One week after the attack.
September in Athens, Texas, was a special kind of hell.
The heat clung to everything like a desperate lover, thick and suffocating even as the sun started its descent toward the horizon. It was the kind of oppressive, sticky heat that made your clothes feel like they were glued to your skin, and that made every breath feel like you were inhaling liquid fire. The air shimmered above the asphalt, creating mirages that danced and disappeared just as quickly as they formed.
My Ducati rumbled beneath me, the engine’s purr the only sound I trusted anymore. The vibration traveled through my body, steady and reassuring, a mechanical heartbeat that drowned out the chaos in my head. But even that felt like a betrayal now. This machine, this symbol of escape, was also a cage. It was the only thing I had left, the only thing that hadn’t been tarnished by regret, yet every mile on it felt like a step further away from the person I was supposed to be.
I had pulled off Highway 175 twenty minutes ago, taking the back roads through town. The decision gnawed at me. My gut screamed to keep going, to outrun the memories that festered in this dust-choked place. But a twisted sense of duty, or maybe just my masochistic urge, had pulled me here. Past the high school I barely graduated from, the same one where I spentmore time in detention than in class, a constant rebellion against a system I never felt I belonged to. And then, the diner. The same diner where Betty still worked the register, her tired eyes missing nothing, where the coffee was always burned, and where the pie was somehow still the best thing in this godforsaken town.
The thought of seeing her, of seeing that flicker of disappointment, maybe even pity, in her gaze, made my stomach clench. I had promised her I would do better, that I wouldn’t end up like my father, a ghost haunting the edges of this town. But here I was, a ghost in the making, the rumble of my Ducati a defiant roar against that promise. I knew what I had to do. I needed to keep going, to run and never look back. But the current I was caught in pulled me toward a darkness I feared I couldn’t escape, not without leaving a piece of myself behind. And the worst part? A chilling part of me, the part that had grown accustomed to the desperation, was starting to accept that this dark path might be the only one left.
Now I sat at the end of the long gravel drive that led to the Gods of Mayhem clubhouse, my hands gripping the handlebars so tightly that my knuckles had gone white. The driveway stretched out before me like a gauntlet, lined with overgrown weeds and memories I’d tried like hell to forget.
Home.
The word tasted like ash in my mouth.
The clubhouse sprawled before me like a monument to everything I’d tried to escape. Two-story, built from red brick and bad decisions, in the shape of an octagon with a wraparound porch that had seen more blood than barbecues. The wood was warped and weathered, splintered in places where fists and boots had connected with the railings during countless drunken brawls. The Gods of Mayhem insignia. A bearded skull with hollow eyes and a trident that was painted across the front infaded blue and gray, the colors chipped and peeling from years of harsh Texas sun and neglect. Motorcycles lined the parking area, at least fifteen of them, all chrome and leather and barely contained violence. Harleys mostly, with a few custom jobs that probably cost more than most people’s houses.
I grew up here. In this place. With these men. This building had been my playground, my prison, my entire world for longer than I cared to remember.
My parents had died for this club when I was six years old. A rival club ambush on a run to Houston, some territorial dispute over drug routes that I didn’t understand then and barely understood now. My mother, Lorna, had been riding on the back of my father’s bike when the bullets started flying. They had both gone down on I-45, their bodies torn apart by automatic weapons fire while the rest of the club scattered and regrouped. The Texas Highway Patrol found them hours later, still intertwined, their blood mixing on the scorching asphalt.
I barely remembered them. Just fragments. Pieces of people I constructed from old photographs and second-hand stories told by men too drunk to lie convincingly. My mother’s laugh, high and musical, cutting through the rumble of engines. My father’s hands, rough and calloused, lifting me onto his shoulders so I could see over the crowd at a club rally. The smell of his leather cut, that distinctive mix of oil and sweat and tobacco that clung to everything he owned.
After they died, the club raised my older brother, Oscar, and me. It wasn’t a choice I would have made, but blood was blood, and the club took care of its own. My brother, seven years older, was already a prospect at thirteen when our parents’ bike went off that mountain road. He’d become a full-patch member at eighteen, when I was eleven. By the time I was old enough to understand what the club really was, what it really meant to wear those colors, Oscar was already Poseidon, one of Kronos’most trusted enforcers, a man who broke bones and asked questions later. A man feared in three states.
