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  Savage Redemption

  “My life was all about revenge until I met her.”

  I want them destroyed.

  The Anarchists killed my father, haunt me and my brother, and seek to destroy my club, the Savage Kings.

  For years, I have stopped at nothing to annihilate them.

  But for years, I also never forgot her.

  She was everything to me.

  She brought joy to my life.

  And I had to leave her without explanation.

  But a chance encounter has brought her back to me.

  And now, everything has changed.

  My life is now all about having her—and nothing can stop me.

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  Devil’s Sin

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  Contents

  1. Landon

  2. Caroline

  3. Landon

  4. Caroline

  5. Landon

  6. Caroline

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  1

  Landon

  I wanted to break my phone.

  In the bedroom behind me, Caroline O’Hara, the crush of my youth and the girl that I hoped would represent the start of a healthier, more stable life for me, lay in bed naked. My body was drained from the incredible, apartment-wide sex that we had just had. My body should have been in contact with hers, the dopamine flooding our systems and making it all but impossible for us to do anything but come close.

  That was what should have been. But the actually current situation entailed me standing naked in the hallway, shivering cold, fearful of what the hell had happened to my brother. He got attacked.

  It’s not over.

  It’s never going to be over.

  “I mean, he got knocked out, what else could I mean, ya dimwit?” Parker said.

  Parker’s words, though typical Parker, barely entered my brain. I was throwing up walls all around in me, trying to internalize what this would all mean without losing my mind in the process. It wasn’t a very successful process.

  “I don’t know,” I said, mostly so Parker wouldn’t start wondering why the hell I had gone silent. “I… where… where’s my brother right now?”

  “Hospital. He ain’t back here, that’s for sure. But we got an eye on him.”

  Shit. Just when I thought that I was going to leave this world behind… and instead now I’m back in it less than a day after thinking I had left it behind.

  “OK, just… just keep an eye on him. I’ll head over in a bit.”

  “Alrighty.”

  I hung up the phone and stared at it, in utter disbelief that I had gotten myself dragged back in. It was like a magnet whose grip I could not reach escape velocity from; I could jump away briefly and believe that I had escaped, but it was merely an illusion, nothing more.

  And that, in a really scary way, meant that as long as there were Kings in this world, I could never pretend not to be one. I was cursed by my last name and my love for my brother to always need to know what was going on. I supposed I could have just said fuck it to my brother and let him handle his own matters, but the guilt I would have felt from abandoning a family member would have vastly exceeded the frustration I had felt from having to stick in the club.

  “Fucking hell…” I muttered to myself.

  I turned back around and made the walk of shame back to Caroline’s room. She wasn’t going to be thrilled to hear this, and I was going to be equally less thrilled to have to explain why I was suddenly being beckoned back into the world. No one won in this spot, except maybe those in the club who wanted to believe leaving was never an option.

  “Did you lie to me?”

  Those five words were like someone taking a two by four and starting to swing it into my face. Unless I reacted perfectly, I knew I was about to get clobbered.

  “No?” I said, but this didn’t feel like the greatest of starts judging by her reaction to that. “Why would I lie?”

  “I thought you said you had left the Savage Saints. I heard you talking to someone named Parker about your brother. What the hell is going on with that?”

  I wasn’t even mad at Caroline for misunderstanding us. If anything, I wanted to take her side desperately. The only reason I wasn’t because it just wasn’t the truth, but I sure had far more empathy for her than I did for Parker for dragging me back in or even for Brock for putting himself in a position to drag me in.

  “I need to just explain it all at once, and hopefully it’ll make sense,” I said, even as I knew I was on thin ice. “Parker is the Sergeant-in-Arms of the club. That means whenever something gets messy, he’s on the front lines and he’s taking care of it. Something happened to my brother, Parker is always going to be the one to talk to me. Doesn’t matter if I left a day ago or a decade ago. But I promise you I left.”

  Again, just as I had at the beach, I explained what had happened at the clubhouse when I told Landon that I wanted to quit. This time, though, I made sure to dive into as deep detail as possible; if I thought of something so small as the type of beer that Parker reeked of when he approached me, I shared it. I did not want to give Caroline any impression of any kind that I was hiding information behind.

  “And that’s all to say that Brock can’t reach out to me himself because he’s knocked out. Someone from the club has to reach out.”

  “I just don’t like the idea that you leaving was supposed to mean that you had actually left, not that you’d be at their beck and call.”

  Stay calm. She has a right to be this upset. You need to make sure you respond appropriately and fairly.

