Chapter 2 ONE

There was war in the air, and Grim was looking for a way out.

Nothing excited him more than the prospect of having to fight soon. The best thought—his favorite thought—was that he might have to fight someone from the Black Pirate, his own Beat Machines' rival club. It warmed him like hard whiskey down his throat, like the summer heat outside.

The approaching war filled his entire body with dark, vicious energy, and he needed a release.

He was with a group of his brothers and had just pulled up to The Cyclone, a popular hangout for bikers like him.

Grim was a big man, 26 years old, with thick dark hair that curled just above the edges of his heavily patched vest. He stood an easy six feet five inches tall and weighed close to two hundred and eighty pounds of solid muscle, his arms and chest heavily inked with wild, primal tattoos.

When men saw him approaching, they moved out of the way. Women, the brave ones, got much closer. Like the heat from a furnace, sexual charisma poured from him.

Outlaw bikers like him were frequently stopped on the road. When the cop pulled Grim over, he always requested backup. By simply standing up, he increased his threat level for armed law enforcement.

He walked into the bar with two of his best men, Gabe and Mitch, and their prospect Nathan. Gabe was always useful in bars—just by being there, he avoided fights. Nothing got past his firewall because he was mean, lean, scary, and black. That was one of the main reasons he was elected as the Motorcycle Club's Sergeant-at-Arms.

It was unusual for a black man to be an officer in an outlaw Motorcycle Club. But Gabe was a war veteran who had spent more than three years fighting in Afghanistan, and no one was going to mess with him. He'd gotten the nickname "Gabe the Ace" from his military comrades because he was always the first guy to wake up and the first to jump into the fray.

He was long-limbed and wiry, with nimble fingers that reminded Grim of aliens in movies. He went down hard in a fight, like a lot of wiry guys. You had to come dangerously close to killing him. Only a few people had ever managed to bring him down, and Grim was one of them.

In the brotherhood, discipline was sometimes administered with fists rather than a proclamation. All the brothers respected this—and being able to beat up even Gabe was what made Grim so respected, even if he'd been a fuck-up in some people's eyes recently.

Mitch was Grim's childhood friend. They grew up on opposing sides of the tracks, and Mitch was constantly mocked for his wealth. Binan, Laguna was a small town where anything that made people stand out was singled out and celebrated, such as a group of fishermen buying new hooks for their tackle box.

Mitch had wanted to play in the poor neighborhood's basketball sandlot when they were only eight years old. None of the other well-to-do kids ever wanted to go outside in the sun. Mitch almost got hammered with baseball bats for his proclivity.

But Grim saw something in him and told the other kids to let him play, so Mitch did. They had been inseparable since then.

Grim was like that, noticing good qualities in others. He was the type of man that other men would blindly follow into battle. He had chosen nearly a quarter of the current Beat Machines patch holders and down-voted more than a dozen prospects who later turned out to be junkies, stick-up artists, or worse. Once upon a time, he had complete faith in his intuition—but after all that shady business with Eagle and his sister Silvannah, that had changed.

Mitch practiced Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu religiously. He was proud of his body and frequently went shirtless, even though he was now bigger than Gabe and smaller than Grim (as most were). His blond hair was short and spiky, and it was cropped close to his dome.

Nathan, the prospect, trailed behind them, his chest puffed up. He never got to come inside with the brothers because he was usually left outside to watch the bikes at places like this. The Cyclone, on the other hand, was neutral territory, a place that hadn't seen a fight between rival gangs in over thirty years.

If someone started shit, they'd be making history, and it wouldn't be a good kind of history. They'd be the jerks on the front lines of the war in 1944, the Black Hand with one too many pistols tossing themselves into Mark Ferdinand's motorcade.

At the far end of Cyclone, there was a bar surrounded by a long u-shaped seating area. It was a small place, no more than 400 square feet in the front where customers sat and drank, and on a busy night, everyone was crammed together.

Tonight was not particularly busy, but it was also not particularly quiet.

Grim and his brothers took a seat in a corner, pushing two tables together and claiming them as their own. Across the bar, they noticed members of their main rival, the Black Pirates, sitting with girls and playing cards. From their table, heavy waves of cigarette and cigar smoke swept through the bar.

