BIKER QUEEN AND HER HELLBOUND KING

Chapter 1 Grace The highway had no name. No signs, no mile markers, nothing to tell me where I was going or how far I'd come from the thing I was running from. Just two lanes of asphalt cutting through the dark and my own headlights thrown back at me like the road was trying to warn me off. I'd been driving for six hours. Maybe seven. The gas station rag around my arm had soaked through twice, and I'd stopped caring about that somewhere around hour four, when the adrenaline flattened out, leaving only exhaustion and a determination to survive this. I turned the radio up instead. There wasn't anything interesting playing, but it was better than the silence. The back seat held everything I had left in this world. A research drive I'd stolen off a dead man's desk. A loaded gun I didn't even know how to use but I would use if it came down to it. And a glass vial of my own blood that Dr. Fenn had pressed into my palm with the last strength in his body, right before the ceiling came down. I hadn't looked at the vial since I'd shoved it into the cupholder. I wasn't going to look at it now. Instead, I looked at the road. I watched it blur and tried not to think about Dr Fenn's face. Tried not to think about the way he'd mouthed ‘run’ like the word itself was the last useful thing he had to give me. Tried very hard not to think about the betrayal. It still hurt just thinking about how he was going to give me away, like I didn't matter, like I wasn't human. “You're something special, Grace,” he had said with glee in his eyes. I had never seen that look in his eyes before, he looked crazy with happiness. “I am doing this for you. What you carry in your blood can change the entire world,” He continued, grabbing my arm when I tried backing away. He didn't look like the man who had brought me out of the foster system because I was ‘meant for something bigger’. Perhaps this was what he meant. I shook my head, clearing the thoughts of the man I would never see again. The man I'd spent the last few years with, someone I had considered family. I shook the thoughts out, he was gone now, dead and probably reduced to ash in the burning lab. I think about what had been moving through the smoke behind him after the lab exploded the first time, because whatever it was, it hadn't moved like anything I had a name for. Dr. Fenn knew it too, he f****d up trusting whatever that was, and it cost him his life, and our relationship. My headlights suddenly shined on something on the road. Something with too many joints, something that turned its head the wrong way. I closed my eyes and pressed the accelerator harder and told myself I hadn't seen it. That the explosion had done something to my eyes. That biochemists from Charlverk didn't end up on unnamed highways at 2 AM running from things that moved wrong in the dark, and that none of this was real, and that in approximately four hours I would find a motel and sleep for twelve years and wake up and all of it would make sense. The car died on a straight road with nothing on either side. No splutter, no warning light, no drama. The engine simply stopped, the headlights cut out. I rolled to a halt in absolute darkness and sat there for a moment with my hands still on the wheel, because my brain refused to process one more thing going wrong. I took deep breaths to steady myself. My entire body hurt, I haven't eaten anything all day. The plan had been to get dinner after work before everything had gone to hell. I tried the ignition four times. Nothing. I could feel the tears coming but I held it in, it wasn't the time to breakdown yet, I wasn't safe yet. I got out of the car. The night was cold and completely still, and I stood on the centre line and looked in both directions and there was nothing. No lights, no signs, no sound of other traffic. Just the dark and the smell of pine and something else underneath it, something faintly electric, like the air before a storm. Then I saw the light. It was off the road to the right, warm and amber through the trees, distant enough that I couldn't make out a building. Just the glow of it. And I stood there for a long moment telling myself all the reasonable things. That I should stay with the car. That walking toward unknown lights in the middle of the night on a road that didn't appear to exist was the kind of decision that ended badly. But the light pulsed, like a living thing, like warmth. It sang to me and I couldn't resist it even if I tried. I thought about whatever it was that was chasing me and looked at the light one more time. There was a safer option, and it wasn't in the darkness in the middle of nowhere. I took the gun from the back seat, the drive and the vial and I walked toward the light. I didn't know how long I walked for, but when I finally came back to my senses, I was standing before a bar. The bar was called Venom, I could tell because there was a sign above the door. There were bikes outside. A lot of them, big and dark and lined up like a statement. The windows glowed amber with light. I could hear faint music and movement, letting me know they were still open. Without thinking too much, I pushed the door open. The music stopped. I don't mean it faded or skipped. I mean it stopped, mid-note, like my presence hit the pause button. Every head turned. I felt the attention land on me all at once, the weight of it, and I stared back at all of them. I had a gun tucked into my waistband, I would pull it out and shoot if there were any sudden movements. Then I saw the man behind the bar. He was shirtless and almost every inch of skin was inked. I swallowed, this couldn't be good. He was looking at me the way no one had ever looked at me, like he knew me. He looked at me like he'd been expecting me, like my arrival was something he'd already prepared for, and whatever the cost of it was, he'd already accepted it. I felt like I'd just made the worst decision of my life, whatever was in the darkness was safer than this man staring at me right now. I took a step backwards from the door and the room tilted. I got one more second of his eyes, dark and fixed on mine, before the floor came up to meet me and everything went black.