Saint's Sin (Serpents Wraith MC #1)

1. Avery

AVERY

The sound at my back door wasn’t a knock. It was wood splitting.

I stood in the middle of my bedroom with one hoop earring in my hand, about to put it on, listening to the scrape of a boot over broken glass downstairs.

My laptop glowed on the bed behind me. A half-finished book cover design filled the screen.

Some cheerful illustrated couple who had probably never had two strangers break into their house on a Wednesday night. Then I heard a man say, “Upstairs.”

I didn’t know that voice and cold moved through me so fast it felt clean.

I crossed the room, locked the door and dragged the narrow dresser in front of it. The old floorboards complained. Downstairs, something heavy struck the kitchen wall.

“Don’t fuck her up,” another man said. “We need her alive.”

I grabbed my phone and called Rook. He answered on the first ring. “What?”

Motorcycles idled behind him, a low mechanical thunder. He sounded irritated rather than alarmed, and for one second I hated him for not already knowing, as unreasonable as that was.

“Somebody’s in my house.” Everything on his end went quiet except the engines.

“Where in the house are you?”

“Bedroom. Door’s locked.”

“How many?”

“At least two.” My voice wanted to climb. I shoved it back down. “They said they need me alive.”

Rook swore, vicious and low. Another voice in the background asked him what had happened.

“Get away from the door,” my brother ordered. “Saint’s three minutes out, he’s on his way.”

Of course the universe had waited until men were tearing through my house to give me the one thing I’d wanted for years: Saint, the club VP, coming straight to me.

“The Gravewater president never showed,” Rook said. “Avery, listen. I need you to?—”

The bedroom door jumped in its frame and I screamed in surprise or fright, I wasn’t sure which. I stumbled back. “They’re here.”

“Window,” Rook snapped. “Can you get out?”

My room was on the second floor. A porch roof ran beneath the window, but the drop beyond it was high enough to break an ankle. I looked at the door again. The dresser shifted an inch as another blow landed. “Maybe.”

“Do it. Keep me on the phone.”

I shoved the window up. Damp night air rushed in, smelling of rain and the neighbor’s cut grass. The screen stuck at one corner. I dug my fingers into the frame and pulled.

Behind me, the lock tore free. The dresser held for half a second.

Then the door hit it hard enough to tip a lamp from the top.

I caught the lamp by the ceramic base and swung as a shoulder appeared through the gap.

It connected with a man’s temple. He roared.

The lamp shattered. I kept hold of the jagged metal stem and slashed it across his face.

“Fucking bitch!”

“Pike, grab her.”

Pike. I held on to the name because it was something useful. The second man forced the dresser aside. He wore black gloves and a dark hooded jacket with the sleeves pushed back. A red snake or dragon curled around his right wrist, the ink bright against his skin.

He lunged at me and I drove my heel into his knee.

“Gravewater sends its regards,” the first man shouted as he grabbed his knee in pain.

It sounded like a deliberate message. Pike caught my wrist. I raked my nails down his face, found warm blood and tried to wrench free.

His fist clipped my cheek. White flashed across my vision.

My phone lay on the floor near the bed. Rook’s voice came through its speaker, calling my name.

Pike twisted my arm behind me. “Move.”

“Fuck you,” I shouted.

The other man grabbed my legs. They hauled me over the fallen dresser and into the hall while I kicked at walls and doorframes.

I caught the banister with both hands. Pike bent my fingers back one by one to release my grip.

Suddenly, the front door slammed open. Saint came through it like the wrath of God had put on a leather cut.

Close-cropped dark hair wet with rain, the Serpents Wraith patch across his broad shoulders, murder in a face that was usually carved from control.

He didn’t shout.

He hit.

The man holding my legs went down beneath Saint’s shoulder.

My hip struck the floor. Pike released me to reach inside his jacket, but Saint caught his forearm and drove it against the wall until bone cracked.

Pike screamed but Saint’s expression didn’t change.

He hit Pike twice, hard enough that blood sprayed the faded wallpaper.

The second attacker lurched up and swung something metal.

Saint took the blow against his shoulder, turned, and buried his fist in the man’s throat.

For a few brutal seconds, nobody in that hall looked human.

Then the attackers ran, and Saint started after them.

I made a sound. Not his name. Barely a breath, and he stopped. His head snapped toward me. The men crashed through the broken back door, but Saint let them go. He dropped to his knees in front of me.

“Look at me.”

I was looking and I couldn’t seem to stop. I was breathing hard. His hands hovered instead of touching, as if he was afraid he might hurt me. A thin line of blood ran from his brow. Rain had darkened his black T-shirt beneath the open cut.

“Avery. Tell me where they got you.”

“My face and my arm.” I swallowed. “I’m okay, though. Really.”

“Don’t give me that shit.” His voice broke on the last word and Saint never broke.

I lifted my hand and touched the blood near his eyebrow. His eyes shut for one beat. Then his palm closed around the back of my neck, and he pulled me against him. He held me so tightly my bruised shoulder protested and I didn’t care.

Leather pressed against my cheek. His heart hammered beneath it, fast and violent. This wasn’t the distant Saint who watched me across clubhouse parties and looked away whenever I caught him. This man had almost killed two strangers with his bare hands and was shaking because they’d touched me.

