Page 1

Chapter One

Tynan

I loved the smell of fresh paint as I stretched it over the canvas of the bike, the thin brush creating flecks so fine they were almost as invisible as a daffodil seed on the breeze. I wasn’t painting seeds but sparks. The dangerous, far-flung embers from the flame I’d painted on the back haunches of the classic Harley yesterday.

I wiped the brush and then picked up a fresh dab of paint to add more, listening as the soft caress of the brush on metal was the only thing that broke through the silence of the Sherwood Garage.

Wipe and dab.

Anymore, it was either the waning or the waking hours of the day when I preferred to get project work done. In the middle of the day, the massive garage was loud with the whir of power tools, the rumble of testing engines, and the cyclone of conversation between the rest of the guys.

Harmon Keyes, his brother, Darius, and Rhys Garrick.

All members of our former Special Forces unit, the Fifth Special Forces Group, Third Battalion. My brothers by fire.

Adjusting to normal life after war was war in and of itself. An everyday battle to keep my head above the memories of what we’d survived…and the memory of those who hadn’t. In many ways, we’d been lucky to be able to adjust together. Coming home from that last disastrous mission, we’d started the Sherwood Motorcycle Garage and buried ourselves in custom bike work. But it wasn’t enough.

I drew back my hand to wipe the brush once more, my gaze snagging on the two lines of numbers inked into the surface of my upper arm. Dog tag numbers. One for Ryan, the brother we’d lost. And the other for the mentor I couldn’t save. Jon.Each black probe of ink had felt like a microdot of memories forever buried into my flesh. Forever a reminder of what was lost.

Forever a reminder of what was owed.

Justice.

When you’ve seen how much evil there is in the world, it was impossible to unsee. To live like it didn’t exist. To pretend like we were okay doing nothing about it.

Especially when it hit close to home.

So, we started the Vigilantes Motorcycle Club. The four of us plus Harm and Dare’s adopted sister, Robyn—Rob, as she preferred to be called. What happened to her was the catalyst. The murder of her parents by a collection of criminals who concealed themselves in the world of corporate camouflage. We had the skills to pick up where the law had to leave off. To render justice outside the bounds of the system. And that became our new mission for the greater part of a decade now: to right the wrongs the law left unpunished.

The club and the garage were the collective focus of our brotherhood. Had been. Now, some priorities had changed. Harm had fallen in love with the daughter of one of our enemies. Then Rhys succumbed to his feelings for a woman who’d been wanted for murder. And most recently, Dare had realized his heart still beat for his high school sweetheart, whom he’d rescued from a hitman.

Wipe and dab. This time, the flecks I painted were sharp and fast. A reflection of the turmoil starting inside me.

I’d never seen a weapon fell a man as quickly, efficiently, and completely as love.

Of course, I was happy for them. My brothers had found their way out of the purgatory I still lived in. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t why I kept my paint jobs to the hours I did. Their cyclone of conversation used to be about missions and projects and criminals and plans…but now it revolved around women and marriage and babies and… life.

I was too old for life—the oldest of all of us—and too damaged for love. Not that I’d ever leave the garage to find it or for it to have the chance to find me. No, the solitude I had here at Sherwood, buried in a small forest on the west coast of California, was enough. The company of my brothers when they were around was enough.

There comes a point when you’ve seen enough death that waking up every morning is enough.

I doused the brush in solvent and wiped it for the last time, collecting all my tools and calling it for the afternoon. There was a fresh piece of salmon I wanted to throw on the grill. Top it with some avocado and jalapeno, and a dab of chipotle mayo…my stomach rumbled at the thought.

I was the cook in the group. Something I’d picked up early on from my mentor, though when Jon made me cook it was for discipline. Now, that discipline had become a hobby, but anymore, I was usually only cooking for myself.

A groan threaded through my lips as I stood, my knees creaking from kneeling for so long. Thirty-nine wasn’t old by any standards, but after four tours in the Middle East, parts of my body started to ache in ways that belonged to sixty-nine-year-olds, no matter how regimented my workout routine was.

