Total pages in book: 45
Estimated words: 42332 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 212(@200wpm)___ 169(@250wpm)___ 141(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42332 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 212(@200wpm)___ 169(@250wpm)___ 141(@300wpm)
The Fuel & Flame Diner had regulars, loyal customers who rolled in for pancakes and gossip. What it didn’t usually have was newcomers like these.
We had the occasional tourist-type passing through who used Riverstone as a rest stop along the way. They didn’t tend to stick around when they found out this was MC territory. Clubs were secretive by nature, and that had a way of attracting the nosy and fucking idiots who were arrogant enough to think they would face off with one of us and walk away.
But lately, there’d been a rash of one-time visitors. Mainly men who didn’t act like the typical passerby. They didn’t take a leisurely walk downtown or check out the local bakery. They didn’t grab a drink at the bar or make a stop at Inferno Cycles for a quick repair. In fact, I’d never seen any of them ride in anything besides a dark, nondescript sedan.
I continued to thumb through footage, tagging suspicious patterns.
Men who came in alone or in quiet groups and sat unnaturally still. No wasted motion or small talk. Heads low and shoulders tight. They scanned the exits too often or didn’t bother pretending to look at the menu. One or two of them had ordered coffee, but they didn’t even touch the damn cup. They stayed just long enough not to seem suspicious, then left without lingering.
It was as if they were trying to disappear in plain sight. And to most people, they were invisible.
Not to me, though.
This behavior would’ve been enough to catch my eye on its own. I’d seen it before. During my years with the SEALs, we’d taken down many organizations that started with “invisible” observers. There was no such thing as random; a pattern always emerged. And by trying to be overlooked, they stood out.
I sure as hell knew what it meant when they all kept orbiting the same fucking diner and nowhere else.
I didn’t have confirmation these visitors were scouts for the weapons pipeline I’d been tracking near the state line, but my gut was twitching.
It had been too quiet for months. Under-the-radar traffic with no obvious deals going down. Then there was a shift. Chatter about expansion. Noise in the dark. And the way they moved—skirting the edge of our jurisdiction—seemed like someone was trying to test our defenses, looking for weak spots without triggering a full-on response.
If that was their plan, they were fucking idiots.
The Hounds of Hellfire didn’t do weak spots. We didn’t leave messes. And we didn’t warn twice.
We weren’t the kind of MC that gave second chances, not when it came to our territory. The Hounds owned most of Riverstone, Georgia, but our sphere of influence—and protection—expanded into the surrounding areas.
Some of our activities were above board, others were buried deep beneath. We ran legitimate businesses, but that was just the surface. Below it ran a deeper current. One we controlled.
Ours was a different kind of power. A brotherhood with a code, a chain of command, and justice that didn't answer to the law.
We weren’t just bikes and brute force, no matter what people thought. The club had legitimate businesses—more than most outsiders ever clocked—and Ace kept the money moving with a brain that should’ve been illegal. Investments, markets, and shells within shells. Everything stayed solid, quiet, and profitable.
The real work happened where the light didn’t reach. Behind the scenes, we were the last resort for the people nobody else could help.
We didn’t get paid to put bodies in the ground. We erased people instead. Men and women with enemies, abusers, or governments on their backs came to us for a rebirth. If you needed a new identity, a life scrubbed clean, and a past buried so deep no one would ever find it, with no fingerprints left behind—we were the ones you called.
It started as favors, the kind you didn’t advertise, before growing into something efficient and ruthlessly clean.
Some paid. Others didn’t. Those rare freebies were carefully chosen and done under the table. They always deserved.
King had built our reputation from the inside out. Our president’s years in the CIA had made him a ghost and a gatekeeper. When he’d taken the gavel, he brought the skills and contacts to make sure our services didn’t leave a trace.
It took an army of skill to pull off. The prez’s forgery skills were a fucking art. We had a tech genius who built identities like puzzles—flawless code, embedded history, and clean data trails. A brilliant lawyer who could bend the system into knots and make it look like a straight line. Experts in fire, explosives, finance, and logistics. A cleaner. A former thief. A crew of men trained to handle everything from surveillance to retrieval. Each patch had his specialty. Mine was security.
I was an expert in munitions, tactical containment, and physical defense. If someone came too close to the things we protected, I made sure they didn’t come again.