by Naomi West
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Ravage: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Demon Riders MC) (Book 3)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
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Ravage: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Demon Riders MC) (Book 3)
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 1
Logan
I wake to Cora looking down at me. The sun has barely risen, her face framed in dim yellow light.
“Are you watching me sleep?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I would never do that. I’m not some kind of freak.”
“Right, of course not. You’re not a freak at all. Last night you were completely normal. I don’t reckon you ever do anything freaky.”
“What?” She tosses her head in imitation of some red-carpet starlet from the fifties. “You saying a woman can’t brutally mouth-fuck a man and then make tender love to him? What’s so wrong with that?”
Both of us laugh, and then she leans up. “I have something to admit. You didn’t wake up naturally just now. I was blowing on your face.”
“You were ... what the fuck’s the matter with you?” I nudge her in the belly, smiling when she tenses up and slaps my hand away. “What time is it?”
“It’s half past five in the morning.”
“Cora. I admitted I cried, didn’t I? I’m pretty damn sure I admitted that. So if this is some sort of punishment ... seriously, though, why the fuck have you woken me up at half past five?”
“I need to get some clothes,” she says. “I have work at ten and—”
“You can’t go to work,” I cut in.
She flinches. After a moment she shakes her head slowly. “I can’t just sit around here,” she says. “I just can’t. I’ll go crazy. The only way I’ve stayed sane since Mom, since Dad, is by keeping busy. Anyway, I’ve missed enough work as it is.”
“Why’ve you missed work?” I ask.
She flinches again. I wonder if there’s something she’s not telling me, or if she’s just annoyed with all the questions. “I’ve been ill. Nothing serious.”
“Oh.”
She folds her arms. “But I’m going to work. I know, I know. It’s dangerous. Those men are after me. Fine. But I’ll go crazy if I don’t go in. And I might lose my job. I know it must seem crazy to you, since I have this huge fortune waiting for me if I’d just trick some poor sap into marrying me and having a baby with me, but this job actually means something. It means that I’m ... well, I’m the sort of person who goes to work. That’s what it means.”
“What would happen if I told you that I won’t let you go to work, that I’d stop you if necessary?”
“I’d find a way to go,” she says stubbornly.
I sigh, standing up. “I thought you’d say that. Sometimes I feel like I know you pretty well, Cora. You like history and you like singing, you’re tough as leather but you’ve got a kind streak in you, too. Then you go off like this and I feel like I’m getting to know you all over again. I never guessed you’d be this goddamn stubborn. Let me make some calls. I need to arrange to have your workplace guarded. What’s the address?”
She gives it to me and I call up Spider. “Hey, boss,” he says.
For a second I want to correct him, tell him to stop calling me that. It’s a thought I often get when one of the guys calls me boss, which is what everybody called Dad for years. Calling me boss is like saying I’m a decent replacement for Dad, that I can fill his shoes and do all the shit he used to do. I guess that’s the point, but it still makes me nervous.
“Boss?” Spider prompts.
“Yeah. I need you to get a couple of the guys together for a guard detail. They need to watch a woman called Cora Ash. She’s tallish ...” I give the description and the address. “They need to stay there all day, watch all the exits and make sure nothin’ happens to her. Understood?”
“Sure,” Spider says. He sounds like he wants to ask some questions, maybe why I’ve suddenly taken such a liking to a woman I’ve never mentioned before, but he doesn’t press the issue.
I hang up the phone and turn to Cora. “Let’s take you shopping, you spoiled brat.”
She giggles and we get dressed. About an hour later we ride back to my apartment with two bags full of clothes bought from the twenty-four-hour supermarket at the other end of town. Cora goes into the bedroom and starts messing around with the clothes like women do, and I sit on the couch drinking coffee, wondering what steps to take today. I need to try and fix this shit with the mafia. I want to follow this path with Cora—last night was incredible; it was like I was a person, she really made me feel that way—but I can’t with this Moretti shit hanging over our heads. She emerges from the bedroom wearing a white shirt and black trousers, throwing a pose.
“How do I look?”
She has her knee raised, her pants tight around her ass.
“I reckon you better stop doing that before I lose control.”
“Maybe I want you to.” She skips across the room, pressing her hand down on my crotch.
Neither of us puts up much of a fight. We dance the same routine as last night, kissing, biting, growling, sinking into each other.
“Okay, seriously now,” she says, putting her clothes back on. “I’m going to be late.”
I take her down to my bike, giving her the helmet and my leather, and then ride her to the dentist’s office. I’m not happy about this, but I don’t see that I have another option. She’ll just sneak out and put herself in danger. This way at least I can make sure she’s relatively safe. I’m lying to myself; there is another option. I could keep her prisoner. But I don’t want that for selfish reasons. I couldn’t stand the way she’d look at me. She climbs from the bike and takes off the helmet, kissing me on the forehead.
