Destiny's Love
Page 1
Table of Contents
End of Book 1– Please Read This
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Important information…
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgments
Destiny’s Love
Destiny’s Love
Savage Love: Book 1
Preston Walker
Contents
Get Your FREE Preston Walker Book
Important information…
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
End of Book 1– Please Read This
Acknowledgments
Destiny’s Love
Get Your FREE Preston Walker Book
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Important information…
This book, “Destiny’s Love” is the First book in the Savage Love Series. However, this book and every other book in the series can be read as a stand-alone. Thus, it is not required to read the first book to understand the second (as so on). Each book can be read by itself.
1
The faint cry of an infant split the night, causing the other wolves to stir. Destiny North felt the disturbance deep inside his soul, a muted breed of confusion and irritation that melted away as soon as the newborn was silenced. Shaking his head, he continued walking. He really had no particular destination in mind. He had guards posted around the perimeter, as he always did. His patrol wasn’t necessary.
He did it anyway, because that was what a leader did. He led by example, going far beyond what would be required of a regular member of society. His word was law here, and he wanted to keep it that way.
Of course, that was going to be much more difficult with the recent events being what they were. The child was going to be the start of something big, a shift in dynamics. Everyone knew it, and it unsettled them. Change was a frightening thing, even for bikers. No one knew what future they were headed toward. It made them restless, got their blood up. Already there had been more fighting amongst themselves as they let off steam in the way only wolves knew so well.
The fighting was fine, as far as Destiny was concerned. Wolves always fought, always roughhoused with one another as a way of maintaining the boundaries of the group. Rather than push members apart, coming together in a fight only brought them all closer.
However, if a large portion of them all started to fight at one time, he could lose control of the pack entirely.
All of this as a result of a baby.
Destiny walked silently through the home he had made, senses opened wide, making sure everything was as it should be. He left no area unseen, no stone unturned. He opened every single door and peered into the darkness beyond, piercing straight through with his lupine vision. He checked every scent, investigated every single sound. At a time like this, everything was important.
He owned this two-story parking garage, bought extremely cheap several years ago at a real estate auction where the owner wanted to be done with it. No one else even bid on the place, not that he blamed them. A parking garage in an average sector of downtown Pensacola, Florida, wasn’t exactly a purchase guaranteed to turn a profit, especially when the garage in question had seen much better days. Rust crawled up the pipes like some sort of gravity-defying blood that can only be found in a horror movie. The entire thing was self-contained and enclosed within solid walls, which would have been a good thing if not for the fact that the temperature-regulating machinery had long since been scavenged by looters for spare parts. Raccoons, rats, and all manner of other invasive city animals had come in and torn the insulation from inside the walls to make their nests, leaving huge gaps where wind and heat could knife through.
It was a money pit.
He bought it anyway, spending every last penny of the savings he’d built up throughout the years by working long hours at various mechanic workshops all across the city. The men in charge gave him the dirty work, the boring work and the endless menial tasks of shop maintenance. He cleaned the tools endlessly, a cycle of filth. Irate, irrational tourists were sent to him because no one else wanted to deal with them.
Destiny took it all, earned money and earned a damn solid reputation, knowing he would need it someday. He had connections all across the city now, a web of favors, whose strings he could tug whenever necessary.
After buying the garage, he brought his gang there.
His motorcycle club, his biker pack. Call it what you would. It was all the same. They ran together, rode together, lived and died together.
They were the Shadow Claws.
That was all back in the early days of the pack, shortly after they formed their group. He ended up having to do most of the work on the garage himself, converting it from a useless hunk of wasted land into a base of operations. At that point, the others caught on and pitched in. Now the garage was equipped with utilities, bedrooms, a makeshift hospital, a workout gym, a kitchen, and anything else a wolf could ever ask for. Members were free to come and go as they pleased, as long as they respected the place and didn’t do anything too crazy. Hell, some of them came and never left. Destiny took rent from them in weekly installments, then turned the money around to keep bettering the place. It was far from perfect.
But it was his. He had made it, breathed life into it, led the others to it so they could prosper. It was worth more than money to him.
He would fight to his very last breath to keep it this way.
“Dusty.”
Destiny turned at the sound of his nickname, which he had earned because of the coloration and pattern of his wolf pelt. He heard the approaching footsteps before the person called out to him, though he’d been trying to ignore the sound as long as possible. Everyone wanted something from him. That was to be expected.
He just didn’t have anything to give. Like it or not, he was as clueless as they were.
“Lee,” he said, by way of greeting. “What’s going on?”
