Kaeden

  Kaeden

  A Motorcycle Club Romance (Red Death MC)

  Naomi West

  Copyright © 2020 by Naomi West

  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.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Kaeden: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Red Death MC)

  1. Kaeden

  2. Fiona

  3. Fiona

  4. Kaeden

  5. Fiona

  6. Kaeden

  7. Fiona

  8. Kaeden

  9. Kaeden

  10. Fiona

  11. Kaeden

  12. Fiona

  13. Fiona

  14. Kaeden

  15. Kaeden

  16. Fiona

  17. Kaeden

  18. Fiona

  19. Kaeden

  20. Fiona

  21. Kaeden

  22. Fiona

  23. Kaeden

  24. Fiona

  25. Kaeden

  Epilogue

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  Books by Naomi West

  Kaeden: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Red Death MC)

  A dark, fast-burn motorcycle club romance.

  I love three things in this world: my motorcycle, my MC, and my whiskey.

  There’s no room for anything else. Especially not after the dark, twisted childhood I had.

  The pink-haired waitress is determined to make herself the fourth thing, though.

  I’ll allow it—for one night only.

  My plan was simple: take her hard, then leave before she woke up.

  But life ain’t ever that easy.

  Especially when my enemies come to make her scream.

  They’ll do anything to hurt me and mine, so they kidnap her to make me surrender.

  Not gonna happen.

  That means I’ve got two choices:

  Turn my back on the only good thing that’s ever happened to me…

  Or wade through hell to reclaim the woman I love.

  My only question is this:

  How much ammo do I need?

  1

  Kaeden

  “Fucking bastards,” Shotgun growls as we duck down behind the old rusty tables. They’re stacked on top of each other in the warehouse, and we damn near get our heads blown off when we kick over the tallest tower and crouch down behind them. It’s lucky there are so many of them, otherwise we’d be eating lead without any way to protect ourselves; one table would be death for us. Not that the situation looks any better. This was supposed to be a routine meet with the Mexicans, buy some guns, do some business, go on with our lives.

  I have to agree with Shotgun. “Fucking bastards.” I blind-fire my pistol and hear a man scream; reckon I clipped him. When I peek around the other side of the barricade, I see that I’m right; the prick is lying on the floor with his guts spilling from his belly like he’s a goddamn piñata. But all the Mexicans are dead, too, lying in their own blood right next to the shipment. It’s just me and Shotgun. There are about fifteen of them, and more charging into the warehouse every second. It’s a damn hot day in Austin and it’s getting hotter with all this gun smoke. My eyes sting with blood and gunfire.

  “What do we do?” Shotgun mutters, shouldering his rifle. He adjusts the sights and looks at me. Shotgun’s a tall man, a red-haired man, and a fierce man. He’s got a scar down the left side of his face that never quite healed properly, all jagged around his eye so that his eyebrow is a weird, curvy line. He grimaces, and his patchy beard grimaces with him.

  “We kill every one of these pricks and we get our shipment and we sail off into the motherfucking sunset.” I laugh grimly.

  “Maybe that’s what we’d like to do.” Shotgun laughs, just as grimly. “Are we dying for this shipment? That’s my question. If we’ve got to die, then all right, but is this what we’re dying for? A few M-16s?”

  I bite down, grind my teeth, more and more of the bastards surrounding us. The only reason they don’t work their way around the tables is because of the tripwires we set up before the meet. They were meant for any ambushing Mexicans, but they work just as well on the Nine Circles MC. I’d almost prefer the nine circles of hell to these cowards, though.

  “No.” I sigh. “We’re not dying for this, Shotgun. You’re right.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we ought to be grateful that we’re smarter than these dumb fucks. We brought flashbangs. They didn’t.”

  Shotgun nods and wraps his rifle’s strap over his arm, reaching for his belt. I do the same. We don’t have to speak about what we’re going to do next. Shotgun and I have been brothers ever since I joined the club. All men in the club are brothers, but Shotgun’s my right hand. He takes out his flashbang and I do the same, and then both of us inch to the opposite edges of the barricade and silently count to five, like we’ve done before. I release the pin and toss the grenade in a high arc. Men shout, there’s a moment of odd silence, and then—bang; white light fills the room like a bolt of lightning. Not that I see it; I’m already heading for the back door as the Nine Circles gasp and cough and swear.

  “They still got the damned shipment.” Shotgun and I ride out to one of the quieter lakes, near the clubhouse, and hang around for a while to make sure no Nine Circles are following us. He spits into the water and turns to me, sighs, and lights a cigarette. He offers me one but I shake my head. “You quit again?”

  “Yeah. You know what they say. Tenth time’s a charm.” I try for a laugh but it sounds hollow.

  “Who’s going to let the boss know?” Shotgun asks after he’s smoked his cigarette down to a stub in two drags. Smoke swells around his face.

  “I will,” I tell him. “It was my job. I’m the point man on this. There’s no need for you to get involved.”

