by Naomi West
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Ravage: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Demon Riders MC) (Book 1)
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
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Ravage: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Demon Riders MC) (Book 1)
By Naomi West
I CAME TO HURT HER. I STAYED TO SAVE HER.
I USED TO THINK I HAD my life all planned out.
Take over the MC when my father dies, marry a lady from the club, and maybe have a kid or two.
That was before my dad gave me a mission with his dying breath.
Now, I have to find some girl I’ve never met and do whatever it takes to reclaim the fortune that rightfully belongs to the Demon Riders MC.
But when I find the girl I’m looking for, all my plans fall apart.
She’s too d@mn beautiful and the $ex is too hot.
I can’t do the bad things I was sent to do.
Especially when she confesses that she knows nothing about our missing fortune.
But when she’s stolen from me by a rival mafia group, money is the last thing I’m thinking about.
I’ll protect my woman, at all costs.
And I’ll slaughter any man who tries to take her from me.
Chapter One
Logan
I pull up outside the hospital on one of those California days that make a man want to submerge himself in a vat of ice water right up to his neck and just sit there until the summer sun decides not to be such a bastard anymore. I climb off the bike and shrug my leather, feeling its stickiness grinding up and down my back. I want to take it off, just wear my black T-shirt, maybe nothing at all. But I can’t go and see the old man without representing the Demon Riders. He’s put his whole life into this club; the least I can do is remind him that it was worth something.
I walk slowly on my way into the building, taking my time because I know what is waiting for me up there. I see a skeleton, skin drawn threadbare over old bones, coughing which rattles his chest, a rasping voice, and pitted eyes. He’s not that bad, but it’s what I see every time I come here. It’s like a waking nightmare.
I nod to the nurse as I pass, wondering if I should hang around and try’n see if I can’t make something happen. She’s tall, blonde, leggy, and thin, with black-rimmed eyes. But I find I can’t summon up the energy. I guess having a dying dad’ll do that.
I knock on the door before I enter. Part of me hopes that he’ll be asleep and that Mom won’t be here to let me in. Part of me hopes that I’ll drop through the floor and land somewhere in the past. Maybe I’m fifteen instead of twenty-eight and I’m sitting with my nineteen-year-old girlfriend at her place, listening to rock and making out and doing other things, too. Maybe I’m at the garage with metal blasting working on an old junker. I’ll keep working on the junker until it becomes a proud new car, fresh-painted and growling like a brave lion. But I get no such luck. Mom’s heels—and they’re always heels—clip across the floor and stop on the other side of the door.
“Logan?”
I swallow, lick my lips, wonder if I still can’t get out of here. Then I say, “Mom.”
She opens the door, lips pursed, panting like she always is these days, her eyes red with recently-wept tears. She waves me in. She’s dressed even more flamboyantly than usual, as if she can stave off her husband’s death with fashion: her hair as big as a bike helmet, bright red, her face plastered with makeup, her shirt colorful, her jeans flaring, her heels six-inch blocks, her nails painted three different colors.
She goes to the corner of the room. The lump in the other corner is sleeping. I can tell by the steady beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor and the fact that Mom is sitting by the window and not next to the bed. I don’t look at him, the lump, a cruel way to think of him but the way I’ve come to think of him nonetheless. His chest rattles and I remember a different rattling, a rattling that came to me from downstairs, and Mom whispering to him to just call me down. I ran downstairs and saw Dad rattling some new tools around in their new toolbox, a smile on his giant’s face, a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. He took a long puff and then thrust the toolbox at me.
“Logan,” Mom says, her voice taut like a mighty engine just before it cuts out.
“Yeah?”
“Are you going to close the door?”
“Yeah.”
I’d rather be anywhere but here, is the cruel truth. As I shut the door I look longingly into the hallway, a long, narrow stretch that looks to me right now like a one-hundred-meter dash. Head down, run. It’s a coward’s way of thinking, but I never expected my old man to go out with lumps in his lungs, even though I should have. A man can’t smoke forty a day and skip into retirement. I expected him to go how most club folks go, with a slug to the head or chest or belly. A belly shot is the worst of all. It’ll spill your insides out like padding from a torn cushion.
“Logan?”
I turn around.
“Yeah?”
“You haven’t said hello to your father.”
“He’s asleep. You know I find that shit—”
She leaps to her feet, moving with surprising agility considering the six-inch heels. She skips across the room and stares up at me. Two heads shorter’n she can still make me feel ten years old. “You haven’t said hello to your father,” she insists. “What do you think we are, animals? Maybe next time I come I should just spit in his face, spit right in his face, and then—and then what? Maybe I should climb onto the bed and go to the bathroom right there, since this family has no sense of decorum anymore. Is that what you think?”
I repress a sigh and turn to the lump. Seeing him now makes it difficult to believe that Thorne Birch was ever as solid as a tree, with thick arms and thick legs, a thick mane of steel hair and a beard to match. Now he looks like a husk, bald on top with sunken cheeks and stick-thin arms and legs. “Hi, Dad,” I say.
