by Tia Lewis
Nicole is determined to learn who killed her father, a detective who was investigating the Blood Riders. When the chemistry between her and Drake becomes much more, she’s caught between her desires and her desperate need for answers.
Then her search turns deadly, and Nicole has to put everything on the line―and trust that the man she’s fallen for will forgive her betrayal. Will he come to her defense ... or will his eyes be the last thing she ever sees?
Threat is book 1 of the Blood Riders MC series.
Author’s Note:
Threat is a motorcycle romance novel that contains explicit sexual content, sexual assault, violence, strong language, and intended for mature audiences only. This book is not intended for readers who are under the age of 18 and uncomfortable with the subject matter. Reader discretion is advised.
Prologue
Drake
We filed into the clubhouse one at a time, all of us looking like shit. It had been one of the toughest weeks of my life, and I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling that way.
Tamara was behind the bar, already filling shot glasses with whiskey. She didn’t need to be told what to do. I saw tears in her eyes. I wanted to say or do something that would make her feel better, but there was nothing. And it wouldn’t have made a difference, anyway. Nothing would bring our brothers back.
I looked at the wall outside of Jack’s office. Three pictures. Three members of our club who would never walk through the door again. I felt like part of my body had been amputated. I couldn’t imagine not seeing Lance, Austin or Pete again. I’d grown up with them, had known them for most of my life. Austin had once covered my ass during a shootout with the Cobras. And the fucking Cobras just had to kill him.
I didn’t dare bring that up since it would only piss everybody off even more. The tension was high, and when a bunch of guys who weren’t used to showing emotion had a reason to be emotional all of a sudden, it wasn’t pretty. I didn’t need there to be any breakdowns around the place. There was no telling how they’d be once they got a little liquor in them.
Jack came in last. He looked like shit like we should have buried him along with the other three. He hadn’t looked good in ages, though. It didn’t have anything to do with the murders. I wondered what was going on, but it would be a cold day in Hell before he'd confide in me. His supposed second-in-command. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get him to understand that being second meant he should clue me in on what was happening in the club. That meant what was happening with him, too, if I was supposed to be in charge in the event that anything happened to him.
We all picked up a shot from the bar, raising them in air. There were three dozen of us there, all of us mourning. We weren’t good at talking about our feelings, but some things didn’t need to be said out loud. We didn’t speak a toast out loud since none of us knew what to say. We just drank. We knew how to do that much.
“I bet that priest didn’t know what to do with himself when he saw all of us,” Ace half-heartedly chuckled. He always tried to lighten the mood whenever he could. I wished it would work, but it didn’t seem like it would. At least he tried.
“Yeah, and he was the one in the dress,” Diesel cracked. That got a better laugh out of us.
“I didn’t know Lance was Catholic,” Richie muttered. I threw him a dirty look.
“What the hell did it matter?” I asked. I didn’t know what pissed me off about that kid, but he was always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Fucking Prospect. It wasn’t like we filled out forms when we joined the Blood Riders. It didn’t matter what religion a person was.
“I’m just sayin’. His Ma made it sound like he was such a good boy, you know? He wasn’t like the way she made him sound.” Richie shrugged. I couldn’t give him shit over that—he had a point.
“Yeah, Lance was one of the few guys who still had a mom who cared about him.” That wasn’t normal for us. Most of us were from broken homes, or we were orphans. Lance had both his parents with him until he was grown. His mother was one of those who always defended him—that goes to show how sometimes a mother could love her kid a little too much. It could be just as bad to always defend a kid as it was to beat them for the littlest things. Lance was a petty thief from the time he was thirteen. He wasn’t a nice kid, but he was a good friend. He was robust and tough, like Pete and Austin. It didn’t make any sense that they wouldn’t come back. I was sure they would walk through the door any minute.
I heard sniffling from the other side of the room, and when I looked, I saw Violet and Darcy holding onto each other. I didn’t know why they were there, but I guessed they just wanted to be with friends. It wasn’t any easier for them than it was for us—and they were women, too, which I guess made it harder. I knew the way things went in our club, I knew they had probably both slept with all three guys at one time or another. Them and a bunch of other girls who floated in and out. We had our core group who stuck around, and they were two of them.
Tamara was one, too. She looked pretty shaken up, but she did her job behind the bar. We all had our jobs in the club.
Me? It was my job to find out why the hell the Cobras were killing our guys, and what we could do about it.
“I say we storm their fucking headquarters and take ‘em all out.” Diesel looked serious as hell, his dark eyes almost black. Phil nodded, his face like stone. They were both ex-Marines. They were ready for battle. I knew I wouldn’t want to run into either of them in a dark alley if they weren’t on my side. I once overheard Phil tell Richie he knew ten ways to kill a man with a spoon. I still wasn’t sure if he was only joking to fuck with the kid or not. I didn’t wanna know.
I looked around the room at my men. My friends, my brothers. They all wanted revenge for the deaths in our family. I wanted it, too.
