Axl (Sons of Chaos MC #1)
Read Axl (Sons of Chaos MC #1) Online
Authors: Riley Rollins
Copyright © 2016 by Dolch Press LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real life is purely coincidental.
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I killed my bike’s engine as I slowed to a stop in the junkyard, pulling up alongside Ryker and Lynch. Behind them were ten or twelve guys on their bikes and the box truck that held our guns.
Everything was in place for the deal.
My bike’s final rumble escaped into the scorched Arizona desert, echoing through the rows of dead, shredded cars. Then, the junkyard was quiet.
“Heat’s fuckin’ miserable,” grunted Lynch, our road captain. He dipped his hand into a saddle bag and withdrew a silver canteen which he unscrewed and tipped against his lips. “Goddamn Reapers chose the most fucked up place ever for this deal.”
He was right. I was drenched in sweat under my skullcap. My balls were boiling and every inch of exposed skin was frying in the sun. But it didn’t fucking matter. Lynch should’ve known better than to bitch about the deal to his VP and President.
“Shut up, Lynch,” I growled. As VP, I kept unruly Sons in line so Prez Ryker didn’t have to. I led the men. Set the example. And shut whiny little cunts right the fuck up. “Ryker says we do this, we do it. Selling our guns to Reapers gets my fuckin’ goat too, but this ain’t a choice.”
“Bullshit,” said Lynch, turning to face me. “We could’ve sold to the Colombians, not the enemy,” he sneered.
His face was reddened and rough, his shaved head pockmarked with scars. His nose was visibly crooked, broken in God knows how many bar fights. Ryker, with his long graying hair and gaunt figure, was rough around the edges himself. But Lynch was a real ugly motherfucker.
My fists tensed and my teeth clenched. “Fall in line, Lynch,” I said. I locked my eyes onto his, my expression deadly. He’d been this way ever since I made VP. Wanted the job himself and now thought I was keeping him on the outside. Well, he wasn’t wrong. Only reason he was still breathing was ‘cause Ryker owed him big time, but I wanted him out. Fucker was a wildcard and couldn’t be trusted.
“Lynch, you got a problem, we’ll settle up later,” I said. “This ain’t the time.”
“VP’s right,” said Ryker. His voice drawled and had a hint of his Scottish accent. “Stay hard, stay sharp. This is a deal with the devil.”
Lynch grunted. I wanted to hop off my bike and put a fist through his eye socket, but Ryker was right. We had to focus.
I listened for Reaper bikes, but there was only the howl of hot wind sweeping through twisted, trashed car frames. I looked down at my watch. Sixteen minutes after three already. The Reapers were definitely fucking with us, letting us sweat. And since we needed their money more than they needed our guns, there wasn’t shit we could do about it.
Then, I heard their bikes and saw dust and exhaust rising from the opposite end of the junkyard. Didn’t feel like an ambush to me. Little disappointing, can’t lie. For a Son of Chaos like me born to fuck and fight, any lost opportunity to crack Reaper skulls was a damn shame.
The Reapers’ bikes came into full view and rode toward us, down the center lane of the junkyard. About a dozen bikes and one box truck, just like our crew. Just like we agreed.
As they pulled closer, I recognized the lead rider. Tony Vargas, fat man extraordinaire and Reaper president.
Ask the guy to walk his own grammy across the street, next thing she knows she can’t find her wallet. Or just ends up dead in an alley.
Vargas came to a stop ten yards in front of us, his guys pulling up behind him. He dismounted his bike, its suspension groaning in relief. Next to me, Ryker swung a lithe leg over his bike and dismounted. He stepped forward, catlike, his dark and white speckled ponytail swinging in the desert wind. “Vargas,” he said grimly.
Vargas’s face broke into a shit-eating grin. I had to fight back an urge to charge forward, seize his pudgy Reaper head, and mop the desert floor with his face.
“Long time no see, Larson,” said Vargas. “You got the guns?”
Ryker stuck his thumb out and motioned toward the box truck. “Fifty AR rifles. Converted. Full auto sear in each one.”
Vargas rubbed his fat hands together. “God, that makes me hard,” he said. “You know, this could really be the start of something beautiful.”
Ryker shook his head. “No chance. One time only. And these are for killing Mongols only. If we ever hear a fucking whisper about these guns in Sons territory-“
Vargas cut him off. His face broke into a sickly sweet, innocent smile and he turned his palms upward, shrugging. “Have some faith, Larson,” he said, pointing to a gold cross that hung around his neck. “I’m a man,” he said, “of my word.”
“Cash,” said Ryker, stiffly.
Vargas motioned to a patch who had a duffel bag hanging from his shoulder. But as the man stepped forward, a voice from the pack of Reapers cried out.
“Boss—in the pickup!”
