Chapter Nine
SCAR
The Next Evening
I pull into the lot and kill the engine.
There’s no way in hell we handle this one alone. Raze needs to hear everything, and the club needs eyes on Cali until we figure out exactly where all this shit is heading.
That’s why I brought her here.
The clubhouse is already loud enough to spill out across the parking lot, music thumping through the walls while brothers laugh, argue, and carry on like the world isn’t getting ready to crack open underneath us.
Gravel crunches under my boots as I head for the clubhouse. The second I shove the door open, noise hits me full force.
“Stay close,” I announce as I step inside.
She pauses just behind me, not long, just enough. I make a point of tracking everything in the first two seconds, the way a vampire with an eternity of violence behind him always does when he brings something new into his territory.
She doesn’t falter.
That surprises me more than it should.
The main room is already in full swing when we walk in, loud and restless in that familiar way the clubhouse gets before the real work of the night starts.
Brothers spread across sofas and tables.
Music rolling through the walls. Money moving hand to hand while deals, threats, and bullshit blend into a single language.
Ruckus has stacks of cash spread across the far table, banded bills piled high while gold flashes from the rings covering his fingers every time he counts.
Luck hangs around him like a living thing.
You can almost feel reality bending sideways to keep favoring the smug little bastard.
He’s halfway through muttering numbers under his breath when he glances up, already grinning before he even figures out why.
Near the window, Coil stands with a phone pressed to his ear like always, eyes bleeding gold as the serpent underneath pushes too close to the surface.
Guess he’s done pretending to look human tonight.
“Triple the rate, and I’ll throw in the warding stones,” he says smoothly into the phone.
“Non-negotiable.” Then his attention slides to Cali and stays there.
The kind of stare that belongs to predators deciding whether something is a threat or entertainment.
Across the room, Wreck hunches over prospect Bennett with a tattoo gun buzzing in his massive hand.
The wendigo looks like death squeezed into biker leathers, all sharp bones and stretched skin with shadows clinging to him thicker than they should.
Like somebody built him out of nightmares and bad ideas.
Bennett sits stiff in the chair, trying real hard not to move while Wreck works.
Smart choice, honestly.
The entire room notices Cali in under three seconds.
I watch it happen. The phone call goes silent mid-sentence.
The tattoo machine keeps buzzing, but Wreck’s eyes lift.
When a wendigo looks at you like that, radiating a hunger that has nothing to do with food and everything to do with the animal reading you as prey, you feel it in your spine before your brain catches up.
The brothers converge without coordinating it, the way predators do. A slow gravitational shift that ends with them between Cali and the exits, hands sliding toward weapons with practiced ease.
Cali stands in the middle of the clubhouse like the chaos doesn’t touch her. Her chin comes up a fraction while her gaze moves across the room, slow and controlled, clocking exits, weapons, threats. Her instinct and training, years of surviving by knowing exactly how fast a room can turn deadly.
And in here? Every brother she looks at is the kind of creature she was probably raised to put down.
That realization settles heavy in my chest, sharp enough to feel like steel pressed flat against my ribs.
Then Wreck speaks, “That’s a fucking hunter.” His voice is flat and certain, like he’s stating a fact rather than offering an opinion, and it lands in the room with the same weight.
Cali doesn’t even blink. “And you’re fucking criminals.
” Her tone is perfectly even, almost conversational, like she’s acknowledging something mildly interesting rather than standing in a room full of supernatural beings whose collective body count would make governments nervous. “We all have our hobbies.”
The silence that follows stretches just long enough to be dangerous.
Then Ruckus lets out a short burst of laughter, the kind that comes out against a person’s better judgment.
“She’s got balls,” he says with that crooked grin of his, all easy charm and trouble, the kind that somehow keeps people from punching him even when he deserves it.
Gold coins clink softly as he moves, the sound following him around like luck itself keeps riding shotgun for the bastard.
“She crashed through the skylight at the bar.” Rhett’s voice floats in from somewhere to my left. “I like her already, VP.”
I find him sprawled on the old sofa near the wall, boots up, arms crossed, the hellhound darkness that clings to him curling lazily at the edges like smoke that hasn’t decided where to go.
