddled in bandages, her chest rising and falling with mechanical precision.
I pull a chair to her bedside and sit, the leather of my cut creaking as I take a seat. The panic that had me in a vise when I first saw her after the explosion rises again and tries to claw its way out of my chest.
That night plays on repeat in my mind—the blaze and the blood-curdling screams that vibrated through my being as I stood outside watching the bar go up in smoke.
But what haunts me most is the moment I finally realized Jess was trapped inside, and that those screams I was hearing were most likely hers.
Guilt flooded my veins in an instant, and it only amplified when I watched the firefighters drag her charred body from the wreckage. I had been so consumed by the need for revenge that poisoned my veins, that it didn’t dawn on me that Jess was literally being burned alive.
I’ve been called a monster many times in my life, but that was the first moment I actually felt like one.
I lean forward, pressing my forehead against the edge of the mattress.
The helplessness I feel crushes my lungs.
I’ve faced down rival clubs, corrupt corporations, and federal agents without flinching, but this—watching this poor girl struggle for every breath, knowing my selfish obsession with her put her in this fucking bed—breaks me in ways I didn’t know were possible.
It makes a man realize he’s got a conscience when he swore on everything holy that he didn’t.
The door opens behind me, and I sit a little straighter, schooling my features. A familiar nurse with weary eyes enters the room, her scrubs rustling as she moves toward the bed.
“Just need to check her vitals,” she says skittishly as her fingers move over the monitors.
“Any change?” I ask, my voice rougher than I intend. It’s the same question I’ve asked daily, and every damn day I get the same fucking answer.
The nurse shakes her head. “Her readings are stable, Mr. Holland.” She lifts her eyes to meet mine. “That’s promising, considering . . .” Her voice trails, and she quickly looks away.
“That’s promising, considering thirty percent of her body has burns,” I finish for her.
“It’s promising, considering the amount of smoke she inhaled and how damaged her lungs are.
It’s fucking promising, considering she might not wake up at all.
” I pause, swiping a hand over my face as I try to keep myself in check. “Did I cover everything?”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. The doctors will update you as they see fit.”
With that, she scampers around the bed and quickly exits the room, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the heavy weight of guilt.
The doctors wasted no time putting Jess into a medically induced coma, claiming they needed to give her body time to heal, but I suspect it was also to spare her the agony of the burns, and in the last three days, there have been no real updates.
I don’t know how long she’s supposed to stay like this.
So still and at the mercy of the machines.
I stare at the bandages covering her legs, wondering what lies beneath.
The doctors mentioned skin grafts, multiple surgeries, and months of rehabilitation.
As much as I want her to wake up, I’m dreading what happens when she does.
I don’t think I can watch as she mourns the life she knew.
I don’t think I can stand in the shadows as she navigates her new reality.
My hand slides close to hers, fingers hovering hesitantly over hers for a moment. The contrast is striking—her delicate skin against my ink-stained hands, symbolizing a roadmap of my violent past. I’ve killed with these hands, and now I’m afraid to touch her with them.
But I do.
I just can’t fucking help myself.
I trace the delicate lines of her knuckles with my thumb as my gaze lifts and locks onto her face.
Her legs took the brunt of the burns, but her pretty face didn’t come away from the explosion totally unscathed.
They had to remove shards of glass from her forehead, and yet even with the black stitches cutting across her skin, she’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.
Beautiful, broken, and so fucking forbidden.
“I’ll make this right,” I rasp.
The chair creaks as I shift my weight, exhaustion finally catching up with me. My eyes grow heavy as I continue to hold her hand, the beeping rhythm of the monitors lulling me into a state of half-consciousness.
It’s not the first time I’ve fallen asleep in this chair, and it won’t be the last.
A hand on my shoulder jolts me awake. My body reacts before my mind catches up, and I’m on my feet in a flash.
My hand goes for the knife I keep tucked into the inner pocket of my cut, eyes wild and searching for the threat.