  “What were we supposed to do, anyway?” He walks over to his bike, looks like he might kick it, then lowers his foot. Spinning on me, he snaps, “The fuck were we supposed to do, Kaeden? We were watching for the Mexicans, not these pricks.”

  “I thought these Nine Circles motherfuckers were playing.” I run my fingers over the hot metal of my magnum, pressed against my hip. The Austin sun blares down like a red coin, hot even as it drops below the skyline. “But they’re not, Shotgun. These bastards are serious. This proves it. Going after a Red Death shipment?” I shake my head slowly. “There will be blood for this.”

  “Yeah, but whose?” Shotgun mutters. “They say this Reaper fella is one mean bastard.”

  I bare my teeth at him more than I smile. “And I’m not? Go on, Shotgun. Go and find yourself a bottle and a girl. Let me talk to the boss.” I pat him on the back—sometimes it feels like the younger man is more sensitive than a man in our line of work ought to be—and climb onto my bike. Thirty years old, yet my bones are hurting today, and hurting fierce. Losing will do that to a man.

  I ride out to the clubhouse on the outskirts of town, sitting alone by the side of a lonely road just off the interstate. No one comes this way much since it leads to a railyard that isn’t a railyard anymore, shut down sometime before I joined the club. The bricks are red, baking, and a few bikes and cars sit in the lot. I walk through the clubhouse, past the fellas and the framed photographs on the wall, the hunting rifle the first president killed a bear with, the mounted head of the same bear, and the decommissioned bike of a brother fallen in battle … and then I knock on Dirk’s office door, near the back of the bar.

  “Silence?” By the way he says it, I know he’s expecting me.

  “Yeah.” I push
the door open.

  The office is simple, with a desk and a few pictures on the walls of the boss’ family and a few brothers. There aren’t any pictures of me, which makes sense since we’re not that close; we’re brothers, but even brothers like some more than others. Not that I dislike the man. He’s almost sixty, with a mane of white hair and a knotted beard of gray and blood-red patches. His nose is hooked and twice-broken, and his hands are covered in spiderweb tattoos which wrinkle when he folds them.

  “So they finally made their move.” He nods at the chair opposite him.

  I take it. “Looks that way. They must’ve gotten to one of the Mexicans—one of them who wasn’t there today—to find out what was going down. Either that or they’re tailing somebody. But it wasn’t our slip, boss, since the only two involved in this were me and Shotgun.”

  “I know that,” Dirk mutters. “These fucking bastards. These fucking pricks. They think they can just ride in and steal one of our shipments and … they want a war, Silence. They want a fucking war and they think we’re scared of them. Reaper, this bastard calls himself. I never much understood men who give themselves their own nicknames. You, you’re Silence because you work so damn quietly, no other name fits. Shotgun used to carry that stupid custom piece around …”

  “Before it almost blew off his arm.”

  We both smile briefly.

  “But Reaper … who does he think he’s scaring, eh?”

  “Some small men think they’re big, and some big men think they’re small. I reckon most of the world’s problems can be explained by that, boss.”

  He looks at me oddly for a second, head tilted, and then nods. “We’ll hit these assholes, Silence. Make no mistake about that. We’ll hit them hard. We’ll hit them so that the next time they even think about making a move on us will make them shiver in their goddamn sleep.”

  “Sounds good to me.” I sit up. “When? Where? Shall I call up Shotgun? We can ride out right now, boss. I’m itching to get my hands on these bastards.” It really does feel like an itch: working its way all around my body, the itch of looking like a damn fool and having to take it. That’s not the kind of itch a man like me wants to take. I have to scratch it with blood, with lead, with death, with anything that’ll make it right.

  He looks like he’s impressed with that, but he shakes his head. “They want us to make a move out of anger. I’ve been at this a long, long time. They want us to react, but I won’t play that game. No, we’ll hit them on our own terms. Go on, Silence. Go find a girl. Go find a drink. Go find a fight if you need to. I reckon you’ve earned all three today.”

  “By losing a shipment?” I force my fists to unclench. It takes an effort.

  “By getting out of there alive so you can get revenge on these motherfuckers.” He nods at the door. It’s the end of the meeting.

  I go out to the bar and think about playing some cards for a second, or maybe getting my hands on a club girl, but somehow I find myself outside with a cigarette in between my lips and the lighter right next to it, the flame almost touching it. I’m about to smoke it when I think about weak men, how they can’t stop themselves from doing shit like smoking, and how strong men only smoke when they want to, not when they need to. I snap the cigarette in half and get on my bike.

  There’s an MC-owned bar in town called the Firefly—the name was picked by the manager, some hippie—which has the best security, whisky, and music for miles around. But that’s not the reason I ride out here. The reason is strutting across the bar floor right now, tall with the sort of body that draws a man’s eyes right to her legs. She has dyed pink hair and a nose ring which catches the hipster lantern lights set into the walls. She’s pale as hell, since she works indoors in the evening; nobody stays pale long in this red-hot city. She wears a black skirt and a professional shirt, but her tights show just how sexy her damn legs are; strong and thin and making me hard just looking at them.