Headlights swept across the hall and the engines of motorbikes thundered outside.

Saint set me behind him just in case it was more attackers, but it was my brother Rook, the president of the Serpents Wraith MC.

My brother took in the blood, the ruined hall and Saint planted between me and the world. His face emptied.

“You hurt?”

“I keep trying to tell Saint that I’m fine.”

He crossed the hall and gripped my chin, turning my face toward the light.

Fury sharpened every line of him when he saw the bruise forming along my cheek.

Mace and Riot moved through the lower floor making sure there was no one else, weapons drawn.

Havoc’s motorcycle growled away from the curb as he went after the attackers’ vehicle.

“Pack a bag,” Rook said.

I pulled my face from his hand. “No.”

“You’re coming to the compound.”

“I have a home.”

Rook looked at the splintered bedroom door. “Not tonight, you fucking don’t.”

“You don’t get to order me behind your gates every time you’re scared.”

“They tried to take you, Avery, do you know what could have happened to you?”

The words hit harder from him. My gaze slid toward the window, the broken lamp, the dark streak of Pike’s blood on my wall. Rook saw the fear I couldn’t hide and softened for exactly half a breath.

“This isn’t a debate, Av.”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

“Congratulations. You’re a twenty-seven-year-old woman somebody just tried to drag into a van.”

“Come on, Rook,” Saint said. One word. A warning from the only man in the club who could give him one. His most trusted man, his VP.

My brother’s jaw worked. He looked at Saint, and something passed between them that had been there long before I was old enough to understand club business.

“I’m putting you in charge of her security,” Rook said. “Where she goes, you go. Nobody gets close without going through you.”

“Rook, I don’t need—” I started to protest.

“I’m not asking you.” My brother kept his gaze on Saint. “She’s in your hands. Keep her safe.”

Saint looked at me then. Years of “almosts” lived in that look.

His fingers lingering at my lower back for a few seconds more than necessary at a crowded party.

His mouth close to my ear when he told me to stay away from a drunk prospect.

The night I’d caught him watching me dance and he’d left the room before the song ended. Now he had no room to leave.

“Understood,” he said.

I should have been furious with both of them and I was.

But when Saint took me outside and settled me behind him on his bike, my body remembered every forbidden thought I’d ever had about him.

The engine kicked alive between my thighs.

I wrapped my arms around his waist. Rain-slick streets blurred past while his gloved hand covered mine against his stomach, holding me there as if he could keep me safe through pressure alone.

At the compound gates, he didn’t release me immediately. His arm locked over mine when I climbed off. His mouth was inches from my temple. “You don’t leave my sight,” he said as the gates rolled shut behind us.

The compound yard blazed beneath security lights.

Motorcycles stood in two black rows beside the converted depot, chrome wet from rain.

Men moved along the fence with rifles held low.

Nobody questioned why Rook had called every available brother back here tonight.

They saw my face, Saint’s blood and the way he kept his body between me and the open yard.

Dare came from the main building with a medical kit. The prospect was older than half the patched men and twice as competent, but the blank space on the back of his cut kept him running whenever an officer called.

“Ready to patch her up if needed,” he said.

“She’s not going anywhere without me,” Saint replied.

Inside, the main room fell quiet. The Serpents Wraith emblem covered the wall behind the bar.

A pale serpent twisted through smoke, the number thirteen worked into its scales.

I had grown up seeing that patch at cookouts and various rides, on men who brought birthday presents and frightened my dates away.

Tonight it looked like a declaration of war.

The club medic checked my pupils and declared my cheek bruised rather than fractured.

Saint stood in the corner with his arms folded until the medic examined the marks on my upper arm.

Rook was there too and watched the body language between us with too much exhaustion to recognize it.

Afterward, he led us to a guest room opposite Saint’s and put my bag on the bed.

“You stay here.”

“We covered my feelings about that,” I told Rook.

“I’m comfortable ignoring them until morning.”

“What changes in the morning?”

“You’ll be rested when I ignore them again.”

Despite everything, I laughed. Rook’s shoulders loosened. There was a gray area between brother and club president. He touched my uninjured cheek. “You scared the shit out of me, you know?”

“I know.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“I’ll put attempted abduction on my no-thank-you list.”

Rook kissed my forehead like a loving brother, then turned into the fearsome president and went to find the men who had tried to take me.

Saint remained in the doorway. “You need anything?”

I looked at the blood across his knuckles. “For you to let somebody check those out.”

“It’s nothing.”

“You’re dripping blood on the floor.”

“Club owns the floor.”

“And apparently your common sense.”

His mouth moved but it wasn’t quite a smile. “Sleep.”

“You staying outside?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Rook said where you go, I go.”

The warmth vanished from his face when he stepped in and touched the edge of the bruise without making contact. “I should’ve been faster.”

“You arrived before they got me downstairs. It’s fine. They didn’t take me.”

“But they touched you.”

“And you stopped them.”

Every one of those “almosts” between us continued to gather in that doorway. Then he stepped back.

“Lock it.”

I did, because whatever else I wanted from Saint, I understood the fear beneath the order. I looked up at the man I’d wanted since wanting him became a terrible idea.

“That might be a problem.”

His grip tightened on the door handle.

“You don’t know the half of it.”