The nurse from earlier jumps back, her hands flying up in surrender as she stares wide-eyed at the knife in my hand.
“I’m-m-m s-s-sorry,” she stutters. “I . . . uh didn’t mean to startle you. Please don’t hurt me.”
Fuck.
My gaze flits to the bed, and I watch as Jess’s chest continues to rise and fall in rhythm with the beeping of the machines.
The sight of her grounds me, and I release a ragged breath before lowering my hand slowly.
My fingers flex around the knife as the adrenaline recedes.
I blink hard and bring my attention back to the terrified nurse.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” My tone isn’t convincing, and the fact I’m still holding the knife does nothing to diffuse the situation either.
Not wanting to startle her any more than I already have, I tuck the knife back into my pocket.
Once it’s out of sight, she seems to take a deep breath, but her hands are shaking, and she looks like she’s two seconds away from bursting into tears.
“There is a woman here,” she blurts, and I narrow my eyes. “She’s demanding to see your wife. The hospital only allows one visitor at a time?—”
“Who is she?” I cut in.
“She says her name is Tori O’Brien.”
My muscles tense at the mention of Jess’s roommate.
Tori has been working for me as a server at The Hideaway for quite some time now.
Over the years, our interactions have been mostly limited, though.
The club is a silent partner with a thirty percent stake in the restaurant, which leaves our partner, Max, overseeing all the daily operations and managing the staff.
When Max suffered a massive heart attack, things changed.
We took on a more prominent role while he recovered, and I started popping into the restaurant daily.
I didn’t make a great impression on Tori.
The girl has a keen sense for detecting bullshit, and she saw right through me.
But she needs her job, so she keeps her mouth shut.
“Where is she?” I ask.
“She’s waiting in the family lounge on this floor. Down the hall to the left.”
I nod once and cast a final glance at Jess before exiting the room.
Not long after I told everyone here that I was Jess’s husband, they started badgering me with questions, asking me to make decisions regarding her care, demanding the details of her medical history that I don’t know because I’m not actually her fucking husband.
I’ve been lying through my teeth for days, making educated guesses that could potentially harm her further, all while trying to get in touch with Tori.
I figured she might have intel on how to reach Jess’s next of kin.
They seem close enough. Aside from being her roommate, she’s also the one who got Jess the job at The Hideaway, something I found out when I asked Max to fire Jess so I could hire her as a bartender at Rodeo Roundup.
It was a lot easier to keep tabs on my obsession when she was working at the bar my brothers and I frequented rather than the restaurant where my partner didn’t want me wearing my colors.
Tori was hip to that.
The girl raised all kinds of hell on her friend’s behalf, but like I said, she needs her job, and throwing an additional hundred dollars a week into a single mom’s paycheck has a way of keeping her quiet.
I push open the door to the family lounge and find Tori pacing the small room, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. She freezes when she sees me, her eyes flashing with anger.
Then she’s on the move, her long brown ponytail swings from side to side as she charges for me.
She’s a tiny little thing, but her size doesn’t stop her from rearing back her fist, and a second later her knuckles connect with the underside of my jaw.
“You son of a bitch,” she shrieks.
The obedient server who bites her tongue to keep her job is gone.
An overprotective friend has replaced her, and since I deserve every ounce of her fury, I plant my feet and let her swing again.
The second punch lands against my ribs, and soon those tiny fists are pummeling my chest. I can easily grab her wrists and make her stop—but I don’t.
I’ve been carrying this guilt for days, and maybe letting Tori beat it out of me is the closest thing to penance I’m gonna get.
When she realizes I’ve been sitting here playing the role of a distraught spouse, making medical decisions I have no right to make, forking over cash to cover the bills that keep piling up, while her best friend lies in a coma covered in burns because of me, she’s going to lose her fucking shit.
If I were the praying type, I might send one up to the big man in the sky.
But I roll the dice and take hits instead because the flames of hell always catch up to the Devil’s greatest disciples.