My knees were the worst; they’d go stiff at the drop of a hat. After that, it was my left shoulder where I’d taken a bullet through my left trap and shattered my collarbone. And when that got sore, it pinched the nerves in my wrist and made my fingers lock up. Thank God I was right-handed, so it didn’t keep me out of commission for long. We all came back with a chessboard of injuries and scars, but as long as the psychological piece of surviving didn’t put us in checkmate, there wasn’t much else to do except continue to play the game.

I cleaned up my paints from the number three workspace around the deep-blue Harley. The black lines on the floor organized the ten-thousand-square-foot garage into an invisible tackle box of projects. A space for each bike. A number for each project. Sherwood wasn’t like most automotive garages where the floors were stained with oil and grime like blood spilled for power and speed. Here we kept everything clean. Pristine. I insisted we keep everything clean. I insisted on discipline.

With the paint put away and the floor wiped down, I left the bike to dry. Tomorrow, I’d put on the finishing touches, and it would be ready for pickup on Monday.

The door at the back of the garage opened to the hallway for the back rooms. Kitchen. Laundry. Rec room. And our security room—the office where I spent most of my day sorting and searching through information for Vigilante business.

I gave a glance down to the far end of the hall and listened. Dare was still here somewhere, grabbing the last of his things. While protecting his woman, Athena, a few months back, he’d found a way out of the guilt that weighed on him, and they’d fallen in love; I wasn’t surprised at all when he’d then decided to move in with her. In a couple of days, I’d be the last of us living here on the garage compound. My very own tomb where I planned to be buried.

I let myself into the office and quietly shut the door behind me.

Our servers were always running—always scanning for new information on powerful men who masked their villainy in a veneer of professionalism. A wealthy businessman who used his connections to smuggle guns and drugs into the country. A powerful politician who facilitated the sex trade. A crooked banker who helped criminals launder and funnel the gains from their illegal dealings. Everyone thought evil hid in the shadows, but the worst of itjust masqueraded in the light.

I clicked to open my daily report. I had a slew of data nets combing the media and the web for any new information on the masqueraded criminals I’d programmed it to find. Most were set to track and collate because we didn’t have enough information yet to target them, but there were some set to do this—to trigger a high alert notification when I logged in. The high alerts were villains that were at the top of the Vigilante chopping block, so to speak.

I clicked and instantly opened the livestream of the local San Francisco news that had triggered the alert, keeping the sound off and scanning the closed captions.

GrowTech. That was what triggered the alert.

Out of all our targets, GrowTech was the biggest. The strongest. The most well protected. It was the biochemical Goliath to our vigilante David.

GrowTech was the largest biochemical conglomerate in the States involved in pesticide production and genetically modified food creation. It was also the company responsible for Rob’s parents’ deaths. Not the whole company, but a handful of its top executives, including the CEO, Bernard Belmont.

“After the devastating loss to his corporate team a few short months ago, Bernard Belmont, the CEO of GrowTech, has announced the new COO for the company.”

I ran my hand along my jaw. A few short months ago, in the process of saving Athena’s life, we’d become responsible for the deaths of Lloyd Wenner, the previous COO of GrowTech, and Ray Ivans, the former Chief Medical Adviser for their pesticide branch. Two decades ago, Ivans falsified the medical records for Rob’s parents, assuring them that their symptoms weren’t being caused by the new chemical GrowTech was testing, even though it was what killed them.

Out of the ring of criminal conspirators involved in the death of Rob’s parents and the ensuing cover-up, only Belmont was left. His criminal house of cards was starting to topple, and he knew it. And when dangerous men got desperate…

My jaw muscle popped under my fingertips when Belmont appeared, the clip from the company’s press conference.

“While I mourn the loss of my longtime friend and colleague, Lloyd Wenner, he’d want his vision—our vision for GrowTech—to continue to forge forward through this difficult time, and I’m happy to announce the man who will help me captain the next chapter of GrowTech’s future. It is with great excitement, pride, and determination that I welcome Mr. Brock Carson to GrowTech as its new Chief Operating Officer.”

“Fuck.”