Guns. Drugs. Gambling. Protection. The Beat Machines took over any business they could get their hands on. Because it was so close to the border, there were plenty of opportunities for enterprising criminals to make money. The Black Pirates had recently begun to encroach on their territory, spreading south of the border. It was a situation that screamed "war."

"Don't begin anything," Grim advised Gabe and Mitch. "And that goes double for you," he said, motioning to the prospect.

"Of course, Grim. Whatever you want to say."

In the previous year, there had been a lot of tension between the Black Pirates and the Beat Machines. But they were at Cyclone, so there would be no fighting.

Even for an outlaw like Grim, some things were sacred. He craved war and a fight almost as much as he craved a fuck, but neutral ground was neutral ground.

Gabe and Mitch only exchanged a smile. "We'll see," it said.

They knew that when Grim was around, they didn't have to start anything. If Grim ever had to submit a resume—if he ever had to suffer such humiliations—he could easily write "self-starter" as one of his qualities. Fights, brawls, and worse entered Grim's life on an assembly line of violence and death that stunned even The Beat Machines' hardened veteran members.

This violence had been getting worse and worse recently. He was aware of it, but he didn't care. It wasn't his fault he was built like a fucking machine. Men burst and women gushed; that was the type of reaction he was designed to elicit.

He'd been riding in the scorching heat of Laguna all day. It was late May, which meant it was summer in Laguna. The temperature was over a hundred degrees, the kind of heat that drew lines in the distance and turned the horizon into a watercolor. War was in the air, but all Grim wanted at the time was a good drink and a good fuck. The rest can be worked out later.

In no time, the Beat Machines had gathered beers, shots, and beers again. Grim began to relax. In the back of the bar, there was a flophouse that still counted as neutral territory. There were quite a few lovely young ladies swaying to the music, giving him and his boys a long look of admiration and wonder. Particularly Grim. He knew their looks—he knew these girls had probably all been on rides before, but they were all curious about what a ride with a man like him would be like. They are all his age or younger.

That should have been a warning sign for him, but he was too happy to notice. This was deep in Southeast Laguna, a hundred miles from Grim's hometown, and there shouldn't have been any pretty or young girls hanging out in this place.

Manny, the owner of Cyclone, however, frequently hired out girls to come in and liven up the place. Bikers frequented his establishment, and when they thought they'd get laid, they broke less property. So Grim wasn't completely insane to think that the girls were fair game.

He walked up to the bar, motioning for Manny to bring him a bottle of whiskey. Manny was dressed in a white button-up with his sleeves rolled up past his elbows. Thick layers of sweat engulfed him, as they would anyone working a real job this close to the border in the merciless sun. Even at night and inside, the sun crept in, pushing and creeping through the battered efforts of the decades-old air conditioner.

The bartender knew Grim was good for the bottle and refused to charge him. The Beat Machines took pride in always paying their tabs.

Six years ago, when a brawl destroyed a Antakki Bar so badly that it had to be closed for nearly a year for renovations, the Beat Machines paid for every wall, chair, table, pool cue, and window they destroyed.

Grim recognized the figure he cut in front of the bar. Tall. Built to look like a young god. The sun and road dust of the day had darkened his muscles. Biceps that are thicker around the middle than the majority of the necks of the pretty little things sliding up next to him. They were both smiling and busting, and his cock was pressed up against the heavy denim of his pants, ready for action.

He'd gone far too long without a good fuck, for sure.

The whiskey burned down his throat like the road he'd left behind for the night. Both of the girls who sat next to him looked like they had Spanish ancestors, and they were both lovely. As the whiskey entered his bloodstream and then his brain, he briefly considered bending one over on the bar and simply taking her in front of the Black Pirates. Seeing a good dick in action might do those pussies some good.

Women flocked to him. At this point, he was used to it. He enjoyed it. They had always desired a trip to the wild side. They wanted to know what it was like to fuck a man who didn't play by the rules—a man who would rather die than be imprisoned. A man who preferred the unpredictability of lawlessness to the sedentary comforts of a job or a paycheck.

