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PROLOGUE

TWO YEARS AGO

I ’m a walking, talking corpse of a man capable of only one thing:

Taking lives.

Once, I was alive. Had a strong identity, fulfilling relationships, and an exciting career as a biker—reasons to smile.

My life was filled with everything good in this world.

There was my brotherhood, the Colorado chapter of the Iron Outlaws. True one percenters. A modern-day motorcycle club with the most traditional of values that eschewed the law: a life created outside the lines of society.

There, I thrived as sergeant at arms, enjoying the responsibilities and privileges of my title.

Then there was my wife, Hallie. The mother of my child, and owner of my every heartbeat. Strawberry-blonde hair that would lean copper, and a playful spirit that yanked me from the darker side of my life.

And finally, my little sunbeam. My daughter, Lottie. I called her Lots for short. Not quite a year old, but she had me wrapped around her little finger. On the day she was born, I said to Butch, my president, that I’d kill for her.

Didn’t think that three hundred and seventeen days later, I’d be here to keep my vow in the dank barn that sits on the club’s ranch. My knife flashes in the half-light. One side is engraved with Hallie’s name, the other with Lottie’s.

“Fuck you, motherfucker,” shouts the man hanging by his feet from the barn joist.

Shouts might be too strong a word. He’s been screaming for the past hour, so his voice is hoarse. In between his cries, there’s the steady monotonous drip of his blood hitting the tarpaulin.

No member of his motorcycle club is coming to save him. They don’t know we have him. And even if they did, they wouldn’t cross the Oakum Ridge Ranch property line.

The Midtown Rebels Motorcycle Club is a club with no ethics, no understanding of what it truly means to be one percenters. The club started in Boston, and like a virus, it keeps trying to spread across the United States. Filled with Plastic Paddies who loudly claim their Irishness while simultaneously dissociating from what it means to be Irish.

They’re cheap, watered-down replicas who copied our club. Tried to do what we do instead of finding something original.

Then they came to claim Colorado as their own.

Their first mistake.

Then they came for me.

Their second mistake.

Then they took my girls’ lives while looking for me.

My soul seeped from my body as I held Hallie and Lottie in my arms. Smoke, one of my Outlaw brothers, had to hold me down when the police tried to arrange the removal of their cold bodies.

I got my road name, Wraith, because of my pale skin and long white-blond hair, but it’s now who I am: a ghost with unfinished business, eager to pass on so I can join my girls.

“You don’t need to do it this way, Wraith,” Smoke says, his rough voice interrupting my thoughts.

Our Stetsoned road captain is worried about my soul or some shit. He’s stayed by my side since it happened, trying to keep me on the path of the righteous man—or as righteous as an Iron Outlaw can be.

I kick the corner of the tarp beneath the hanging man. “Yes. I do.”

I peer at the man’s cut. His road name is Reaper.

Ironic, seeing as I’m the one with the knife in my hands, and he’s the one bleeding out slowly.

Smoke slaps my shoulder. “You’re losing yourself instead of dealing with losing them ,” he says. The words should affect me, but the branches of nerves and feelings in my body shut down the day I shoveled dirt over my girls’ coffin.

The two quarters I keep in my cut’s pocket clink together. If the legends are true and you really do need coins to cross the Rivers Acheron and Styx, I’m not going to be caught short.

Using my knife, I slice through the rope holding Reaper up. He hits the ground, landing face first with a thud and groan. His hands, currently tied behind his back, do nothing to break his fall. He wasn’t elevated enough to snap his neck, but in approximately three minutes, he’s going to wish he had.

“Tell me who killed my girls,” I say.

“Go. Fuck. Yourself,” Reaper says.

“You got a few minutes left on earth. You wanna spend them using every variant of the word ‘fuck,’ you fill your boots. Not gonna make a bit of difference to what I’m about to do.”

His feet are tied, as are his knees, and there’s a rope around his biceps. Looks like a pathetic human caterpillar twitching around on the ground.

I crouch next to him, tilting my knife from left to right so he can appreciate the violent teeth on it. “I use this for gutting things,” I say.

I lift the damp T-shirt from his skin, hitching it up just enough so I can make a sharp incision through his abdomen.

Reaper screams in agony.

If he hopes it will give me cause to show sympathy, he couldn’t be more wrong. Every night for the past eight weeks, since I put my family in the ground, I’ve heard their screams.

The imagined screams where they call me, begging me to save them.

The pleas and deals I know Hallie would have made to try and save Lottie.

Take me and not her.

You can have anything you want.

She’s innocent.

I hear my baby girl’s screams, even now. Even though I wasn’t there when it happened. Different to the cries when she was hungry, or cranky and tired.

I never much thought about the afterlife before, but I find myself praying that it somehow wipes those last few minutes of life for Lottie. I hope all she’s left with are memories of a happy and loved life while she waits for me.

I walk to the work bench, where I have a claw hook waiting. When I return, I crouch next to him. “One last chance. Tell me who killed my family.”

“You’re gonna fucking kill me anyway,” he snaps. But this time I hear it. I’m breaking him.

I nod and tap the hook on my palm. “I am. But you could, perhaps, meet your maker with a clearer conscience if you tell me what I need to know.”

He spits in my direction, but blood loss and exhaustion mean his mouth is dry and his aim shot to shit.

“Pathetic,” I say as I dip the claw through the gash in his skin and hook his lower intestine.

There’s a reason medieval torture included disembowelment. The scene is gruesomely horrific. And if you pull out only the intestines, leaving all the other organs in place, the person can stay alive for hours like something out of a horror movie.

So, I pull slowly. Because I want this man utterly ruined.

Every few centimeters, there’s a slurping sound as intestine is pulled out through the incision.

“Fuck me,” Smoke says. “That’s some next-level shit.”

It is.

But even as I do it, I feel like I’ve failed Hallie and Lottie all over again.

Because I couldn’t get this man to tell me who killed them.

And I’m going to have to do this again and again until my enemy’s blood permanently stains my hands red.

I’m going to disappear into myself, into the hell of knowing it’s my fault my family is gone forever.

And no number of deaths is going to make up for the fact I should have been there to protect them.

But I’ll keep killing until the day I die, because vengeance is all I have left.