“That’s what they want, man,” I said. “That’s what they’re planning on, and they'll be ready for us when we burst through the doors. We can’t give it to them. We have to stay strong.” I sat on one of the leather stools in front of the long, polished bar. Tamara took good care of it, right down to making sure the glasses are shiny.
“Stay strong? We’re strong if we go in there and kick the shit outta them. I wanna kill them all.” Sometimes I thought Diesel might be a little unbalanced. He used to talk about military stuff with Ace, who was in the Army, and Ace once told me he thought Diesel was a little too into the training he received back when he first enlisted.
“Staying strong can mean having discipline, too,” I pointed out. I looked around the room, hoping somebody would back me up. Usually, my word was law. Nobody thought to go against me. I was second-in-command, but even back before Jack picked me as his second, I was a force to be reckoned with in the club.
The rules didn’t apply when three of our own were cut down. I couldn’t get a handle on them. I waited for Jack to speak up as president, but he kept his mouth shut. I could have killed him for it.
“We have to be the smart ones. They wanna lure us into a trap, the way they already have,” I said. “Hawk and his guys, they’re sick. Hawk plays mind games. He knows how to read his opponent and he’ll do anything to get to them. He twists the knife, you know?”
Finally, Jack spoke up. “I’ve known him longer than anybody in this room, and what Drake’s saying is the truth. I don’t know who messed Hawk’s head up when he was a kid, but somebody did in a big way. He’s a sick fuck, that guy.”
Jack’s words gave me a little more strength. “And he’s the master of information, too. He knows shit about us, about all his enemies. And you know he’s got plenty.”
“So what if we get with the Road Knights, the Lost Breed, the Devil’s Riders? What if we get together and take them out as a group? No way they can defend themselves against something like that.” Creed looked and sounded serious, and I didn’t hate the idea. Finally getting rid of the Cobras once and for all. But…
“Let’s face it,” Jack said, folding his tall body into a leather easy ch
air. Funny, seeing a big, tough man like him in an easy chair. “If we take them out as a group, then the entire group is gonna wanna split up what’s left behind. That means revenue streams. And you know what happens when you fuck with a biker’s money.” A collective groan rose up in the room. We all knew what Jack was getting at. It could turn into an all-out war.
“And nobody’s saying the people Hawk and his crew do business with would wanna do business with any of us. And then they’d just be blowin’ in the wind, and they might complain to our people, our suppliers, and dealers. And then what would happen? We’d still end up losing all that money.”
“So what, then?” Diesel asked, his jaw clenched just like his large, bony fists. “We just let them pick us off one by one? Or three at a time, like a week ago?”
“No.” Jack’s reply was a like a whip. Everybody stood up a little straighter when he talked that way. “No, we don’t just let them pick us off. I didn’t say we’d have to roll over and play dead. What, do you think, I lost my balls when I lost my guys?”
Diesel stood down a little. I could tell he had forgotten himself when he talked back to Jack like that. “No, brother. Sorry. It’s just…”
“I know. It’s a tough time. It’s been a tough time for all of us.” Jack nodded, then stood and clapped a big hand on Diesel’s shoulder. D was a big guy—huge, really, and packed with muscle. But he looked small next to Jack, who was over six-and-a-half feet tall.
“I just wanna get payback,” Diesel muttered.
“And we will. We have to pull back and think up a plan, instead of blazing in there and getting ourselves killed. Remember: if we act out of anger, we lose our heads, and they win. Didn’t they teach you that in the Marines?”
Diesel grinned a little. “Yeah. They did. You’re right, of course.” He shook Jack’s hand, then went to the bar for another drink. I had a feeling there would be a lot of drinking going on tonight, and who could blame us?
Jack caught my eye, nodding his head toward his open office door. I knew what that meant, and I went in without question. He wanted to have a private conference. Good thing, too. I had a few questions I wanted to be answered, but I couldn’t ask them in front of the other guys.
Jack’s office was a great room—more like a living room than an office, with comfortable furniture and a big, expensive looking desk in front of a leather chair big enough to fit a big man – like Jack. He had a sixty-inch TV on the wall—even nicer than the one out in the lounge, where we played video games together sometimes. His own private bathroom, which was a good thing in a club full of pigs.
I had my own bathroom, too, but not because I had my own office. Because I lived in the clubhouse. I had always been the MC’s orphan in a way. I never had a decent home when I was growing up, and I didn’t see the point of wasting money on a house or even an apartment when everything I needed was in the clubhouse. Food, entertainment. There was always somebody there to talk to, to drink with. We had bedrooms on the second and third floors, too, so it wasn’t like I was ever alone. Odds were that any night of the week, somebody was sleeping it off upstairs. Or sleeping there because their old lady kicked them out, or because they wanted a little private time with one of the girls in the club. It was like a second home to a lot of us.
Jack sat at his desk with a heavy sigh. There was a big window behind him with metal bars over the outside. It wasn’t much of a view, anyway, just a crummy little street in Jamaica, Queens. The building looked like shit on the outside, just like all the other buildings on the street. Only on the inside would a person get a look at what the club was really dealing with. We were the richest, most well-connected MC in New York City, and it showed.