He tried to protect me from the life, in his own rough way. Tried to keep me separate from the violence and the drugs, and the women who came and went like the seasons, their laughter echoing through the clubhouse at night before fading into memory by morning. He kept me in school when other club kids dropped out. Made sure I had clean clothes and hot meals. Checked my homework with grease-stained fingers after long nights doing God knows what for the club.
But I couldn’t grow up in a clubhouse and stay innocent. I couldn’t watch men beat each other bloody over territory disputes and not understand that the world ran on power and fear. I couldn’t fall asleep to the sound of engines roaring out at midnight on runs I wasn’t supposed to know about and maintain any illusions about what my family really did. I learned early that loyalty meant everything and weakness meant nothing. Learned that respect was earned through violence and maintained through reputation.
I left the day I turned eighteen, the day Oscar could no longer legally keep me there. Packed a single duffel bag with everything that mattered and climbed onto the Ducati my brother had given me for my sixteenth birthday—the only gift he ever gave me that wasn’t wrapped in guilt and overprotection—and rode north without looking back. Didn’t tell him I was leaving. Didn’t leave a note. Just disappeared into the early morning fog like a ghost, the rumble of that Italian engine drowning out whatever second thoughts tried to catch up with me.
I was going to see the world.
I was going to be free.
I made it as far as Rapid City, South Dakota.
That was where I met him. Michael Campbell. Business Accountant for the Prancing Pussycat, a strip club on the southside of town that smelled like broken dreams, stale cigarette smoke, and cheap vodka. The kind of place where the neon signs flickered and buzzed in the windows, promising fantasy but delivering only desperation. He had been charming at first, the way predators always were. Told me I was beautiful, that I was something special. He told me I could make good money dancing, more than I ever had seen working double shifts at the diner. Told me he would take care of me, protect me from the rougher customers, and make sure I always felt safe.
And I was stupid enough to believe him. Stupid enough to overlook the tiny red flags that screamed at my gut, the ones I had been trained to ignore my whole life. The way his eyes lingered a little too long, the casual way he dismissed my concerns, the unsettling possessiveness that I somehow twisted into devotion. I saw the desperation in the faces of the other girls, the hollowness in their smiles, but I told myself I was different. That he was different. I wanted to believe in a savior, a way out of the grinding poverty that felt like a physical weight, and he offered me a gilded cage. Was it weakness, or was it just survival? That question gnawed at me, a constant, low-grade ache. I chose to see what I wanted to see, silencing the part of me that screamed it was too good to be true.
Stupid enough to think that a man like Michael Campbell saw me as anything more than another asset to exploit. Stupid enough to follow my heart instead of my head, to mistake his possessiveness for passion, his control for concern. The rational part of me screamed caution, whispered warnings of every cautionary tale I had ever heard, but the lonely, yearning part of me desperately wanted to be seen, to be cherished, even if the packaging was all wrong. It felt like a betrayal of my own need for love to distrust someone who was showering me with attention and promises. I convinced myself that his intensitywas proof of his deep feelings, a fire that would burn away all my insecurities.
Stupid enough to think that love was something other than a weapon men used to control you. A leash disguised as affection. A cage painted to look like home. Each time he tightened his grip, I rationalized it, telling myself it was for my own good, that he just loved me too much. I even found myself defending him to myself, a frantic internal battle to justify his actions, to prove to myself that I wasn’t making a mistake. The guilt of wanting more, of needing freedom, warred with the desire to be the woman he wanted me to be, the woman he claimed to love.
By the time I realized what Michael really was, an abusive son of a bitch who saw women as property to be trained and molded for his sexual perversions, I was already trapped. Dancing at the club six nights a week under a stage name he had chosen for me, a name that felt like a costume I could never take off. Living in a cramped apartment he paid for, where he had a key and I didn’t have any privacy, the walls closing in on me with every passing day. Wearing bruises he had put there with his fists and his words and his relentless need to own every part of me, to remake me into something that existed solely for his pleasure. Each new mark, each new humiliation, chipped away at something inside me, leaving me with a hollow ache and a growing, simmering rage that I was terrified to unleash. I hated myself for letting it get this far, for not fighting back sooner, for being so easily broken.
So I had done what any smart woman would do.
I stole everything from him.
Seventy-five million dollars he had hidden in offshore accounts and laundered through shell corporations, and I took it all.
Every.Fucking. Dollar.
And then I disappeared.