  Her name is Fiona Wilkes, and I’ve had my eye on her for a while.

  “Another,” I tell the barman. He refills my whisky.

  I drain it and try not to think about the way the Red Death busted into the warehouse. Talking with the Mexicans and then … a stray bullet, right through the door, catching one in the side of the head. Running to the tables, knocking them over … hell, broken loose. I almost crush the glass in my hand; I force it to relax.

  “Another.”

  The barman, an old fella with white, sprouting ear-hair, looks like he wants to say something but thinks better of it.

  “Another.”

  “Another.”

  “Another.”

  When I’ve drunk enough whisky so that just watching this pink-haired girl doesn’t seem like enough, I get to my feet and glance around the bar for her. She’s on the opposite side, collecting some glasses from the table. She’s tall, all right, but she’s not taller than me. She leans over, causing the fabric of her dress to hug her tight ass.

  I walk toward her.

  2

  Fiona

  When I flunked college—which had nothing to do with my foster parents moving to New York, despite what they tried to tell me over the phone—I thought working at the most notorious bar in town would be fun. People whispered worries at me when I told them I was starting work at the Firefly. They said that it was gang-owned, more specifically MC-owned, and after I asked what an MC was, a shiver moved through my body. What got to me most about college was that I was bored all the time, which was maybe a bad reason to drop out, but there it is. This would be different. If I had to get a menial job—and I did—then at least it would be entertaining and exciting; no two days would be the same.

  Except that every two days are exactly the same. The Firefly is just another bar, a hipster-type place with students and young office workers mingling with bikers without even realizing it. It’s a lucrative business; that is all.

  I glance over to the bar as I take the glasses into the kitchen (since the busboy is sick today, again). Silence stares at me as I go, his eyes burning into me. At first I think I’m being paranoid, but he’s definitely staring at me. He’s a massively tall man. I think being six foot as a woman is a disadvantage, but Silence stands at six and a half feet. His nose has been broken a few times, it looks like, and his hair is jet-black and curly. He doesn’t smile often, but when he does it’s devilish and somehow scary. I only know about him from the stories the other waitresses tell, all of which are as terrifying as his dark, intriguing smile.

  I go back out to the bar and collect some more glasses, and then a presence walks up behind me. It feels like I’m suddenly standing beneath the shadow of a massive tree.

  I turn, my throat tight. He stares down at me with dark green eyes, a slight smirk on his lips, but no humor at all in his expression. He looks serious, and a little drunk, though not much. He never gets drunk as far as I know. One time—the other waitresses say—he drank two bottles of whisky and was sober half an hour later. Silly talk, but still.

  “Um, can I help you, sir?”

  He wears his leather jacket. It’s tight, and gets even tighter around his biceps when he lifts his arms to gesture at the storage cupboard at the rear of the bar, past a group of college kids … me two years ago, basically. I’m only twenty-three, and yet sometimes I feel like an old lady looking at those kids. “I think so,” he says. “That door; does it lock?”

  “Um, yes.” My heart is thundering in my chest, in my throat, in my everything. I can barely breathe, barely think. What’s worse is that the few times I’ve imagined Silence talking to me, I’ve been funny, interesting, witty. Now I can barely manage simple sentences!

  “Then you can help me by following me with a bottle of whisky.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “I’ll give you two minutes.”

  He pushes past me and makes for the storage cupboard. I watch him go, his massive bulk shouldering his way through the bar, not caring when a group of frat boys—making their wa
y toward the other college kids—cross his path. He barely glances at them as they take a collective step back, looking at each other with worried, suddenly boyish expressions. He goes into the storage closet and closes the door. I place my hand on my chest, my heartbeat slowing but not enough. I take a deep breath: calm, calm. But I cannot calm myself. This is too mad. This is too much.

  But what am I supposed to do? He’s an MC man and the MC own this club. I can’t say no. Is that just an excuse? I question myself as I get the whisky and follow him to the storage closet. Am I just following orders here? Or is there something else? Like many questions about myself, I leave this one unanswered. Despite what my English literature professors tried to make me believe, too much introspection is bad for you. All I know is that I don’t seriously think about ignoring his request … if you can call it a request.

  “You took your time,” he says, stepping out from the shadows and slamming the door behind me. He turns the lock and snatches the whisky bottle from me, nodding for me to follow him to a stool and a table in the corner where the kitchen staff sometime play cards.

  I sit on the stool, my heartbeat stampeding once again. Horses’ hooves gallop at the back of my throat.

  “You drink?” He takes a massive swig and slides the bottle across the table to me. Everything looks smaller with him here: the bottle, the stool, the table. Like he’s a giant in a regular-sized house.

  “Sure,” I murmur, though I never normally drink whisky. I need something, though, to combat the nerves which attack me every second. I take a small sip and fight the urge to gag. I fail and he laughs at me. “I’m not a huge fan,” I tell him, with more than a suspicion that my cheeks are turning red. “Anyway,” I go on, apparently emboldened by my little sip, “there’s no need to be a jerk about it.”