His eyes are lit with that brightness he gets when something genuinely interests him, which is, as a rule, everything that inconveniences other people.
“You would.” Bennett doesn’t look up from the tattoo chair. His jaw is still locked, though I suspect that’s more about dignity than the needle. “Your kind appreciates excessive property damage.”
“Better than sitting around looking pretty and judging people.”
“I don’t just look pretty…” Bennett pauses for dramatic effect. “I bring divine justice.”
“You bring divine judgment,” Rhett says. “There’s a difference.”
“One more word…” I say, without looking at either of them, “… and I’m assigning you both to Wreck for a week.”
In the corner, Wreck shifts his weight in the chair, and the entire feel of the room changes with him. He doesn’t rise or step forward. He simply exists harder for a second, and that’s somehow worse.
The wendigo hunger rolls off him, spreading slowly and heavily through the clubhouse, thick enough to feel beneath the skin.
It crawls through the air like a coming storm, dragging every instinct in the room to attention.
The lights flicker, the music stops, and everyone reacts visibly as the atmosphere tightens around him like a storm cloud.
Like the room itself knows a predator is sitting in the corner capable of eating every living thing inside it if he ever loses control.
Both prospects go quiet instantly. The kind of quiet that comes when your survival instincts finally outvote your mouth, and I can’t help the smirk that pulls at my lips.
I hear them coming before they hit the bottom of the stairs. Raze’s boots land heavy and steady against the upper level while softer footsteps move beside him close enough to blur together.
He comes down side by side with Roxy tucked under his arm as though that spot was made for her. His hand rests low against her waist, casual and possessive all at once, the kind of touch that stopped being deliberate a long damn time ago and just became part of him.
Then Raze looks up and sees Cali.
The warmth that lives in him now, the warmth Roxy drew out of him, doesn’t disappear.
It retreats behind something much older, much cooler, the part of Raze that runs a criminal empire and has never once flinched at what that requires.
Ice shards spiderweb up his arms as his gaze moves to me, his brows furrowed in a stare that tells me he is unimpressed.
“Scar.” Just my name, one syllable, but carrying the full weight of ‘Explain this, now, or I will remove the problem myself.’
I hold his gaze. “We have a problem.”
“Define we.” His eyes cut back to Cali, a blade disguised as a glance.
“The Crimson Circle. They’re active again.
” I watch something move behind his expression, and I keep going before he can interrupt.
“The rogues hitting our territory… they’re not feral.
They’re coordinated. Faster than they should be, smarter than they should be, taking orders from something that knows what it’s doing.
Someone’s been experimenting… mixing vampire blood with berserker blood. ”
The muscle in Raze’s jaw tightens. “That’s not possible.”
“It wasn’t. Three hundred years ago, we made sure of it.” I pause, just long enough for the weight of what comes next to settle.
The clubhouse moves around us, despite our arrival. Music is back on through the speakers. Coil keeps talking low into his phone somewhere near the window. Wreck’s tattoo gun buzzes steadily in the corner while cash keeps changing hands around the tables.
Every brother close enough to catch the conversation feels it happen at the exact same time. You don’t survive in this club without learning how to recognize the moment shit gets serious.
Raze holds my gaze for a long second, and I let him think it through without interrupting.
I know exactly what’s happening behind those eyes—threats, territory, fallout—all the worst-case scenarios.
He’s weighing how bad this would be if we believe her, against how much worse it would be if we don’t.
And after five centuries beside the bastard, I know better than to rush him while he’s putting the pieces together.
“And her?” His chin lifts toward Cali. “Where does a hunter fit into all this?”
“She’s the one who found the pattern. Tracked three separate incidents back to the same source before our people even knew to look.” I keep my voice even. “She came to me. We want the same outcome.”
“Hunters don’t want outcomes that keep us breathing.”
“This one needs us to.”
Raze lets the silence stretch while his eyes settle back on Cali, with the kind of attention that makes most people start second-guessing themselves. Somebody who didn’t know him might mistake it for patience.
It’s not.
It’s the look of a predator deciding whether the thing standing in front of him is about to become an ally, a problem, or a goddamn body.