Page 35 of Heresy (The Lost Gospels #1)

When she emerges, she's dressed in the clean jeans and the black t-shirt. My leather jacket hangs loose on her small frame, swallowing her. It’s a brand of ownership, a public declaration to anyone who might see us.

She looks less like a prisoner and more like an old lady, and the thought is a dangerous, unwelcome one.

I lead her through the garage to my bike, the one I rode here. It's not my usual beast; it's a leaner, faster machine. I grab two helmets from a locked cabinet—my own, and a smaller, plain black one. I hand hers to her without a word. She takes it, her expression unreadable.

The ride is a different world from our previous ones.

I drive with a smooth, controlled power, leaving the anonymous suburb behind and heading out of the city as the sun begins to set, painting the sky in shades of bruised purple and orange.

The air is clean and cool, and the thrum of the engine is a steady, hypnotic rhythm.

This ride is a calculated risk, a move on the chessboard.

It’s a reward, a taste of freedom designed to make her more pliable, to remind her of the world she’s lost and the only man who can give it back to her.

But it’s also an escape for me. A way to flee the wreckage of my kingdom, the ghosts in my clubhouse, the accusing stare of my wounded brother.

It's a way to focus solely on the intoxicating, infuriating puzzle of the woman whose arms are now wrapped around my waist.

For a brief, dangerous moment, there is no war. There is no club. There are no ghosts. There is only the road, the dying sun, and the strange, fragile truce between me and the splinter in my soul.

I push the bike harder, leaving the city behind, climbing a winding road that snakes up into the hills.

I finally pull over at a deserted scenic overlook, a concrete ledge carved out of the mountainside.

I kill the engine, and the sudden, absolute silence is a stark contrast to the roar of the ride.

The only sounds are the wind whistling through the tall grass and the soft, metallic tick-tick-tick of the cooling engine.

We are completely alone. Below us, the city is a vast, glittering carpet of light, a silent, beautiful jewel.

She slides off the bike, her movements stiff. She doesn't look at me. She walks to the low stone wall at the edge of the overlook, a dark, solitary figure against the endless lights. The fragile truce holds, a bubble of quiet in the midst of a war.

A harsh, insistent vibration starts in the pocket of my cut. My burner phone. A message from Glitch.

I pull it out, the screen casting a faint, blueish glow in the darkness.

I open the encrypted file. The report is concise and brutal.

Glitch found it. A single, heavily redacted NYPD police report from eight months ago.

An incident at a penthouse owned by Katarina Volkov's father.

The call log shows a 911 report of a woman's screams. But the case was marked "unfounded" and buried within an hour. Squashed.

But Glitch, in his genius, managed to pull a single, un-redacted file associated with the report: the personnel photo of the lead detective who personally signed off on it and made it all disappear.

The name on the file means nothing to me—some generic Irish name. But the photograph...

My blood turns to ice. My world, which had already been shattered, fragments into a million impossible pieces. It's a face I haven't seen in years, a face I thought I'd left for dead in a rain-slicked alley. Older, a new scar over one eye, but unmistakable.

It's the face of the man who forced my hand and made me kill my own brother.

It's Cain, staring back at me from the screen in the uniform of an NYPD detective.

The world narrows to the size of a phone screen. A single, grainy photograph. A face.

My blood, which had been slowly warming in the fragile truce between us, turns to a solid block of ice in my veins.

It's a face I haven't seen in years, a face I thought I'd left for dead in a rain-slicked alley behind a forgotten bar.

Older, a new scar cleaving one eyebrow, the youthful arrogance replaced by a cold, hard certainty. But it is unmistakably him.

It's the face of the man who forced my hand and made me kill my own brother.

It's Cain, staring back at me from the screen in the uniform of an NYPD detective.

The silence of the overlook is no longer peaceful.

It is a suffocating, ringing void. The city lights below are not jewels; they are the cold, indifferent eyes of a world that has been lying to me for years.

Cain is not a ghost. He is not a rival MC president hiding in the shadows.

He is a cancer inside the very system that is supposed to hunt us.

He has been hiding in plain sight, a wolf wearing the shepherd’s fleece.