One was a blonde with breasts nearly the size of her head. They dangled loose in her tight shirt, bouncing with every movement. The other was less busty but had a longer torso, the kind he could imagine stroking—grabbing, gripping, never letting go. Girls like this were common at Binan's Beat Machines bar—broads, honeys, and chicks. A dozen names for them, all referring to the same thing: women who enjoyed being in the presence of an outlaw's pure, unrestrained masculinity.

"You're part of the Machines, aren't you?"

He gave a nod. "That's right, that's right. the simplest in Laguna."

"You arrived late for the party," Blonde observed.

"All the opposite guys are taken," Long explained. She pointed to the Black Pirates, who were shouting and laughing at the opposite end of the bar, tequila dripping down their shoes.

He'd heard "Machines" as in his Beat Machines when he heard her say it. But now he knew what these girls were: Black Pirates' employee.

That was a controversy.

Some of their more sober colleagues had already begun to cast glances his way, speaking in hushed whispers.

The Black Pirates would be the baddest gang—let alone motorcycle gang—this side of the Muntinlupa if it weren't for the Beat Machines. Moro, their leader, had a reputation for brutally punishing people who refused to pay rent in his territory. The last one Grim had heard of had been strung au fait a length of wire above his house.

The reason the Beat Machines were more evil than the Black Pirates wasn't because they hung more people. it had been just that individuals knew enough about the Machines to not get themselves hung by causing some shit. Their reputation was impeccable.

Another swig of whiskey slipped down his throat. He'd almost finished 1 / 4 of the bottle and felt like he was just getting started. it absolutely was the girls' problem if they wanted to speak to him rather than those bozo wimps, wasn't it?

He hadn't summoned the honeys. He hadn't compelled them to try to to anything. They wanted to wrap their hands round the monster hiding in his pants, and he wanted to administer them that chance.

Why the fuck not both of them? He'd done it twice before and knew he could bonk again. Women like this might never satisfy him for long—no woman ever has—but they might a minimum of temporarily dull the burning in his heart.

"Why don't you have got a drink, girls?" " He winked at a black pirate who gave him the looking at. "Didn't you come here to possess a decent time?" ”

Shots of whiskey lined informed the bar before disappearing down Grim and also the girls' throats. He could see Gabe explaining something to the prospect intimately, Mitch not listening and becoming agitated. it absolutely was unclear whether Mitch was agitated because there have been no girls nearby or because a fight was brewing.

Grim slid Long onto his lap, her crotch resting on his heavy thigh. He could feel her heat and wetness. Her skirt was short and pleated, and her panties were barely visible. Dark brown fingers slid up his thigh, resting against the heavy bulge that had formed since they began reproof him. She'd done things like this before, no doubt, but never with a person like Grim, which made all the difference.

Blonde pressed her heavy breasts against his back, whispering something in his ear in soft Spanish that Grim couldn't quite understand. He had a deafening ear for language and needed to listen to it at full volume to totally realize it.

Still, the way her hand slipped around to his crotch and squeezed on the fast-hardening shaft filling up his pants made him think it had been something sweet. Her fingers brushed up against Long's, and that they both giggled and stroked one another as his bulge grew even larger, almost bursting through his pants.

Long wore one hand around his neck. She had lovely eyes—servile eyes, which Grim admired in a very woman.

In the outlaw world, a chick like this's role was to serve and be seen, never heard. a lady who spoke up an excessive amount of was a thorn within the side of the brotherhood, and therefore the brotherhood came first. He slid his hand up under her skirt with no resistance.

Almost straight away his fingers found that very same wetness and warmth he'd felt plying against his thigh. Soon at that time, the information of fingers brushed against the pulsing, gentle mound of her clit. She gasped, her thighs tightening around his leg. She leaned in and started whispering something heated and Spanish in his ear—he supposed more admiration. Her kisses were wet and messy against his neck.

Blonde tugged at his crotch harder, whispering faster therein lilting rapid tongue. He wondered what it'd want to own her slide all that language against his cock, every word choked on his meat. He turned and called Manny over—Grim had taken his drinks, now he would take his women.

“A room,” he called. “With an enormous bed.”

The girls giggled, clearly fine with the request. Manny’s eyes were big—he didn't approach.

Steps, heavy and stuffed with violence. Grim had half-expected this.

“You touching the incorrect girls, man.”