Which was why clubs like the Cobras hated our guts, and the other ones only tolerated us. Hawk was either stupid or crazy enough—maybe both—to get on our bad side. Nobody else had the manpower or the weapons we did, so they knew it was best to be friends … or at least, stay on our good side.
“What do you think?” he asked, running a hand through his gray hair. For as long as I’d known him, he’d had the same buzz cut. It was simpler, he said, easier to maintain. A man like him, with so many lives hanging in the balance of every decision he made, needed to save time where he could. None of us were exactly caught up in our looks.
Well ... I was, a little bit, but only because the ladies liked me looking the way I did. That was another story.
“What do I think? I think we’re gonna have straight up anarchy on our hands if we don’t come up with a way to get revenge and quiet everybody down. Words will only work for so long.”
“I agree, V.P. So what do you think that’s gonna take?”
“Wow. You’re really raking me over the coals here, aren’t you?” I couldn’t help smirking a little.
“When I’m not here anymore, you’re gonna be the one who has to deal with this shit. I wanna see if you have what it takes.”
“Oh, come on.” I sat on the sofa against the opposite wall, slouching a little.
“I mean it. Hey, do you think every MC President gets this sort of chance? A little, whaddya call it, internship? When I became Prez, it was because my Prez got his ass killed in an accident. He was so fucking drunk, he had no business riding that night. Notice how I’ve never ridden drunk.”
“I know it.”
“He never took this time with me, like I’m trying to take with you. He thought he was gonna live forever. Instead, he ended up killing himself, and I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. I had no idea what I was doing. You’re lucky.”
“Yeah. Real lucky.” I grimaced.
“So? What do you think?”
“I think we need to set up some kind of surveillance on them. Find out where they’re going, what they’re doing. What’s their main business right now?”
“Oh, I can tell you that much,” he said. “They just started running guns with some no name Canadian cartel.”
“Canadians?” I couldn’t help laughing. Jack laughed a little, too.
“Yeah, I know. It’s weird, right? You wouldn’t expect it.” Jack shrugged. “Hey, money’s money. And guns are money. It’s not all about Mexico, you know?”
“I guess not.” I sat back, thinking about it. “Do we know their schedule? When they pick up shipments?”
“Negative, but we can find out. If Hawk can find out so much shit about us, we can turn it around on him. It might be a big city, but we run in a small world.”
“Good. So what, we set the Cobras up the way they set us up?”
“Either that or we take some serious manpower to the next pick up and take out as many of them as we can. It’ll be risky, but then they took risks with us. I can’t see them taking more than half-dozen guys on a pickup run, do you?”
“No, that’s about right. They’re not working with that many members—two dozen, the last time I counted.”
“So that’s what we do. The Cobras can’t spare the sort of manpower we can. We vest up, and we head out. Pick the best twelve guys you can think of—but let me tell you something, if you don’t think Diesel or anybody else is stable enough to do it…”
“I know. You don’t have to tell me.” I took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh, staring up at the pressed tin ceiling. It was one of my favorite parts of that room and the lounge area. It used to be a bar, our clubhouse—hence the bar in the lounge—and the ceiling was one of the original parts of the building. When the ugly old drop ceiling was taken out, around the time Jack took over and renovated, it was like stepping in a goldmine. The old place had a lot of character, and a lot of shit—both good and bad—had taken place there. Sometimes I thought it was a little haunted, like bumps and noises in the night. That type of shit. Sometimes—and nobody in the club knew this—I would sleep out on one of the couches in the main lounge with the TV on just to drown out the noises in the building. I didn’t have a TV in my room, so it was the next best thing. But I would rather have died than let anybody
else know that little secret of mine. I would never hear the end of it.
“Any other business we need to discuss, just the two of us?”
“Oh, yeah.” I sat up, looking at Jack again. His grayish skin bothered me enough to make me forget what I was about to say. “But ... Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Why? Because you look half-dead yourself. You told me a couple weeks ago you were gonna go to the doctor. Did you go yet?”
“Who gave you the job of being my mother?” he grumbled, waving me off.
“I mean it, man. You’re as gray as your hair. You want me to leave you alone for a little while, maybe let you get some rest?”
He shook his head. “Not like I could rest right now, anyway. Talking helps me forget. Know what I mean?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I know that feeling.”
“So what were you gonna say?” I noticed how he had quickly sidestepped my questions about his health, but I made a mental note to ask him again and again until he was straight with me. He was a tough nut to crack, my president, and I needed to drill it into his head that honesty was the only way we were gonna be able to work together. If I didn’t know what was happening, how could I ever be a leader? Even though he was the first one to remind me that I’d be in charge of the club one day—soon, from the way he told it—he was good at playing things close to the vest.
“Oh, right. I was gonna ask if you saw that Detective Bluth hanging around the edges of the group, down at the cemetery.”
“Oh, that asshole,” Jack waved his hand again like he was swatting away a fly. “He doesn’t mean anything.”
“I think he was waiting for one of us to crack,” I said.
“Yeah, and everybody knows that. He might as well take an oath and get a leather vest with his name on the badge. He’s like an unofficial member.”