My breath catches in my throat. The report from Glitch swims in my vision. A wellness check. A 911 call for screams. A buried case. Eight months ago. The night she disappeared. The night Cain, the lead detective, personally signed off on the report and made the entire incident vanish.

My head snaps up, and I look at her.

She is standing by the low stone wall, a dark, solitary figure against the endless lights, her hair whipping in the wind. The woman who appeared at my pier. The woman who saw my secrets. The woman whose past is inextricably tangled with the ghost I thought I'd slain.

And my mind, my carefully controlled, strategic mind, explodes into a firestorm of pure, undiluted paranoia.

Is she a trap? Is she a pawn? Is this entire fucking thing—her appearance, her defiance, her capture, her intel —a long, intricate game orchestrated by the master manipulator from the very beginning?

The thought is a poison that floods my system, rewriting every memory, twisting every interaction we've ever had.

Her appearance at the pier, a 'lost photographer' stumbling upon our most private business? Not a coincidence. A calculated insertion.

Her defiance in the alley, the fire in her eyes? Not the raw courage of a survivor. The cold, practiced arrogance of a trained operative who knows her handler is watching.

Her escape attempt, the 'flaw' she found? A test of my security protocols, a way to gauge the discipline and weaknesses of my prospects.

And the intel on Grizz… My blood runs colder. The most perfect move of all. Cain sacrificing one of his pawns—Grizz—to make his queen, Vera, seem indispensable to me. He fed me a traitor to gain my absolute trust in his real weapon. Her.

The thought is a physical blow. The air is thin up here, and I can't seem to get enough of it.

The fragile, dangerous connection we forged tonight, the unwanted tenderness, the raw, desperate sex—was that real?

Or was it the final move in her infiltration?

A way to get past my armor, to find the man behind the monster, to locate the wound and sink the knife in deeper.

The king is dead. The monster is unchained. My own thoughts from a few hours ago mock me. Yes. He is unchained. And he is a fool.

She must see the shift in me, the way the truce has been annihilated. Her hand, which had been resting on the stone wall, drops to her side. Her posture becomes wary, defensive. She sees the king has vanished, and the beast is back.

I say nothing to her. There are no words for this level of betrayal, this depth of catastrophic failure. I stalk toward her, my boots crunching on the loose gravel. She takes an involuntary step back, her eyes wide with a confusion that quickly curdles into a familiar, primal fear.

I grab her arm, my grip a bruising, punishing thing. The splinter is no longer just under my skin; it is a shard of glass working its way toward my heart, and I need to rip it out.

"Get on," I snarl, the words a guttural command.

I haul her back to the bike, her feet stumbling to keep up.

I shove the helmet into her hands. Her fingers tremble as she fumbles with the strap.

I don't help her. I swing my leg over the bike, the machine a familiar, solid weapon beneath me.

The rage I felt after the siege was a clean, hot fire.

This is different. This is a cold, black, venomous thing.

She finally gets the helmet on and climbs onto the bike behind me, her movements stiff with terror. Her hands, when they come to rest on my waist, are trembling. She feels it. She knows the man who drove her up this mountain is not the same man who is taking her down.

I twist the throttle, and the bike doesn't glide; it leaps, a raw, aggressive surge of power that throws her hard against my back. The controlled cruise is over. This is a violent, angry flight back toward the city, toward the war that has just become infinitely more complicated.

The wind screams past my ears, but it cannot drown out the thoughts raging in my head. I can feel her body pressed against mine, a source of warmth and a source of poison. Every breath she takes is a potential lie. Every tremor of her hands on my waist is a potential act of betrayal.

I am no longer her complicated captor. I am her terrifying, unpredictable monster once more, and she has no idea why.

But I will find out the truth. I will put her back in her cage, and I will dissect her, piece by painful piece, until I know if she is a pawn, a queen, or just the ghost who was sent to orchestrate my final ruin.

And I will burn down the entire city to get my hands on the man who sent her.

The war is no longer with the Santos. It was never with the Santos.

The war is with Cain. And it has been raging, in the shadows, for years. Now, it is finally out in the open.

For hours, I pace the main room like a caged animal. I am a king of a fallen kingdom, a strategist outmaneuvered by a ghost. I read Glitch's report over and over on my burner, the blue light illuminating the words until they burn themselves onto the back of my eyelids.