  “The best way I can describe this is by analogy,” I said. “Imagine you got a call that your mother or father went to the hospital. That call came from your ex, who was at the scene of the incident. If you take that call, does that mean you still have feelings for your ex? Or that he’s still in your orbit? I would think not necessarily. It’s the same here.”

  Caroline seemed a little placated by the analogy, and I couldn’t even begin to describe the relief I felt from seeing her cool down a bit. We were still a far way from her looking as happy as she had on the date, but we were at least trending back in that general direction.

  “I’m still hurt by this, Landon,” she said. “I get it a little bit more, but still. None of my exes would have encouraged me to get into violence the way the Kings have.”

  “I know, but this isn’t a phone call that’s going to make me change my mind about the Kings.”

  I hope, at least. God help me if it does.

  “Listen, I really hate to do this after the night that we’ve had, but I really can’t be sitting here any longer. I need to see my brother. OK?”

  Nothing about Caroline suggested she wanted this to happen, but for someone as devoted to family as she was, I knew she would understand at some point. She didn’t nod, but she also didn’t fight back.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said, coming over to kiss her on the top of the head. She didn’t seem particularly smitten with that decision.

  I quickly got dressed and headed out of her apartment before it could get any more awkward. I just had to hope that this wasn’t the last time that I walked out.

  I walked through the hospital hallways, ones I’d become all too familiar with when my father was killed. A decade hadn’t changed the hospital, but it sure had changed me in many ways.

  But it still triggered the memory of my father’s death, and I could only hope that this attack had only just knocked my brother out. If it killed my brother…

  Some hypothetical scenarios just weren’t worth getting into.
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  I found Brock’s window because Parker and several other Kings were standing in front of it. They moved to the side as I looked in the window. Although unconscious and with some bruising on the face, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was.

  In fact, by all accounts, my brother looked reasonably healthy. But when I walked inside and looked at him, I saw scars that were not visible from the hallway. He was out cold, perhaps in a coma or just unconscious, but either way, he was alive but not responsive.

  I walked outside and saw Parker looking at me with folded arms. He also held in his right hand a cut.

  My cut.

  “Landon, I know what ya did tonight, and though I don’t agree with it, you’re a free man in this wonderful country of ours,” he said. “However, ya see how ya brother is. Ya see that the battle ain’t over yet. The officers could take up arms no problem, and we’d kick the asses of the Anarchists who did this. But the rest of the club?”

  I wanted to so badly to just ignore what Parker had to say. My brother would live. The club could figure out their own damn business.

  Too bad that what he said actually struck a chord with me.

  “How ya think they gonna react when they realize that the Anarchists are back and all the Kings are gone? How ya think they gonna feel when they see that you, when ya brother got hurt, left? No matter how much we tell them that ya heart ain’t in it or whatever else, they gonna believe ya ran. And I know ya don’t give a shit what some prospect thinks. We ain’t either, not most of the time. But when the whole club believes it? When the name King ain’t mean shit?”

  I shook my head. I hated how much sense he was making.

  “Is that what ya want ya brother to wake up to? To a club that has deserted him cuz his brother left—

  “Parker, I get it,” I said snappily.

  Parker shut up. But not before he held the cut out and looked pleadingly at me, for more than he usually did.

  “We need ya, bud,” he said. “The choice is yours. But please make it here.”

  I stared at the cut. I stared back at Parker. I’d sworn this trip wouldn’t have led me back to the club. I’d made that promise to Caroline.

  And yet, my brother needed me. He didn’t just need me to keep him alive; he needed me to keep his club—OK, maybe our club—alive. So which came first, the promise to Caroline or the loyalty to my brother?

  Why the hell did it have to be so damn difficult?

  “Parker, I hate your guts,” I said, and there wasn’t any humor to them.

  Parker just stood stoically, waiting for me to make a decision. I sighed.

  “Goddamnit.”

  I made my choice.

  2

  Caroline

  Distance from Landon and time away from him allowed me to realize that he hadn’t been lying to me about leaving the club when we spoke after sex.

  Unfortunately, distance from Landon and time away from him after that moment was starting to make me suspect that he had gone back on his word and had joined the club.

  It was Saturday afternoon. Outside, an unusually heavy downpour of rain and consistent drumming of thunder was making me a prisoner of my own apartment. I wasn’t a social butterfly by any means, but just knowing I couldn’t go outside for a walk, run, or just some coffee or drinks in town frustrated me. It also made my mind way more active and way more analytical than I wanted it to.

  Landon hadn’t said a word since he’d left me. I was trying, again, not to be “that girl,” but why hadn’t he at least texted me an update a few hours after seeing his brother? Why hadn’t he said anything in the morning? A part of me took some solace in the silence, as if Brock had perished, I’m pretty sure Landon would have said something. So maybe no news was good news.

