Chapter One
Prime
I hated quiet mornings at the clubhouse.
Not the normal ones, those were fine.
The kind where Skull complained about coffee, Lost snored on the couch, and someone’s music leaked out of a bedroom door because they forgot headphones existed.
Those mornings were noise and life and the kind of chaos I’d kill to keep.
This wasn’t that.
This was the kind of quiet that hummed under the skin.The kind that tasted like grief and unfinished business.
Bernice was dead.
And somewhere out there, the bastard who did it was still breathing.
I stood in the common room with a mug of coffee cooling in my hand and stared at the muted TV with the sound off.I wasn’t watching it.The news anchors moved their mouths without meaning.The ticker at the bottom talked about a storm two states over.
None of it mattered.
Behind me, the hallway was quiet, and the last door closed.
Shay was behind that door.
She’d been there less than a week, and my whole world had shifted around that fact.
I took a slow sip of coffee and turned to look down the hallway.
She hadn’t come out yet.
Didn’t blame her.
The past days had been too much for any person to process.Yanked out of her normal life by a stranger in a cut.Then dropped in the middle of a biker clubhouse on a haunted-ass island and found out her picture was in some psycho’s file that was killing people.
And Bernice dying in front of her.
Welcome to Skull Island.
God damn.
Footsteps creaked behind me.
Anchor came over to me like he’d aged ten years overnight.He probably had.He was carrying a mug, but I’d bet good money it wasn’t his first.
His eyes tracked down the hallway.
“You slept?”he asked.
I huffed.“Yeah, sure.”
“So that’s a no,” he muttered.
“You?”
He didn’t answer.
