Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Torment
Three weeks after the Death Dogs attacked. Soulless Sinners’ clubhouse, New York City...
The silence in the boardroom was fucking deafening.
I had sat through hundreds of these meetings over the years. Loud, raucous affairs where voices competed to be heard, where fists slammed on the table and laughter echoed off the walls. Where life pulsed through every word, every gesture, every goddamn breath.
This wasn’t that.
This was a tomb.
I leaned back in my chair, and the leather creaked beneath my weight as I let my gaze drift around the table.
Every face told a story, and I was trained to read them all.
Body language, micro-expressions, the tension held in shoulders and jaws.
It was all data. Information. A window into the human psyche that most people didn’t even realize they were leaving wide open.
Right now? Every single one of my brothers was screaming without making a sound.
Mercy sat to my left, his massive frame hunched forward, elbows on the table, hands clasped so tight his knuckles had gone white.
His jaw worked constantly, grinding his teeth in a rhythm that was going to give him one hell of a headache if he didn’t stop.
But he wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. It was the only thing keeping him from exploding, from putting his fist through the wall or flipping this entire fucking table.
Our vice president was holding on by a thread.
Across from him, Fury stared at nothing.
His dark eyes were fixed on some point in the middle distance, unfocused, seeing something the rest of us couldn’t.
Or maybe seeing nothing at all. His hands rested flat on the table, perfectly still, but there was a tremor running through his left index finger.
Subtle. Most people wouldn’t have noticed. But I did.
Fury had always been the most controlled among us, the one who kept his rage locked down tight until it was time to unleash it. Watching him unravel, even incrementally, was unsettling as hell.
Storm sat beside him, one leg bouncing under the table in a rapid staccato that made his chair vibrate.
Nervous energy. The man couldn’t sit still on a good day, but this was different.
This was anxiety manifesting in physical form.
His body was trying to burn off the adrenaline that had been coursing through his system since Diamond Creek.
Since we watched Malice take his last breath.
My chest tightened at the memory, as I forced myself to breathe through the pain. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Controlled. Measured. The same technique I taught my patients when they were on the edge of a panic attack.
Physician, heal thyself.
Payne sat at the far end of the table, his expression carved from granite.
The former SEAL looked exactly like what he was.
A weapon waiting to be aimed. His hands rested on the table, relaxed, but I could see the coiled tension in his shoulders, the way his eyes tracked every movement in the room.
He was in tactical mode, assessing threats and calculating responses. It was how he coped. How he survived.
We all had our mechanisms.
Rage leaned against the wall, refusing to sit down.
His body taut, ready for what came next.
Our brother dropped everything when shit started to heat up with the Golden Skulls and Bane, then he traveled with all of us to Nebraska days before the Death Dogs attacked.
Rage left everything behind: his demolition company, his life away from the clubhouse, and flew across the world to help us.
Shame was standing in the corner, laptop open on the table, fingers flying across the keys in a blur of motion.
Click-clack-click-clack. The sound was almost soothing in its consistency, a metronome of normalcy in a world that had gone completely sideways.
He hadn’t looked up once since we sat down.
He hadn’t acknowledged any of us. Instead, he’d retreated into the digital world where he had control, where he could find answers, where things made sense.
I didn’t blame him.
Vicious sat to my right, and out of everyone here, he was the one I was most worried about.
The road captain had always been intense, but there was something hollow in his eyes now.
Something broken. He had his phone on the table in front of him, screen dark, but his thumb kept moving toward it before stopping.
He wanted to call Linsey. Wanted to hear his wife’s voice, to know his kids were safe.
But not wanting to worry her more than she already was.
The duality was tearing him apart.
Bane sat beside Vicious, and the club doctor looked like he had aged ten years in the past week.
His face was drawn and exhausted. The lines around his eyes were deeper than I remembered.
He was the one who worked on Montana in the field, who kept our president alive long enough to get him to a hospital.
He was the one who watched Malice die and couldn’t do a goddamn thing to stop it.
That kind of helplessness left scars.
And then there was the head of the table.
Montana’s chair sat empty.
It was never empty.
In all the years I had been a Soulless Sinner, I never saw that chair vacant during church.
Montana was always there, commanding the room with his presence, his authority, his absolute certainty about the path forward.
He was the anchor. The foundation. The reason we all believed this club could weather any storm.
But he wasn’t here.
He was in a hospital bed at First Presbyterian Hospital in downtown Manhattan, with tubes and wires keeping him alive, his body riddled with bullets put there by his own brother. By Arizona. By his own blood.
The betrayal of it sat heavily in the room.
“We need to talk about what happens next,” Mercy finally spoke, his voice rough, as if he dragged the words up from somewhere deep and painful.
No one responded.
He tried again. “We can’t just sit here with our dicks in our hands. Arizona and Dakota are still out there. They’re a threat to Montana, to this club, to everyone we love. We need a plan.”
“What plan?” Fury’s voice was flat, emotionless. Dangerous. “We don’t even know where the fuck they are. They could be anywhere. They could be planning another attack right now, and we’re sitting here playing with our dicks.”
“Shame’s working on it,” Payne said, his tone clipped and efficient. “He’ll find them.”
“Will he?” Vicious leaned forward, his hands curling into fists on the table.
“Because last I checked that motherfucker played dead for the last year, instead of helping the club prevent this shit. And now, the club isn’t ours anymore, Malice is dead, and Montana’s in the fucking hospital, shot to shit.
So forgive me if I’m not filled with confidence in Shame right now. ”
The words landed like a slap, and I watched Shame’s fingers still on the keyboard for just a moment before resuming their frantic pace. He had heard that. And it had cut.
