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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 andkicked 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.
Even if it means I have to kill him to be free.
***
I loved Dornan Ross once. I loved him so much that he became a part of me. I loved him despite his darkness, despite the impossibility of us ever being able to have a real life together.
I fuckingworshippedthe man. But false Gods always betray your devotion eventually. They peel off their mask, and you stare at a stranger. They are the shark and you are the prey, and you wonder how you ever thought you could trust them not to devour you on sight.
CHAPTER ONE
MARIANA
You might’ve walked past us and wondered why a woman like me – twenty-eight years old, no tattoos, modestly dressed – was withhim.
The president of the most lethal biker club in California, the Gypsy Brothers MC – John Portland. Covered in tattoos, smoking, the crest of his brotherhood inked on the flesh above his heart. That tattoo was hidden from public view as we stood side by side on the Santa Monica Pier and watched his daughter and my kind-of-not-really stepson ride the Ferris wheel, two teenagers clearly experiencing the first stages of love. Fifteen and sixteen. When I was their age I’d already given birth to my only child and had him taken from me. I’d already been tainted by life.
My not-stepson had found his mother dead, murdered by his father – my lover – a few months earlier, and it was safe to say he’d been tainted by life, too.
John’s daughter had been too, to a lesser extent. Junkie mother. A father who presided over criminals and murderers.Despite her beginnings, she still had traces of the naivety that summer love and an overprotective daddy provided. She still slept soundly at night, from what I could gather.
