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‘What’s going on in that head of yours?’ John asked, cupping my chin and bringing it up to meet his eyes. They shone bright blue, even in the dim flicker of candlelight.
‘Hawaii,’ I said, smiling tiredly.
He grinned. ‘Hawaii?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, leaning my head against his chest as he held me tightly. ‘We could do it. Take these kids and get the hell out of here.’
‘If they found us, they would kill us,’ John said soberly. ‘Remember Colorado?’
‘Of course,’ I said, pulling away so I could see his eyes. ‘Of course I remember. That’s why, if we did leave, we’d have to kill them first.’
PART 3
EMPIRE
I loved you at your darkest.
ROMANS 5:8
PROLOGUE
MARIANA
People aren’t born monsters.
They’re made that way.
After all, how do you fight the darkness when you’re thrust into it?
Same goes for vengeful beasts. They aren’t born. They’re created, fuelled by one singular moment in time when the universe wrongs them and their existence shatters.
I’d been with Dornan Ross for almost a decade. Slept in his bed, sewn up his wounds, tasted his blood, seen inside his soul.
I was the mistress of a monstrous man. Dornan Ross, vice-president of one of the most feared biker gangs in the United States.
Son of the most powerful drug kingpin along the West Coast.
A man whose entire being was predicated on violence, blood and death.
But even I wasn’t prepared for what he did.
He killed our child. He put his boot into my stomach and kicked our baby to death.
He killed the love I had for him.
And he took away the only family his son had ever known. Left his mother in a bathtub full of blood and a hotshot still hanging from her arm, for a sixteen-year-old boy to find.
I’d been foolish enough to question the brutality he’d delivered to his son’s mother, and lost my own child as punishment.
I should have known it would always come down to this, from the very moment I laid eyes on him in that motel.
I should have known his salvation was too good to be true.
Because it’s all gone now, the dark secret love I had for him bleeding away in the darkness that came afterwards.
Now, there’s only hate.
Now, I just want to escape.