There was a knock on my door, and I stilled, wiping any emotion from my expression just as Dare opened the door and tipped his head inside.

“You need anything?”

“Nope.” I kept my eyes focused on the news playing out on my screen. I knew Dare wanted to get out of here—get home to Athena, and I wasn’t going to stand in his way. Not with this news.

Learning that Brock Carson, a businessman long-suspected by the upper echelons of the intelligence world to have deep connections to the sex trafficking trade, was Belmont’s new COO was the kind of thing that promised a shit weekend. It was the kind of knowledge I’d bear the burden of alone until Monday.

“All right. Have a good weekend.”

I released my breath when the door closed behind him, but by then, the press clip ended, and the reporter had moved on.

“Fucking Carson.” I opened a new browser window, entering his name into a search that would scour the depths of references to him in news media, social media, and law enforcement databases and organize the information.

But that was all that could be done for now. Reconnaissance. I shut off the screen, letting the program work in the background. The initial pass would take at least two days. After that, new updates would ping immediately. I grabbed my phone and keys off the desk and stood. That salmon was calling?—

I stopped short, my attention snagging on the wall where monitors displayed the various angles from the shop’s security cameras. There was a car parked out front—one that didn’t belong to any of us.

I strode to the screen and swiped for another angle. There was a mousy-looking man in a suit standing at the door to the garage talking to Dare. He looked like a man who had power but no authority. A police officer or detective. The kind that wasn’t very good at their job and relied on a title rather than character to command deference.

Shit.

Another tap in the corner unmuted the feed so I could hear their conversation.

“Who are you?” Dare asked.

The mouse man puffed his chest and reached in his jacket for a card. When he did, his head turned over his shoulder and back to his car.

Immediately, I flipped back to the angle of his vehicle and zoomed in. There was someone in the back seat. I pinched and zoomed, and then squinted because fuck me, but I swore the person in the back seat looked just like…

No.

I tore through the garage like there was a live grenade rolling behind my heels. Why was she here? She shouldn’t be here.

“Is Mr. Bates here or not? I need to speak with him.”

I hardly heard Dare’s response before I blasted through the door and pushed my friend to the side.

“I’m here.” My voice was stern as I towered over the man who was much smaller in person, or maybe it was just the way he cowered at my tone that made him seem to shrink. “What do you want?”

“I’m here about Ms. Brant.”

Every muscle in my body hardened. My eyes hadn’t been fucking with me. Sutton Brant. My old mentor’s daughter.

“I can handle this, Dare.” It wasn’t an assurance, it was a dismissal. I didn’t want Dare around for this. For her. Not until I knew what the fuck was going on.

“Are you?—”

“Go.” My fist balled at my side to keep from reaching out and dragging him over to his bike so he could leave.

The man knew how to take an order, but he sure did take his damn time walking over to the motorcycle and getting on. And there was no preventing him from looking inside the car.

“What about her?” I clipped with a low voice.

The first time I’d met Sutton Brant, she was six and begging for a piggyback ride.

Jon and I had just come back from twelve months overseas, right in time for Thanksgiving, which I was content to spend at the local diner, but Jon wouldn’t hear of it. He took me home with him to meet his daughter and off-and-on-again girlfriend, Angela.

Angela was a little bit of a disaster. She came from a conservative Filipino who’d wanted her to become a doctor. Instead, she’d dropped out of art school when she became pregnant with Sutton at nineteen. The relationship between her and Jon was tenuous…tumultuous…but while they sorted out their shit inside, I’d been entertained by the six-year-old with bright pink streaks in her smooth, black hair, who sauntered around in her sparkly blue princess dress demanding my name, how I knew her dad, what I did. At twenty-four, I didn’t know if soldier was a good explanation for a six-year-old, so I told her I was a white knight. At that, she’d promptly requested a piggyback ride to chase the fire fairies—which turned out to be fireflies—around the fenced-in perimeter of the small yard.