“Thank you,” Mom says. “You’re going to be the president soon, Logan. You need to learn how to handle situations like this. How many of your father’s friends have died, do you think? How many times has he had to sit at their bedsides with their wives? It’s time to grow up. You’re almost thirty.”
“Ma, I didn’t come here for a lecture.”
She aims a sword-like forefinger at me, slashing it through the air. “Sit down, and be nice. We’ll wait for your father to wake up.”
I want to leave, maybe go see Spider and get so tanked on whisky we can barely walk, but I’ve never seen Mom like this. She looks like she could crack any moment, and that ain’t just ’cause of how sad she is. Her makeup has been applied so thick that cracks have appeared all over the place, at the corners of her eyes and lips, on her cheeks, a line running down her forehead, like the cracked earth of a desert. Every time she speaks, the cracks open and close.
“Okay, Ma.”
We sit, Mom sipping coffee and me just staring out the window at the nurses and doctors and patients, at the smoking area where a few people gather. One woman laughs. I can’t hear it from up here but it’s a big belly laugh. She throws her head back. Her cigarette falls out of her hand.
“So, you found a girl yet?”
“What?” she snaps. “I’m just asking you a simple question. You don’t have to get this attitude about it.” She pauses, letting Dad’s beep-beep-beep take over for a moment, and then says, “So, have you?”
“I haven’t been looking. Don’t forget that you’re the one who wants me to find a girl. I’ve never said shit about it.”
“You did! At the barbecue last year!”
I rest my head in my hands, massaging my temples. It’s true. At the barbecue last year, when Dad was first diagnosed, Mom cornered me and demanded to know if I was ever going to find a girl. I backed against the wall, feeling like I was under siege, and told her that yes, one day I would find a club girl and maybe have a couple of kids. I didn’t give it any thought beyond wanting her to calm down. Dad’s lungs were shot, and if she kept going on like that her heart would be shot.
“So you lied to me,” she mutters.
“I didn’t lie. I just told you what you wanted to hear.”
“Well, what a fine way to behave to your only mother!” She prods my nose with her fingernail, making me look up at her. “You have to understand something, Logan. Family is the most important thing we have, and we don’t have any. You don’t have any brothers and sisters. You know why that is.” Yeah, I know: Mom miscarried four times after me. “Is it really that unreasonable for me to want grandchildren, a daughter-in-law?”
I nudge her hand away. “No, it isn’t. But I’m not about to shackle myself down like one of those poor saps you see at the mall, nodding over and over ’cause their old lady wants to buy some curtains and they’ve lost the will to live.”
“I never said you had to marry that sort, did I?”
“What other sort is there?”
“Now you’re just being mean.” Mom pouts, which she somehow makes fierce. “There are as many different types of women as there are types of flower—”
“And there are as many different types of men as there are types of dog.”
“I don’t say it that often,” she protests.
I open my mouth to reply, but then Dad croaks and lifts his trembling hand. I go to one side of the bed and Mom goes to the other, busying herself with dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth and bringing a straw to his lips, and then cleaning his chin when he dribbles half of it instead of swallowing.
“Son,” he says, his voice an echo of an echo of what it once was. “My son.”
“Dad.” I don’t know what to do, so I lean forward. Mom nods at his hand so I take his hand. It’s small and sticky. The hand that once held me up to the sky so it felt like I was flying is small and sticky. There’s some horror in that.
“I have something to tell you ...” He closes his eyes, shudders. “It’s important ...”
“Go on,” I say.
“I ...” He shudders again, forcing his eyes open. “Crash, Crash ...”
“Crash? Who crashed?”
“No, Crash.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Pa.”
He closes his eyes, and in a matter of seconds he’s snoring. I look over him to Mom. “What was he talking about?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “He goes on that way sometimes. Maybe it was nothing. But did you see his eyes? He hasn’t looked that serious since the diagnosis.”
I did see his eyes: twin embers, blazing.
“Call me if he starts making sense,” I say.
“You’re going? You only just got here!”
“I have things to do.”
I stand up and make for the door.
“What things?”
Drink, is the truth of it. But I don’t tell her that. I just leave.
Chapter Two
Cora
I sit in the green room of the dingy bar, head held back so that I can see the World Serpent’s mouth on my neck, biting its own tail. I study it for a time, thinking about Ragnarok and the beginning and the ending of the nine worlds, and Thor and Loki and Frey and all the other Norse gods, Sif and Frigg and Heimdall and on and on, and the wolf Fenrir and the sea-giantess Ran. I stare at the tattooed serpent and think about my own life and wonder if that, too, will die and be rebirthed: if the world of my life will be stormed by giants and Loki and emerge anew. Maybe if I keep singing rock I’ll be able to quit my job at the dentist’s office; that would be my rebirth.