“That’s not fair, Vicious,” Storm remarked, his leg still bouncing. “It’s not Shame’s fault. None of us saw this coming.”
“Says the fucker who bolted when shit got too heavy,” Fury interrupted. “Tell me, Storm, when you heard what was happening, did you have to ask your wife for your balls back, or did she force them into your hands and tell you to man the fuck up?”
“Fuck you, Fury.”
“Enough.” Bane’s voice was quiet, but it cut through the rising tension like a scalpel.
“I’m not patching up any more of my brothers.
You two want to kill each other? Go do it somewhere else.
My best friend is clinging to life, and I, for one, want to tell him when he wakes up that at least one of those motherfuckers is dead.
So knock it the fuck off before I put you both in a bed next to him. ”
“And I’ll help,” Vicious sneered.
The silence that followed was even heavier than before.
I cleared my throat, and every eye in the room turned to me. I wasn’t just an officer. I was the club’s therapist, the one they came to when the weight got too heavy, when the nightmares wouldn’t stop, when they needed someone to tell them they weren’t losing their minds.
Right now, they all needed my expertise more than ever.
“We’re all processing trauma,” I said, keeping my voice calm and steady.
“What we all went through in Diamond Creek—watching Malice die, seeing Montana get shot, fighting for our lives—isn’t something you can just shake off.
You are all grieving. You are angry. You are scared.
And if your emotions go unchecked, you will turn on each other because you don’t know what else to do with all of your emotions. ”
“Don’t shrink us right now, Torment,” Mercy said, but there was no heat in it. Just exhaustion.
“I’m not shrinking you. I’m stating facts.
” I leaned forward, making eye contact with each of them in turn.
“We’re a family. We’ve always been a family.
And right now, our family is hurting. But tearing each other apart won’t bring Malice back.
It won’t heal Montana. And it sure as hell won’t help us find Arizona and Dakota. ”
“So what do we do?” Storm asked, and I noticed there was something almost pleading in his voice.
“We do what we always do,” Payne replied before I could answer. “We adapt. We overcome. We hunt down the motherfuckers who hurt our family, and we make them pay.”
“With what authority?” Vicious demanded. “We’re not Soulless Sinners anymore. We patched over to the Golden Skulls. We’re prospects now. We don’t have the resources, the connections, the—”
“We have each other,” Mercy cut him off. “That’s all we’ve ever needed.”
“Is it?” Fury’s question hung in the air like smoke. “Because it wasn’t enough to save Malice.”
His words were a gut punch, and I watched the impact ripple around the table. Shoulders slumped. Heads dropped. The weight of that truth was almost unbearable.
“Malice knew the risks,” Bane spoke quietly. “We all did. Every time we put on these cuts, every time we ride out, we know we might not come back. That’s the life. That’s the choice.”
“Doesn’t make it easier,” Storm muttered.
“No,” Bane agreed. “It doesn’t.”
Another silence fell, but this one was different. Less hostile. More... resigned. We were all coming to terms with the same brutal reality: our brother was gone, our president was fighting for his life, and the club we’d devoted ourselves to had fundamentally changed.
Nothing would ever be the same.
“I miss him,” Storm uttered suddenly, his voice cracking. “I miss Malice. I miss his smartass comments and his weird Catholic guilt and his stupid obsession with those nasty green apples. I miss knowing he was there, you know? That he had our backs.”
“He died having our backs,” Fury whispered, and for the first time since we sat down, there was emotion in his voice. Raw. Painful. Real. “He died protecting Sandman. Protecting all of us.”
“He died a Soulless Sinner,” Mercy declared. “And we’re going to make damn sure everyone remembers that. Arizona, Dakota, the Death Dogs. They’re all going to learn what it costs to fuck with this family.”
Heads nodded around the table. It wasn’t much, but it was something. A shared purpose. A common enemy. Something to focus on besides the grief that was threatening to drown us all.
“What about Montana?” I asked. “What’s the latest?”
Bane pulled out his phone, scrolling through messages. “Tessa says he’s stable. Still in the ICU, but we’re cautiously optimistic. He’s strong. He’ll pull through.”
“And when he does?” Vicious probed. “What then? Does he come back to a club that doesn’t exist anymore? Does he help Reaper lead the Golden Skulls? Does he—”
“He leads us,” Mercy firmly stated. “I don’t give a fuck what patch is on our backs. Montana is our president. That doesn’t change.”
“Reaper might have something to say about that,” Shame called from the corner, still not looking up from his laptop.
“Then he can say it to my fucking face,” Mercy growled.
I watched the fire return to his eyes, the steel straighten his spine. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. We were all finding our footing again, remembering who we were, what we stood for.
We were Soulless Sinners.
And Sinners didn’t go down easily.
“We need to visit Montana,” I said. “All of us. He needs to see that we’re still here, still standing, still his brothers. He needs to know the club didn’t die in Diamond Creek.”
“Agreed.” Mercy nodded. “We’ll head over there tomorrow. Tonight, we drink to Malice. We remember our brother. And tomorrow, we start planning how to end the motherfuckers who took him from us.”
Chairs scraped against the floor as everyone stood. The meeting was over, but nothing had been resolved. We were still adrift, still uncertain, still grieving.
But we were together.
And maybe, for now, that was enough.
I was the last one to leave the room, pausing at the doorway to look back at Montana’s empty chair. The weight of everything we lost, everything that had changed, settled over me like a shroud.
I was the club’s therapist. I was supposed to have answers, supposed to help my brothers process their trauma, supposed to guide them through the darkness.
But who guided the guide?
Who healed the healer?
I didn’t have those answers, and that scared me more than anything else as I flipped off the lights and closed the door behind me, sealing the boardroom in darkness.