“See you later,” she says, and it’s almost like I have a girlfriend.
I check in with the guys, one posted at the front and one at the back. Then I ride away to handle my business.
I call one of my police contacts and twist his arm a little. We’ve got shit on a few cops, and this one is no different. He likes to fuck around on his wife on the weekends, tell her some fairytale about how he’s going to a police conference and then spend the weekend snorting buckets of coke and sc
rewing anybody he can get his hands on. After I threaten him a couple of times he tells me that Moretti is holed up in a bar downtown.
I hang up and kick my bike to life, riding down the beach past the weightlifters and the dog-walkers, stopping outside the bar. It’s a dingy place, a squat gray building nestled between two abandoned storefronts, one of which is being worked on by construction workers. I check my pistol and approach the building confidently. If there’s one thing I’ve learned dealing with other gangs, it’s that a man can never show fear to another man. Maybe with a woman it’s all right, or it can be all right, but not when there’s a group of bloody men ready to turn to violence. So I walk up to the bar like I haven’t got a thing in the world to fear, even if I know that death might be waiting for me. The door is grimy, covered in what might be oil, might be blood. Music plays from inside. A couple of men laugh.
I knock and step back, waiting.
A peephole slides open in the door, two brown eyes study me, and then the peephole slides closed. A moment later the door whines open and a mafia kid looks me up and down, eighteen, all golden jewelry and slicked-back hair.
“I’m here for Moretti,” I say.
“You wanna see the boss?”
“I wanna see the boss,” I confirm.
“You got a death wish or somethin’?”
“Maybe so. But to be honest, kid, that ain’t any of your fucking business. So why don’t you take me to him so that the men can talk.”
He don’t like that any, and I can’t blame him. It wasn’t so long ago I was eighteen myself. Any time some older bastard spoke to me like that I thought I might snap. But I see it in his face: the rising violence and then the falling defeat. He shrugs and nods me in. Absurdly, considering the circumstances, I feel a little guilty. We walk down narrow hallways until we arrive at a bar area. The floor is sticky, the carpet riddled with holes and covered with chewing gum. The wallpaper on the walls has mostly chipped away; in some places the wall gives way to the next room, flashes of beds and bathrooms.
The kid takes me into the main bar area and nods to a tall, skinny man with an eagle-like nose and long spider-leg fingers. The bar is full of men and women, strippers sitting on laps and dancing at tables, fat old men pawing at them and eager young men doing the same. The music cuts short when they spot me. All at once the men stand up, going for their guns. I stand straight, my face composed, not letting a moment of fear pass across my face, even though I’d be fuckin’ insane not to feel fear at a moment like this.
I swallow and then call across the now-silent bar, “The president of the Demon Riders is here to talk to the boss. I heard that Moretti was a tough guy. But maybe I heard wrong. Maybe he’s the sort of fella to have a man killed who comes here in peace.”
That gets to him. His spider-leg fingers clamp together and then release. He nods to one of his men. I raise my arms as he pats me down. He takes my gun and then touches my jacket, as if he’s going to take that off, too.
“You wanna lose a hand?” I say to the guy. “You can take this jacket off my corpse, but that’s it. You ain’t getting it otherwise.”
The man looks to Moretti, who shrugs. He steps away from me and I walk across the bar with dozens of eyes locked on me.
He waves away a redheaded stripper and nods at the seat opposite him. “You must be Thorne’s boy,” he says.
“You must be the man who burned down our clubhouse a while back.”
He inclines his head. “I’m glad my work hasn’t been forgotten. You’re either a brave man or a stupid man, coming in here like this.”
“Maybe I’m somewhere in between.”
He smiles, but there’s metal in it. “How can I help you, Thorne’s boy?”
“I’m here to tell you that this woman your men have been hounding, this Melissa Collins, you have no claim to her. You never put any money into her father’s business. You never had a stake in the business. My dad did, and that’s it. So I don’t see how you can justify breaking into her goddamn apartment.” Emotion enters my voice: anger, but also outrage and fear, fear for Cora but also fear for myself, because if Cora got hurt I’d never be able to forgive myself. I kill it with an effort. “She’s ours. Her money’s ours.”
“Money,” Moretti says, steepling those long fingers. “Is that really what this is about, Thorne’s boy?”
“It’s business,” I say. “What else would it be about? Maybe you want a war with us. Maybe you think that’d be pretty damn easy. But let me tell you something, old man, if this comes to war, I’ve got some boys who make these bastards look like kittens.”