I wonder, as I often do, if I’m attractive enough to make it big—or semi-big—as a rock star. It’s a thought I try to avoid but one that arises anyway, like a tenacious hound, dogging me endlessly like Skoll chasing the sun. I have funky shoulder-length brown hair, hacked here and there for an uneven look, with bright green eyes and high cheekbones. Men often find me attractive, but then some men look at me and see nothing more than a punk girl with Viking tattoos on her neck and thumb. I look down at the rune on my thumb now, the rune which means a need not yet fulfilled—ᚾ—and I think of that need, my desire to do more than work a job I don’t enjoy, to live in an apartment I don’t care about, to fund hobbies I have no interest in. Perhaps that’s a nihilistic way of looking at things.
I stand up and walk around the room, a place that’s falling apart, the couch covered in holes and the wallpaper chipping and flaking. I think of my house growing up. Crash Collins, my father, was a wealthy man, an old-money man, the sort of man who could buy estates and think nothing of it. We had staff and grounds and all the rest of it: the American dream gifted to a girl who knew no different. That would have been fine if he also wasn’t an old-fashioned man who believed that family trumped all, that family was everything and if a girl didn’t wear dresses and learn to knit she wasn’t a girl; she was a monster.
I pace around the room, listening to the drummer tear away on his own, the lead guitarist struggling to keep up, the crowd cheering, but not loudly. There would need to be more than fifty people for the crowd to cheer loudly. I drop onto the hole-ridden couch and stretch my legs out. I’m wearing black jeans and black boots with silver carvings of wolves on the side. They were the last thing I took from the house after Dad died and the will executor arrived with his cronies to tell me I wasn’t entitled to anything, that I had to leave unless I fulfilled the terms of the contract.
I laugh grimly to myself.
“The terms of the contract,” I whisper beneath the music pounding through the walls. “Sure, why don’t I just lie on my back and open my legs and wait for the first man who wanders by to deposit a nice load of spunk in my belly, and once the baby’s born he’ll put a ring on my finger and everything will be perfect.”
I hate waiting in the green room. It’d be different if I had a band, people to shoot the shit with, but I’m more of a solo kind of woman. In all my twenty-three years I can’t remember ever having a close friend. Boys were intimidated by me because I wasn’t intimidated by them, and girls didn’t like me because I never fit in with them. I tried to. I had a period in my teenage years when I’d dress pretty and try and force myself to care about prom, but I’d always end up back with the outcasts smoking and drinking. And I never even felt close to the outcasts, because none of them cared about making something of their lives. They just wanted to smoke and drink until the end of the world.
I pick idly at the couch cushion, rolling a piece of thread between my forefinger and thumb. That was a cruel thing for Dad to do, I reflect. He knew what sort of person I was. He knew I didn’t want to settle down early. He knew that when I read the Old Norse poems I wanted to be the shield-maiden, not the wife, waiting for her man while sitting at the loom. I wonder, when he wrote that I could only come into my inheritance when I am married with children, did he feel guilty? Did his pen pause, or did he scrawl it out rashly as he did with everything else? Crash was a man of action, a man who rarely thought before he did things. Maybe that was why he was so successful. I don’t know. What I do know is that it didn’t make him a good father. Still, I’ve paid tribute to him in my own way. I’m Cora Ash now, Melissa Collins reinvented.
I’m muttering to myself like a madwoman—and really, I can’t deny that charge—when the manager walks in. He’s a big man, but not strong-looking. He’s big in all the wrong places, big at the lower legs and forearms, big at the belly, big at the neck. He’s around forty years old with a slick gray comb-over and dark brown eyes. His first name is Charles. I forget his second.
I stand up. “Is it time?” I say, eager.
The drummer is still pounding away, drowning out the other instruments and the screaming voice, but maybe I can crowd backstage, watching and waiting like a raven over a battle. It’d be better than sitting here stewing on my past, anyway.
Maybe I seem too eager because Charles licks his lips and steps forward, and I see in his face that he thinks he has me. He sees me as the tortured little tattooed girl, snake-necked, oh-so-vulnerable.
“Not quite yet,” he says, nudging the door closed behind him.
“Okay ...”
I wait. I need this gig, as sad as that is. I need every gig, no matter how small.
“I’ve been thinking, Cora. You like playing this place, don’t you?”
“Like,” I repeat, leaving it up to him to decide if that’s a positive or a negative.
“You haven’t been doing this for very long. Just a couple of years. Isn’t that right?”
“Just a couple of years.” I swallow a grim laugh. It’s easy to say something’s only been a couple of years; it’s much different to live it, going from low-paid or unpaid gig to gig, trying to convince myself that I’m not wasting my time.
“What are you, a parrot?” He cackles loudly, resting his hands on his belly, and then letting his hands drop as though the action is a reflex he’d rather do without. He takes another step forward, this one much larger, so that he’s only a few paces away from me. “You need a break in this business, don’t you? You’re always reading about some big star who played the same venue for months before getting their break. A lot of talent spotters come in this place, you know. That’s one of the things we’re most proud of here.”