After that, I only caught snapshots of her life through Jon’s photos. When we crossed paths, I saw the photo of her Mulan Halloween costume when she was eight or nine, her toothy smile making the entire photo. A couple years later, when I was with Harm’s unit, I’d caught up with Jon again in Iraq, and he’d clapped me on the back, his smile bursting with pride when he showed me Sutton receiving her black belt in tae kwon do; she was maybe fourteen. It was that photo when I really saw how the two of them had the same smile. She had her mother’s full lips but her father’s smile. Jon was so fucking pumped that she was this kick-ass kid, boasting that it wasn’t the only martial art she excelled at and how he’d given her strict instructions to break any fingers of boys who touched her.

The last time I saw him—that last mission—all he talked about was getting home to surprise Sutton with a car for her sixteenth birthday. He said she’d asked first for a motorcycle, which he immediately shut down. After that, it was a Jeep Wrangler she had her heart set on. One with a soft top.

He hadn’t made it back to give her that car.

The second and last time I saw Sutton in person was at her father’s funeral. Then, she’d still been thin as a rail, her dark hair cut into a bob. She looked physically younger than fifteen, but her face…her demeanor…was of someone much older. The firm set of her mouth seemed etched in stone, no trace of the wide smile I’d always seen in the photos. Her almond eyes were heavy with the loss of one parent and left with the craze of another. Angela had spent the majority of the funeral sobbing and cursing Jon’s casket for leaving her, and I had the sense Sutton was used to this kind of behavior. But what did I know? More importantly, what the hell was I supposed to do about it?

They were fine. Set. The military would take care of them for all of Jon’s service.

“She violated her parole, so I’m remanding her to your custody.”

Parole? The word was like a grenade levied at my feet. Custody?

“What? No.” My voice cracked like lightning across the pavement.

“Either that or I report it and she goes to jail—real jail this time, Bates, not juvie.”

Juvie? Jesus fucking ? —

“Dammit. What the hell did she do? I’ll fix it.” And where the hell was her mother?

“You need to fix her,” the small man snarled and violently motioned at the car.

Everything stilled—silenced—as the door opened.

It was the eyes I’d recognized from the video feed. Not the bright color or shape, but the heaviness was still there. Like this girl still had the weight of the world on her shoulders at… twenty-one?

Fuck.

She was no girl.

And the rest of her was nothing like I remembered. In six years since the funeral, Sutton had filled out into a full-grown woman. Her midnight hair was long now, down to the hourglass shape of her waist. She was dressed in all black—straight black jeans and a loose black tee that hung off one shoulder, but even those couldn’t hide the curve of her hips or the fullness of her chest.

Something stirred inside me—something I thought was long dead and buried.

There was no kid left to the woman in front of me, and that was even before I noted the tattoos— the ones I could see . A giant flower capping each of her shoulders. A branch of thorns wrapping along her left forearm, and some kind of bee or wasp on the inside of her right wrist. And the piercings. Studs all along her ears. One through her eyebrow. And a hoop through her septum.

What the hell had happened in the last six years?

My friend’s daughter had turned into some kind of mythical badass. The goddess of trouble. Her hips swayed in a way that was nothing but pure hypnosis as she approached, a slow smile curling the ends of her full lips. Dammit. I should’ve been more concerned about the next six minutes than the last six years.

“Uncle Tynan.” Her voice was honey laced with sarcasm. “So good to see you again.”

I swore my jaw cracked.

“Six weeks. Six weeks until her parole ends. Six weeks until I suggest you start letting her clean up her own messes,” the officer said low, and I realized I didn’t even get his name…and neither did I care.

I spun and stepped close, lowering my head directly over his, his wide eyes bulging and red splotching his cheeks.

“Get. Out.” I couldn’t remember the last time I was this…furious. The last time my emotions had threatened to take over me.

I blinked and the miserable mouse had scurried back to his car, next to which still sat Dare on his bike. Dammit, why the fuck was he still here? I glared as my friend finally revved his bike and took off down the drive.

I was going to have to explain myself—explain this—later .

“Sutton.” I turned back to the problem in front of me.

“You don’t look very happy to see me,” she pouted, her lush, fucking lower lip jutting out so full I saw the damn tattoo stained to the inside. A dagger.