All heads, Sons and Reapers, swiveled to an old, rusted-out red Ford truck sitting next to our box truck. What I saw made my chest pound. Inside the pickup truck was a young little thing who didn’t look a day over 20. She was crouched down low behind the steering wheel, her shimmering black hair spilling over her shoulders.
She was holding—what looked to me—like a fucking video camera.
I had no idea how in the fuck she’d managed to sneak in there, or what she thought she was doing. Oh lord, was she dead. The two clubs would never let her out of here alive.
And that was just a real goddamn shame, because she was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen during my entire 28 years on this fucked-up Earth.
I grew up in Bumfuck, Nowhere, an outskirt of an outskirt somewhere in the middle of Arizona. On a map it was called Coppertail, but it was the kind of town that even mapmakers forgot about.
In a town of rednecks and skeletons, I was the smart, shy girl. The one with a bright future, the first one to go to college. My parents and the local townsfolk projected their own unfulfilled hopes and dreams onto my future, as if it were my destiny to finally bring Coppertail its glorious dues. In a washed up old slum like that, my smarts almost made me a Z-list celebrity, which in Coppertail was a legitimate credential.
Probably the worst part of the town, aside from its isolation, was its lack of guys. I noticed it more and more as I grew up. The men were drunkards and gamblers and the boys followed in their footsteps.
My parents brought me up to be better than that. They wanted me to move to the city after college and marry a lawyer or a nice Jewish doctor. And that was... fine, I guessed.
But it wasn’t exactly my fantasy. I mean, I was a nerd but I wasn’t a total square. I really just wanted a gorgeous knight in shining armor to ride through Coppertail, sweep me off my feet, and take me away. I didn’t think I was much to look at, but a girl can dream, right?
Of course, if that ever happened, my mom and dad would’ve been
“so”
disappointed in me for not “living up to my potential.” Yeah, that was my parents. Always wanting me to make them happy, even if I sacrificed my own happiness in the process.
Anyway, no knight ever appeared to take me away. But my parents did well with their accounting business, well enough to eventually send me to Southern Arizona University without too many student loans. At SAU I met some guys and got a little experience, but they all faded into the background.
I did at least fall in love with something at SAU: photography and cinema. So I designed my own major that culminated in a senior documentary project, a video documentary of Coppertail. It was my baby, and maybe my way of saying goodbye to the town. I just knew I was gonna blow the lid off the national indie film festivals with my hot new release, and send my career into the stratosphere straight out of college.
At least, that was my plan until that Thursday afternoon when I went out to the old Coppertail junkyard with my new video camera. I had a great idea to use the junkyard to represent the spirit of Coppertail—some tumbleweeds blowing in the wind through a graveyard of old, torn up metal corpses.
I parked my car, a little Honda Civic with a long-broken odometer, outside the junkyard grounds. I’d heard that driving into the junkyard was a guaranteed flat, so I left it outside the perimeter and walked in.
I was filming next to an old red Ford pickup when I heard the unmistakable growl of loud motorcycle pipes. But it wasn’t one bike, it was at least a dozen.
When they kept getting louder and louder, I got a weird feeling in my stomach. I always tried to follow my intuition, and my intuition told me to get out of sight. So I hopped into the truck and slouched down low. I kept my camera rolling, though, because that’s the number one rule of video journalism. Soon a second motorcycle gang showed up, and it began to dawn on me that I was somewhere I really should not have been.
Unfortunately for me, I was far less stealthy than I’d thought, and the bikers spotted me easily. I almost threw up all over myself when one of the bikers shouted, “in the pickup!”
After the shout, there was confusion. Time paused while the stink of betrayal billowed over the scene. I didn’t know much about motorcycle gang deals, but it didn’t take an expert to figure out what was happening when the gunfire started: Each club thought I was working for the other. And as I found out, motorcycle gangs really don’t like being spied on.
The only thing that saved my life was one biker—my knight in shining armor who I later came to know as Axl Archer—sprinting toward the pickup, diving in, and pinning my body down to the floor with his hard, muscled, tattooed, six-and-a-half foot body. It must’ve been the adrenaline, because even as I felt the shockwaves of bullets flying overhead, even as my video camera fell and shattered into pieces, all I could think about was how he instantly set my senses on fire.
“Who are you? Who fucking sent you?” he yelled over the gunshots. His elbow stabbed hard into my chest, pushing me against the Ford’s crusty floorboards. His weight crushed the air out of my lungs and brought me back to reality. Anger and confusion seethed through his perfect teeth and through his soft-looking lips. Sweat plastered his thick, black hair over his forehead, and dripped down his square jaw into his dark beard. He was like a heartthrob actor, meticulously vetted for a movie role, costumed and made up by the best in the industry. Except it wasn’t Hollywood, and he wasn’t an actor. He was the man that Hollywood tries to mimic.