Chapter One
From his perch on top of the Harley Fat Boy, Caspar waited Silas out as he looked toward the front gates of the Defiance Motorcycle Club’s headquarters.
The darkness had already started descending by degrees. Hard to differentiate day from night, but there were subtle differences. Lately, more differences than before, but if anyone else but him noticed, they didn’t say shit.
“How’s she look?” Silas asked finally, then let smoke drift out of his mouth before blowing it in a frustrated stream when Caspar said, “Fine.”
“Cut the shit, Cas.”
Caspar burned when Silas used that nickname; his hands itched to go around the guy’s throat but he focused instead on the rasp in Silas’s voice. “Those’ll kill you.”
Silas snorted at the running joke, threw the butt on the ground and reached for another. What with the general dearth of sunlight and food, plus the constant fucking fighting—for both fun and survival—cigarettes were the safest things in this new post-Chaos world.
When Silas lit up the next cigarette almost immediately, Caspar took pity on him. “She looks the same. Thin, though.”
Silas didn’t look the same. He looked older—worn, with deep lines around his eyes and mouth. With his long hair pulled back tight, it made his sharp cheekbones look more severe than ever. And he was way too concerned with an old girlfriend.
“She ask to come here?” Silas asked.
“Can’t talk to an unconscious woman,” Caspar offered, but they both knew Tru had been marched here cruelly by the Kill Devils MC, because she’d made a choice.
The rules had always been simple here—you lived and died by your MC. Men were in charge, women weren’t.
He didn’t know if Tru had been violated, but that’s what typically happened when a woman rejected the bond offer.
He’d wanted to kill someone when he’d heard that, but couldn’t show his hand. So he pretended he didn’t give a shit, the way he always did. The way it had to be.
Silas nodded. “Stay with her. Let her know she can hang.”
Caspar raised a brow, asked, “What’re we tellin’ her?” and Silas shrugged, said, “Tell her everything. She knows the deal. If she’s smart, she’ll finally goddamned accept it.”
Tru not accepting the bond offer had nothing to do with her being smart. Tru was smarter than most; that meant she was considered trouble. The only thing saving her up to this point had been her father’s position in the Defiance club. The man had been a sergeant at arms, an Enforcer no one fucked with. His daughter had as much respect thrown to her as a woman in this society could.
Caspar nodded. “Why can’t Roan take care of his own shit?”
“He’s on patrol. It’s all you, brother.”
Brother. That was the biggest joke of all. They all knew Caspar as the bastard brother of Silas’s clan, bastard child of Silas’s father, Lance. Caspar had been dropped off when he was ten after his mother died, and was taken in by Lance’s extended family, passed around and generally treated like dirt. At least until his long, muscled frame and proclivity for violence and other criminal pursuits got him noticed. Men in his own club wanted to fight him just to prove they could, a feat that proved harder as each year passed. When Lance sent him out into underground cage fighting matches to earn the club money, he raked in cash and respect.
Once the lights went out, his ever-expanding skill set became even more coveted. He’d been in the higher ranks of Lance’s MC ever since, although he’d never been fully accepted as part of Lance’s immediate family, never been one of them. To Caspar, that was a good thing.
On the opposite end had once sat Tru, with Silas. They’d been the couple in high school—prince and princess of Defiance when things were still normal. Whether Silas ever knew about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, Caspar didn’t know. And when Tru disappeared without a trace three and a half years earlier, Silas had mourned for six months.
Now the man was bonded to Liv.
The MC had always used the term bonded over marriage, even if club members did end up going the traditional route recognized by state and church. But bonding was a whole different thing now—it was the most serious set of rules the club had, and breaking a bond wasn’t taken lightly. Lance had had the bonding ceremony written into the bylaws.
They all recognized the importance of loyalty in the MC, especially once the compound began to house almost all of the Defiance members and their families instead of just being the MC’s meeting place. Rules and order were necessary—the women chosen to be old ladies needed to be trusted.