The warehouse they walked into was no different than all the other ones she’d been in over the course of her twenty-eight years, though as the daughter Priest had tried to shelter from the life in his inconsistent way, she’d never been at a clubhouse like this one unless it had been a planned family event. Old ladies and kids everywhere, various and sundry friends of the club in attendance, sometimes curious civilians along with them. Picnics and barbecues and wholesome games out in the yard. Catch and corn hole and horseshoes. Like Sesame Street in studded leather.

It was the peculiar dichotomy of the biker life, she was well aware—family men when it suited them and evil fucking bastards when it didn’t.

And here in the Devil’s Keepers’ clubhouse in the middle of nowhere, it was definitely not family night.

She looked around while trying to appear as if she wasn’t looking too closely at anything in particular, a skill she’d picked up a long time ago while growing up in the French Quarter. There was a big central area that the brothers clearly used as their hangout space and was, to her mind, decorated like a very lethal version of a fraternity house. There was a bar on one side of the room that she imagined prospects or the girls were expected to tend at the brothers’ whim, couches everywhere to facilitate a lot of hanging out around a few TVs and a couple of pool tables, and then a hallway that went off toward the back. That would likely lead to their offices if they had a legitimate business connected to this warehouse, bedrooms if the brothers wanted to stay here or fuck here or both, and no doubt whatever space they used for church, the full-patch-members-only meetings most biker clubs held at regular intervals. The building across the back courtyard from the Priory had been the Deacons’ clubhouse while Sophie was growing up, and she’d seen perhaps a bit more of what had gone on there than she should have—certainly more than Priest would have liked. These days, the once sacred Deacons’ clubhouse contained an eclectic art gallery.

She had to bite back her smile at that—and more, at what Ajax’s reaction was likely to be when he discovered that small fact.

“I’ll tell him you’re here,” the man who’d led them in told Ajax. Which meant he wasn’t the president after all. She focused on his cut. SERGEANT AT ARMS. “He’ll want to pay his respects.”

“Appreciate that,” Ajax said in that low rumble of his.

The man looked at Sophie then. He didn’t introduce himself. She suspected that he was rarely in situations where he wasn’t instantly known. He nodded at her, his gray eyes grim.

“I knew your dad,” he said gruffly. “He was a good man.”

“Thank you,” she replied, surprised to find she meant it. “He was.”

Ajax didn’t let go of her when the other man walked away. He steered her across the room, headed for the bar, and Sophie knew enough to keep her expression neutral as they navigated the typical nighttime detritus of a place like this.

Two brothers were playing pool and drinking beer with two women wearing nothing but lacy thongs and their nipple piercings. Another brother was slumped low in an armchair in front of a big-screen television, with a woman crouched down between his legs, sucking him off while he gripped her idly by the hair and watched the game. Across the coffee table from him were two couples sitting on a low-slung couch, drinking a few beers and laughing. Like any couples anywhere except that in this case, one of the women was leaning back astride one of the men with her skirt raised up and her legs spread open while the other woman bent over her, licking busily between her thighs.

Sophie shifted as they walked, so she could lean a little closer to Ajax and make sure no one overheard her. “On a Tuesday?”

She felt the rumble of his laughter in his chest beside her and the rich vibration of it as it moved along that hard arm that she was a little too comfortable with, heavy on her shoulders like that. It was almost as if his laughter was inside of her, too.

“We’re deep in Cajun country, baby,” he said, and his gaze was brilliant and too blue as it met hers. “They don’t fuck around.”

“Warning received,” she replied, and maybe her tone was too sharp, though she didn’t think it was, not here where she knew that would be suicide. Maybe he just felt like it. Either way, he hauled her closer to him with an easy tug, so without a chance to react she was suddenly straddling his side and he held her neck in the crook of his big arm. Her belly was flush against his hip, smooth and sculpted and then the faint bite of his waistband against her belly ring. She balanced herself with one hand on the flat, taut expanse of his stomach and the other on the hard plane of his lower back and the heat of it all was like a Louisiana sunrise, instantly sweltering, rocketing through her, making her have to stop to catch her breath. Hard.

Blue, she thought in a daze, with his face so close to hers. His eyes are so fucking blue.

“Be a good girl,” Ajax told her, his mouth hovering over hers so she thought she could taste the words, taste him, and she shuddered at that idea. Or maybe it was the memory of before, still kicking through her. “And I might give you a reward.”

“A little reward?” She sounded needy and soft. Ruined, maybe, and that knowing gleam in those wicked eyes of his told her he knew exactly what he did to her. Sophie tipped up her chin in yet another show of pointless mutiny against her own weakness and was sure she fooled neither one of them. “That sounds awesome. Like this is a biker field trip.”

He bent his head and nipped at her chin.

It was cute when domesticated creatures like cats did things like that. Adorable, even.

Ajax was no kitten.

Sophie felt the scrape of his teeth everywhere, the scratch of that close-clipped beard. Her pussy clenched. Her nipples ached. Like he was electric and he’d flipped a switch, sending fire charging through every part of her, whether she liked it or not.

And she understood in that instant that this was the drug. He was. Her mother was a junkie and no matter how many times her father told her otherwise Sophie had always figured that she must have it in her too, that impossible need. That longing. That empty hole only one thing could fill, and Ajax was it. She knew it.

Worse, she thought he knew it, too.

And the scariest part was how little that scared her at all.

She didn’t realize she was digging her nails into that flat stretch of his hard abdomen, and not gently, until he laughed and tugged her hand away. He didn’t let go of her, as if he didn’t quite trust she wouldn’t do it again. He only ran his thumb over her nails, back and forth.

“I like claws,” he told her, amusement and approval making his low voice warm. “And, baby. Believe me. It’s not little.”

—

Ajax was a little bit cunt drunk.

He sat at the table in another part of the clubhouse, talking Priest’s death and club politics with old friends, but he was keeping an eye trained on Sophie.

She was safe enough. The Devil’s Keepers were old allies going back to the formation of both their charters in southern Louisiana, and they’d put a prospect on the bar while Sophie waited for him, in case anyone got any ideas. All perfectly normal.

What wasn’t normal was Ajax giving a shit what a piece of ass was doing with herself when he wasn’t fucking her.

Then again, nothing was normal anymore. Priest was dead, and the sheer wrongness of that was like his ribs had been ripped out through his own chest and he didn’t think that would ever really heal. He’d had to look at another body of another old friend, lost for no good reason. He’d had to bear witness to yet another corpse—this one, someone he actually gave two fucks about—and Ajax was having trouble shifting the stain of that off him. He’d been back in Louisiana less than twenty-four hours and he already knew he was staying. He had no need to return to Houston. He hadn’t cared where he’d lived if it wasn’t New Orleans, so Houston had been as good of a bad choice as anything else. It had taken being back where he belonged to realize that for him, there had only ever been one home, and that was the Priory.