  But that was only true of Brock’s condition. It didn’t seem particularly true for us.

  By the time I had placed an order for pizza delivery to pass the day, I had decided that there was an undeniable truth. The only reason Landon hadn’t said a word to me was because he had gone back to the club, and he didn’t want to hurt me by telling me. The same boy who had closed off the world when his father died had now closed me off as a man when he had to go back to the world that ruined him.

  It was a damn thing, too. He was a true gentleman, a real king—just a Savage King as well as a real king. He was someone that, in a different town or city or with a different last name, could have been something special with me.

  Instead…

  You know what you need to do.

  But as I pulled my phone up and stared at it, trying to muster the courage to send off the text that would end our little fling just barely before it started, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt like I was wasting something that needed more time to develop.

  Even if it felt like I already knew which direction it was going to develop.

  Instead, I dialed the one person I knew I could count on the most here.

  “Caroline! You must be dreading the weather in Romara right now, huh?”

  “It’s not so bad, Mom, hi.”

  Even in times like these, even with shit weather and shit conditions in my life, talking to Mom still put a smile on my face.

  “How are you, dear?”

  “Well… I’ve been better.”

  “Was it your date?”

  “Oh, no, nothing quite… well, it was fine.”

  I knew my hesitation would give me away. But I didn’t much care. I wasn’t ready to say out loud everything that had happened, but as long as Mom got enough of the hint, that would be good enough.

  “I’m just, you know, trying to think ahead to the future and figure out how you and Dad make it work so well. You’ve been married now, for what, fifty years?”

  “Has it been that long?” my mother said, her lame attempt at a joke followed by me politely laughing to humor her. “Yes, I suppose we do work quite well. But there’s really no secret to it, dear. You just tell each other the truth and communicate.”

  Tell the truth. And communicate.

  My mother didn’t know it right then, but she had just sealed the decision for me. And maybe it wasn’t fair for me to act this early—maybe I was being a little crazy with how quickly I was deciding to cut it off—but this wasn’t like he had forgotten to put the dishes away and as a result I was dumping him. If he wasn’t going to come back to me that quickly after we’d had sex for the first time, he was just always going to be this way.

  I carried on a conversation with my mother for about the next five minutes, mostly just to reassure myself that I’d always at least have my parents’ support. But I could have just as easily hung up the phone before then and I would have had everything that I needed.

  When I did disconnect and I went back to the text messages with Landon, I tried one more time to play devil’s advocate. His brother had just gone to the hospital. He hadn’t really gone back to the Savage Kings, not yet at least. He had only quit the day before; it was only natural for some of the other club members to try and reign him back in.

  But I wasn’t asking for a love letter or a heart-felt confession. I was just asking for some simple communication in the morning. And if this reflected poorly on me, than maybe I wasn’t fit for a relationship with Landon anyways.

  “Hey Landon,” I started to write. “I appreciate all that we’ve done together the past few days. But I just think we’ll better work as friends.”

  No, that’s leaving an opening. It seems nice, but it’s really not. You know you need to be stronger than that.

  “Hey Landon, I appreciate all that we’ve done together. But…”

  Be honest.

  “The silence is disheartening, especially after we had sex last night. I don’t feel valued or appreciated, and I know as long as the Savage Kings are around, you’ll never truly be free from them. So I have to move on. Sorry.”

  I hit send before I could keep editing. Looking at it as it went from an editable text into an actual sent message,
I knew I could have said some things better.

  But the specific words didn’t matter as much as the overall message.

  And yet, who did I just break up with? Landon the man, or Landon the Savage King?

  And can one even distinguish the two?

  If I could, I really hoped that I hadn’t just made a critical mistake.

  3

  Landon

  I sat on the couch, my head resting on my chin, deep in thought.

  How the fuck am I going to do this?

  The thought was there because said couch was not in my apartment. It was not at the hospital. It was back at the Savage Kings’ clubhouse.

  The very place that I had sworn I would never return to, and it had taken me less than twenty-four hours for me to find my way back here.

  “Fucking Parker,” I mumbled under my breath, though no one was really in range to hear me anyways.

  I wanted to say the Texan bastard had coerced me into doing it and had tricked me, but that was a lie. I’d just felt the pull to protect the club in Brock’s absence. But the timing of it sure could not have been worse.

  And not only was the timing off, the elevation of me to temporary President was a questionable decision as well. Brock had gotten into the nuances of the club and done all that he could to make it a place people wanted to join. I just hung on until Vulture was killed. And now I was expected to act like the captain of the football team and figure shit out?