Ulysses stepped out of the shadows gathered underneath a nearby staircase, appearing to almost shrug his disguise away. He was a loyal member of SC, slim for an alpha but certainly not lacking in ferocity. “I knew you’d be coming by here, like you always do, so I waited. I need to talk to you about something.”
“You could say the same thing about any place inside the garage,” Destiny pointed out. “I’m everywhere.”
Ulysses actually did shrug this time. “That’s what you want to think.”
Destiny went out of his way to provide security for his pack members. For his efforts to go unappreciated really irked him.
He’s trying to push my buttons. He wants a reaction, something different to happen. He’s scared like the rest of them.
Gritting his teeth, he slowly counted backwards from five before pulling in a deep breath. These coping tactics never actually helped him act calmer, as they only made him all that much more aware of the reason he was having to do them, like staring at a needle being pushed into his vei
ns. However, they did give him time to think. By the time the syringe was withdrawn, he normally had a response prepared.
“So, what’s bothering you?”
“Walk with me?” Ulysses asked. The request being voiced like a command really irked Destiny even further. He gritted his teeth again, felt enamel squeak grittily against enamel. He imagined grinding and grinding his teeth with every single bit of irritation that came to him throughout the days, thin layers of white sloughed away in intervals. By the end of the week, he would have worn them down to infantile nubs protruding a paper’s width above the gumline.
A disturbing image, but most of his thoughts ran in that direction these days.
“Of course, Lee. I’ve always got time for anyone who needs me.”
Relief flashed in Ulysses’s eyes. He nodded and turned away. No doubt when Destiny looked at him again, the relief would have been replaced by an expression far more irritating. However, the glimpse underneath the other wolf’s mask made him feel softer on the inside. He did have time for anyone, no matter how big or small the issue.
Holding onto that thought, he followed Ulysses around the side of the staircase, and up the steps to the second floor of the garage. This floor was where most of the sleeping areas and relaxation activities were located, giving the wide expanse an air of peacefulness that lingered in the very atmosphere like a scent. Calm had seeped into the walls, the floor. Encountering that sensation was a heady feeling, like pulling in a deep breath of incense directly from the burning stick.
Rather than be calmed by the aura, Destiny found himself tensing up. All of this could be lost in an instant if he played his cards wrong, misjudged the worth of the hand he held. Damn hard to play poker when you couldn’t even see the opponent.
The wide concrete ground was covered in rugs and lengths of carpet, a patchwork of colors laid down in an attempt to keep the cold from leeching up. The heat and humidity that was Florida’s natural state had little effect on buildings like this. They formed their own weather, developed their own ecosystems, and the result was usually somewhere within the three fields of damp, musty, and chilly.
Clusters of furniture and low, makeshift walls crafted from pallets and other scraps of wood helped to break up the imposing emptiness of the space, giving it the appearance of a maze. Or unfinished blueprints, a house eternally in a state of planning, doomed to never take shape.
Ulysses skirted around the outside of all this, taking up a position at one of the windows at the opposite end of the building. The low, murmuring sounds and snores of the nearby sleeping wolves faded away to the point where a person could almost imagine they were all alone in the world.
So, that’s what you wanted. Why you waited there in particular. You wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be interrupted.
Stepping up beside the smaller alpha wolf, Destiny looked out the window. There wasn’t much to see, even given the fact that the weather was warm and fair and tourists had flocked to the city in huge quantities. The population swelled grotesquely during the spring and summer months, then bottlenecked down when the ocean got cold and rough around the season that passed for winter in Florida. A bigger city would have been lively right now, perhaps even more frantic with activity than during the day.
Pensacola was different. There was no real skyline to speak of, no towering plazas hosting parties that lasted for days. When night came, the beaches closed. When the beaches closed, the beach-centric crowd went into what was essentially hibernation until they reopened in the morning. Some of them might go to bars, out to dinner, to concerts, or movies. The rest would settle in like hermit crabs in a temporary shell, closing themselves off until it came time to scuttle out onto the sand once more.
Aside from the distant glow of orange sodium lights from the street, the occasional sweeping beam of yellow from a car passing through on its way to somewhere else, the city was dead. Slumbering. A series of gray, lifeless shadows.
“I hate to say this, Dusty, but maybe we should kick them out.”
Destiny stared at the other man, his face silhouetted in the dark. “You’re going to need to clarify what you just said. So I can understand.” He wanted to understand, on top of that. All opinions were valid.