Was it a warning that her tongue was sharp? Or that her mouth was a weapon? Whatever it was, my dick interpreted it in a very singular and far too fucking explicit way.

“You shouldn’t be here.” I banded my arms over my chest, my mind rioting with my emotions to think logically. It had been so long since I’d felt…anything as strong as this. I wasn’t prepared. A muscle unused in the aftermath of war. “What have you done, Sutton?”

She was on parole. For what? And what had she done to violate it?

“You heard the man, Uncle Ty.” Her voice mocked me with its huskiness as she stepped closer to me, the scent of jasmine invading my nostrils. She wasn’t even as tall as the piece of shit officer whose card was crushed in my fist, and yet she faced me with more gumption than he had in one of his fat fucking pinkies. Her head tipped up, the corner of her pink lips quirking. “I’m your problem now.”

I managed to force in a single deep breath before I followed her inside the garage.

“Wow, this place is impressive,” she said when the door clicked shut, her tone as appreciative as her actions were careless.

My jaw locked as she strode up to the closest bike—the newest restoration project we’d taken on—and dragged her hand along the body like it belonged to her.

“Don’t…touch,” I warned through tight jaw.

Her head tipped over her shoulder, and she laughed. Fucking laughed. Her long hair shimmered down her back, the waves moving like dark water over pale skin. She had another tattoo, I realized just as she pulled her shirt back up her shoulder and covered whatever it was.

“Or what?”

What the fuck had happened to this woman?

Air hissed through my lips, watching her slide her fingertips onto the seat, the black tips of her nails gently marking the leather. And then her eyes danced.

“Sutton—” I warned too late.

She turned and swung her leg over the seat like a hundred-thousand-dollar motorcycle that didn’t belong to her was nothing more than a public playground.

Goddammit. She snapped my control like a toothpick.

I stalked over to her and growled, “Or this.” I bent, snaked one arm around her soft middle, and hauled her off the bike and over my shoulder, silently relishing her gasp and then curse of surprise.

“What the fuck—put me down,” she demanded, burying her fist into my low back right where my kidneys were with enough force to make me grunt.

Damn.

Still, I didn’t stop until I’d reached the far side of the garage, grabbed one of the rolling stools from off the wall, and dumped her insolent ass onto it.

As soon as I did and started to straighten, the thick rubber sole of her black boot detonated in my abdomen. I stumbled back, wheezing as stars popped in my vision. Holy fuck. I’d endured gunshots with less force than her damn kick. It was swift. Targeted. Powerful. Jon would be happy to know that her black belt in tae kwon do was well-deserved.

I caught my balance quick and lifted my arms, instinct kicking in and preparing me for an attack. And I wasn’t the only one.

Sutton sat on the chair, her back against the wall, and a slender knife pointed with lethal steadiness at me.

“You had no right to touch me.” Herwhite teeth bared with a feral kind of anger.

Damn there was a fucking fire raging inside her.

I lifted my hands to signal a truce and then lowered my arms. “You had no right to touch that bike,” I countered, my voice still hoarse from her wrecking-ball kick. “I don’t know what the hell happened to you in the last six years, but in here, you get what you give. You disrespect my property, I’ll disrespect yours.”

It took her a beat to swallow down my words, but then an incredible thing happened. I watched her box up all the pieces of her exploded anger and bury it behind an expression of nonchalance in a way that had taken me decades to master.

“So, you went from white knight to…motorcycle mechanic?” She arched her eyebrow. The one that was pierced.

“And you went from fairy princess to…criminal heathen.” I held her gaze.

She stilled, and then a wide smile broke over her face. For that first second, the smile was real, and then it became something restrained.

“Reformed criminal heathen,” she corrected, relaxing back against the wall and folding her arms. My eyes instantly dropped to her chest. The swell of her tits was more than enough to make my dick thicken, but this close, even the pitch black of her shirt couldn’t hide the hard bars studded through her nipples.

Her tits were fucking pierced, too.

Raging, destructive lust pumped through me. For a second, I was nothing more than a Neanderthal with the primal urge to rip her clothes off and mark her with my teeth.

