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PROLOGUE
Ariel
I was just a child when I was taken and turned into a sex slave. Fifteen years old. Just a silly girl with silly dreams and silly worries. I don’t know her anymore. For years after I was rescued—which is a blessing so many in my situation don’t get—I tried to find that girl again. Psychiatrists and psychologists and my family tried to help me find her too.
But that was just another silly dream. Another stupid idea.
That girl is gone. She existed and now she doesn’t anymore.
There’s no going back to how it was. There’s only forward.
All roads are open for me now. And yet, all I do is look back, suffocating in the darkness of my bad memories.
There’s nothing for me back there. Nothing to find. Nothing to cure, to solve, to survive.
I have survived.
This is the new me.
And I don’t know who that is.
I don’t know what she likes, what she dislikes. I don’t know what she craves. Desires. Loves.
I definitely didn’t think the answer to those questions would ever be a man.
Especially not one as broken as I am just in a different way.
Can we help each other heal?
Can we find our new selves? A new life? Together?
Do I even want to?
All very good questions that I wish I knew the answer to.
Because what no one talks about when helping victims of human trafficking is this: the me that I was died when I was taken.
And no new Ariel was born to take her place. Just a shadow came back. Made of darkness.
1
Ruin
Cross, the president of my club-Devil’s Nightmare MC-has given me and my best friend Edge an impossible job. Granted, most of the jobs the Devils undertake are impossible. But this one is worse. We’re to find out if our onetime friends are ratting us out to our enemies. And why.
The Devils have been fighting a war for close to a year now, a war that was long in the making and doesn’t seem to be dying down yet. And every time we win a battle, we make new enemies. Whole new generations of enemies. A never-ending cycle of violence, blood, and hate. This war was seeded a long time ago, back when Devil’s Nightmare MC was a band of killers for hire, very efficient ones. It’s the sons and grandsons of all those men they killed waging the war against us now.
There’s no winning this war. Not in the long run. But we keep fighting, because what else can we do? The old me would’ve rejoiced at the opportunity to fight in this war.
I joined the Devils when I was seventeen years old. That’s almost a decade ago. And for most of that decade, I’ve lived for violence and blood. Death and destruction. And I dreamed of the day I could collect up all my hate and make it rain down on the men who killed my family and ruined my childhood.
Until I did.
Then there was nothing left but anger and hate. It consumed me, body, mind, and soul. And I was proud of being a soulless killer.
Even Ice—one of the MC’s top guys and the man who brought us into the MC—warned anyone who would listen that I was losing it. And once upon a time, he was the coldest killer of them all.
He wasn’t above killing fathers in front of their children, something the Devils, for all their ruthlessness, don’t do. He had his reasons, and good ones at that, but still. Savage, he called me once. At the time, I even considered changing my name to that. But I didn’t, because I prefer Ruin. I destroy everything I touch, so it’s more fitting starting with my dead parents. If I hadn’t made the introductions to those wannabe drug runners, when they wanted to sell the meth my mom cooked, they’d still be alive. The men I connected them with killed them all, alongside Edge’s parents who were in on the deal too. I’ve ruined a lot of things since, including my standing with the MC and the friendship of Ice, who took me in and treated me like a father.