Ulysses huffed. He wasn’t really small by any means, and it was still obvious he was an alpha wolf. That being said, he seemed to have some sort of deep-seated issue where his own appearance and stature was involved. He constantly went out of his way to pick fights, to assert himself in ways he really shouldn’t. Rather than making people respect him, his behavior instead made them view him as a stuffy jerk. Knowing this, Destiny tried to give him some slack.
“I mean Cain and that Ralphie guy. And their whiny pup. They’re just going to cause trouble for us.”
Of course, Ulysses didn’t often make it easy to give him an easy time. “The pup whines because he’s only two weeks old,” Destiny explained. “And his name is Knox. He’s a baby. You did the same thing when you were just born.”
“Not as much as that kid does. Knox, I mean.”
A small victory, getting Ulysses to use the pup’s name. Destiny felt a little more hopeful anyway. Some members of the pack were harder to deal with, but he appreciated them no less than the others. “I’m not sure how you would know that, since we don’t really start forming memories until we’re about three years old.” He had only just read that in one of the pamphlets Ralphie and Cain had in the infirmary. He saw no need to point this out to Ulysses, since his sudden outpouring of knowledge about kids looked like it had put the other man off-guard. “Unless that’s what your mother told you, in which case she probably lied just to let you keep believing that you’re perfect.”
“Shit, no one’s perfect.” Ulysses’s breath fogged against the glass as he chuckled, creating a faint mist of condensation that rapidly evaporated. “And my momma never told me anything unless it was to shut up.”
Destiny wondered if there was a story there, if he should press for information in the future.
“I understand they’ve got history. They’re in love. Can’t fault them for that. I just don’t think we should be the ones who have to suffer for it.”
“They’re only staying here until Ralphie feels better. They’ll go home after that, and you won’t have to hear Knox whining unless they come to visit. In that case, you can just get up and walk away. Go on a patrol. Buy groceries. Is that good enough for you?”
“They’ll still be in the pack. We’ll still be in danger because of them.”
Destiny tossed both of his hands up into the air, then brought them both down hard on the windowsill. Pain reverberated up his arms, rattled his teeth in his jaw, putting a momentary dent in his anger. “We would be in danger anyway. What don’t you see about this, Ulysses? What’s done is done. We can’t take it back or pretend it never happened. It’s out there. We can’t escape it. Even if we kick them out, Lethal Freedom might not actually believe that we kicked them out. They’ll think it’s all a ploy to get them off our backs, and everything would still stay the same. Do you understand?”
Ulysses took a step back, his eyes widening for a moment. In his disbelief at having actually elicited such a strong response from his pack leader, he seemed like an entirely different wolf. With all the stress and aggressiveness wiped from his face, he looked much younger and more naïve. He was more like a child pretending to be an adult, a pup standing in the place of a wolf.
Hell, they were all like that. Pretending they knew more than they did. That was why Destiny stayed as the leader of SC, because he actually knew more, could put that knowledge to use. Being an alpha was about more than brawn. It was about knowing when to use that brawn and how. He didn’t fight unless he was getting between other wolves in an attempt to stop them from hurting each other when their roughhousing went too far, or to protect his pack, or to defend himself when someone, rarely, tried to take over his position.
He could have easily started a war. All it would take wa
s a declaration, a few simple words that even a toddler could say. West versus east. Shadow Claws versus Lethal Freedom.
Lethal Freedom was the enemy, the pack of wolf bikers who controlled the east end of Pensacola. The disputes between the two of them were less about the human need for total dominance and more about the wolf instinct to protect what belonged to them. They displayed and pranked and annoyed more than they fought. It was almost a Cold War between them, an endless series of threats that all seemed to be heading towards something bigger…which never came.
Cain Savage was a member of Shadow Claws. A damn good shadow, always on the lookout for information as he rode around the city; an even better claw, a ruthless fighter with all the sure, steady strength of a goddamn tank. He was Destiny’s unofficial second-in-command, a little too instinct-driven for the full job, but nevertheless a good replacement where necessary. Wherever Cain walked, he attracted followers and admirers by way of some inexplicable magnetic force.
Then, Cain fell in love with Ralphie, who belonged to Lethal Freedom.
There was history between Cain and Ralphie, a past relationship that had been only recently rekindled. Destiny knew the whole story by heart now, so much that the words didn’t actually matter as much as the information and feeling conveyed. The two lovers had found each other again through odd circumstances, stitched their lives together as one. Ralphie grew pregnant. It was around that point everything started coming apart, as the members of LF realized where their favorite omega had gone.
They were understandably pissed. Everyone was. This shouldn’t have happened. The wolves were on separate sides to prevent this exact thing from occurring.