I exhaled tightly. Slowly. Leashing the unbridled lust back into a cage.

She shouldn’t be here. Not with that dangerous mouth and her pierced fucking tits.

But I had zero room to complain. My cock had six fucking bars pierced through the shaft. They were meant for pleasure, but fuck me, because right now all they caused was pain. With her hidden lip tattoos and braless pierced nipples, she was like some kind of Gothic Medusa sent to turn my cock to stone.

I yanked another chair out from under the wall desk and held it in front of me—something to take the brunt of my frustration and block the evidence of my arousal.

Fucking hell. This was what solitude got me. A hard-on for my mentor’s fucking daughter.

“Why are you here, Sutton?”

She looked up at me from underneath her lashes. “You heard the man. I violated my parole, and now I need a babysitter to make sure I’m on my best behavior for the next six weeks.”

“Where’s your mother?” And why wasn’t she the first person you were taken to?

Sutton’s scoff called me an idiot. A chill moving like an ice cube along my spine just before she replied, “Dead.”

I stiffened. The news was far too devastating for the kind of nonchalance she had about it. Angela was dead? Christ. How had I not known? Not heard—because I cut myself off from everyone and everything except this garage.

“I didn’t…I’m sorry.”

Sutton shrugged, and it was the first time she gave me a glimpse of her real pain. “It was a while ago. No big deal.”

Damn, her walls were wrapped in electrified barbed wire. It would be highly impressive if they weren’t being used against me.

“What were you in juvie for?”

Her nonchalance disappeared, and there was no other word for her expression than deadly. “None of your business.”

I gritted my teeth. I wanted to clap back that I could very well make it my business and find out, but juvie records were sealed, which meant I’d have to get someone to hack it. No, it didn’t matter.

“Fine. Then how did you violate your parole?”

She huffed and pulled her hair over one shoulder, the length like a swathe of the finest black silk. My fingers twitched, wanting to run through it. To fist it. To— fuck. I grunted. Thankfully, she thought it was a sound of warning to answer.

“It was bullshit. I went to my friend’s apartment to get my phone, and she wasn’t home, so I picked the lock.” She rolled her bottom lip through her teeth, and my dick surged. “It wasn’t like I hadn’t been there before, but the stupid security guard downstairs is a scumbag.”

My head tipped. I wasn’t getting the full story here, that much was pretty fucking obvious. What was equally as obvious was that she might never trust me with the full story, and even though it shouldn’t make a difference to me, it did. It really fucking did.

“So, do you live around here, or is there a couch somewhere in this place that I can sleep on for the next couple weeks?”

A wave of tension rolled through me. Shit. All the answers in the world didn’t change reality; I’d just been entrusted to babysit her for the next six weeks…and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

No, there were plenty of things I could do about it. Plenty of things I should probably do about it. But this was Jon’s daughter. He hadn’t cared about much outside his military career—one of the many things that went wrong between Angela and him—but damn, if Sutton wasn’t the thing he cared about most.

The least I could do for the man who’d done everything for me was spend six weeks guarding his daughter. To make sure she was set on the right path when it was all said and done, just like Jon had done a lifetime ago for me.

“No. Not here,” I snapped too quickly and reached for my phone. “I have to make one call, and then I’ll take you to where you can stay.” I started to walk away, scrolling for Dante’s number in my phone.

Dante Lozano worked for Covington Security about twenty minutes south of the garage in Carmel Cove. We’d worked adjacent to the private security firm from time to time, all in the pursuit of justice, and were friends with the nine-man team. Dante and his wife, Lenni, had a townhouse there that they used to live in before it couldn’t fit their brood of kids. When they moved, they either rented it to vacationers or let friends or family use it as needed. And right now, I fucking needed it.

When the line started to ring, I turned back to Sutton, catching her eyeing a different bike now. Mine.

“Sutton,” I clipped, capturing her attention before I warned, “Stay right here—and don’t touch…or sit on anything that doesn’t belong to you.”

The way her mouth curled into a sultry smile was the kind of thing that would haunt me for the rest of my miserable life.