His men bristle at that, but Moretti waves them down. “What are you proposing?” he asks.
“I’m proposing that you back off.”
“Right, of course. But you can’t really expect us to just walk away. Look around. We already have such a nice home here.”
I repress a sigh. I want to reach across the table and crush his throat, snap his neck, break his goddamn nose. “What do you want?”
He pauses and then leans across the table and rests his chin on his fingers, making a bed of them and bouncing his head up and down. It’s an oddly feminine gesture, one I wouldn’t expect to see from the leader of a mafia gang, but the men don’t flinch or think anything of it. I get an intuition that this man is someone to be feared, that he’s done terrible things and will do terrible things again. There’s no way he can sit there acting like that without men like these reacting, unless he’s a real tough bastard.
“What do I want? Now that is an interesting question, isn’t it? I’ve often wondered that. I’ve often asked myself that very same question. Because we all want something, don’t we?”
“Get to the point,” I growl. “I’m a busy man.”
“Yes, I imagine you are.” He grips the edge of the table, rocking back and forth. “When I was a boy, my father was a cruel man. He was the sort of man who made himself feel big and tough by raping his wife and beating his son. He would come home every day—”
“I don’t need the sob story,” I cut in.
He curls his lip, looks like he might spit on me, and then swallows his rage. “I killed him when I was ten years old. He was in the middle of raping my mother, and I walked in with a metal frying pan—still hot—and smashed his head over and over. I could smell his hair cooking as he died. That was the first man I killed.”
“Congratulations,” I say, feigning boredom. In reality he’s getting to me, even if I don’t want to admit it. He has a crazed look in his eyes, the look of a pyromaniac, somebody who just wants to burn everything down. I wonder if it was a mistake to come in here. I need to find a calm way to leave, a way that won’t cause these men to leap at me. I can’t show weakness. It’s like facing off against a wolf or a bear; the moment I break is the moment they run. “You still haven’t told me what you want.” Though I know, now, that he doesn’t want anything except to cause some mayhem.
“I used to judge my father for raping my mother,” he goes on, ignoring me. “But then I got older and I realized what sluts women are. Look at her.” He points to the woman next to him, right at her breasts. She’s around twenty and looks terrified behind her smiling mask. “What sort of whore dresses up like that and comes to a den full of killers? So who can blame my old man, really? What do I want? I don’t feel like answering that question. Maybe I’ll just have my boys string you up and skin you alive right here, and then have one of these little sluts suckle on your flayed cock.”
I click my neck from side to side at the threat. I’ll make you pay for that, I promise silently.
He trails his fingers toward the door. “You can go, tough guy. I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other again.”
I stand up and turn away. I should just leave. But I need to make him see. He needs to know that I won’t take this shit. I place my fists on the table and lean over him, looking into his face. I don’t like what I see there. He has the eyes of the sadist. But I don’t let that show. I
just stare. “If you touch her,” I say, “you’re a dead man.”
He crosses his legs, folding his hands over his knee, regarding me the same way a teacher would regard a precocious kid. “So you’re fucking this Melissa slut, then. It’s crazy what they’ll do to you, isn’t it? A pair of tits and a slit between the legs, some problems in their past which make them good at sucking dick, and voila, you’re helpless.”
I grit my teeth and make for the door. I haven’t fazed him at all. He whistles a tune as I hold my hand out to the kid, waiting for my gun. The kid looks at Moretti, who calls across the room, “Let him go, and turn the damn music back on!”
I snatch my gun and leave the bar, tucking it into my waistband and pacing across the street to my bike. I ride down onto the beach and sit on my bike a while, looking at the sea. I’d come to the sea as a kid sometimes, sitting on the sand with whatever girl I was banging, smoking a joint and saying some wannabe philosophical shit about the way the ocean moves and the way our lives move, not making sense with the weed coursing around my brain. I watch the sea now and wander if it’s gonna be blood, and if so, how much blood. How many of our men are gonna fall ’cause of this crazy fuck? How many wives are gonna lose husbands, kids are gonna lose fathers?
I sit there for longer than I mean to, because I get to thinking about Dad and how he would handle this. I remember the time a rival biker gang was making moves on the Demon Riders. I wasn’t patched in then, but I walked into the club one day to find ten men tied to chairs in the bar area, socks stuffed into their mouths. Mom wouldn’t have let me stay but she wasn’t there. Dad waved me in, told me not to look away. It was the first time I saw a man die.
I call up Cora’s security, just to check on her. The phone rings for a couple of minutes and then goes to voicemail. I call the other fella and the same thing happens.
I call Spider.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
“Boss.”
“Get to Cora’s work right now! I think there’s a fuckin’ problem!”