CHAPTER 1
Sera’s POV
The neon sign buzzed like a dying wasp.
I should have kept walking. The "O" in PURGATORY had burned out weeks ago, maybe months, leaving the sign to read PURGAT RY in sickly red light above a steel door with no window. The kind of bar that didn't want you to see inside before you committed.
But my heels were blistering, raw, wet heat against both pinkie toes and the back of my left ankle where the strap had been chewing skin for three blocks. My phone was dead. The rideshare I'd ordered forty minutes ago had cancelled twice. The financial district had emptied out hours ago, and the April wind cut through my silk blouse like it wasn't there, carrying the sour tang of the river.
Five minutes. One outlet. I'd be gone.
The door was heavier than it looked. I had to lean into it with my shoulder, cold steel biting through silk, and when it finally gave, the sound hit first, a low, bass-heavy throb I felt in my molars. Cigarette smoke. Whiskey. Something metallic underneath, like rust or blood. The floor was sticky beneath my heels. The overhead lights were caged in wire, casting crosshatch shadows across faces that didn't want to be seen clearly.
Every head turned.
Not slowly. Not casually. Every single person in that bar looked at me at the same time, and the silence that followed was so complete I could hear ice settling in someone's glass.
I counted leather cuts. Twelve. All black. All bearing the same patch: a crowned skull wreathed in iron chain. Iron Saints MC.
I'd walked into a clubhouse.
Turn around. Turn around right now.
But I'd already taken three steps inside, and the door had swung shut behind me with a sound like a coffin lid.
"You lost, princess?"
The voice came from a booth to my left. A man with a beard like steel wool and arms sleeved in faded tattoos grinned at me, not kindly. The woman beside him looked me up and down like she was pricing cuts at a butcher counter.
"Phone died." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I just need an outlet for five minutes."
Someone laughed. Low, ugly.
"Five minutes." The bearded man tasted the words. "What do you think, boys? We got five minutes for the lady?"
The laughter spread. My fingers tightened around my dead phone. I mapped exits without moving my head. Front door behind me. A hallway past the bar. A staircase, roped off with a chain.
I was calculating the distance to the hallway when the room changed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a shift, like barometric pressure dropping before a storm. The laughter died. The bearded man's grin collapsed into something flat. Even the bartender, a woman with a shaved head and a neck tattoo, went still.
I felt him before I saw him.
He came from the staircase. The chain had been unhooked without me noticing, and he descended the last three steps with the unhurried ease of a man who had never once been rushed in his life. His boots hit the concrete in a muted percussion I felt through the soles of my feet. Tall, well over six feet. Shoulders that filled the doorframe. Dark hair, cut short on the sides and pushed back on top, gleaming under the caged lights like wet ink. A jaw that looked carved from something harder than bone. Tattoos climbed his neck and disappeared beneath a black henley that fit like it had been stitched onto his body. His hands hung loose at his sides, scarred across the knuckles, split and healed and split again.
But it was his eyes.
Dark. Not brown, darker. The kind of black that swallowed light whole. And they were locked on me with an intensity that made my lungs forget their function.
He didn't look at anyone else.
Just me.
He stopped six feet away. Leather, smoke, and something expensive underneath, something that didn't belong in this room.
"Who let her in?"
His voice was low. Quiet. The kind of quiet that didn't need volume because the room was already silent.
"She walked in herself, Prez," someone offered from the back. "Phone's dead. Wants to charge it."
Those black eyes moved over my face. My throat. The pencil skirt and silk blouse I'd worn to my interview that morning, a lifetime ago. His gaze was a physical thing, heavy and thorough. I had the disorienting sensation of being catalogued. Measured. Filed.
"You shouldn't be here," he said.
"I'm aware." I held his gaze. "I'm leaving."
I turned toward the door.
"No."
One word. It stopped me like a hand on my spine.
I looked back. He hadn't moved. His expression hadn't changed. But something behind those eyes had shifted, a gear engaging, a decision made.
"You saw the patches," he said. "You saw the faces. You know the name."
"I don't know anything. I came in to charge my phone."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Something worse.
"Sit down," he said. "I'll decide when you leave."
