Ruled - Anne Marsh Hard Riders MC

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for his MC. Sucks to be a teenager stuck with babysitting duty when everyone else is out partying. My sneak exit through the window had been awesome up until the moment I returned and discovered our house surrounded by the blue-and-whites. Dear old dad got busted running arms, and I got busted as a deadbeat who’d put having a good time ahead of looking out for her little brother.

      That was on me.

      And yeah, I know that the ten years that have passed since that night should count for something. That Rocker doesn’t blame me for the six months of foster homes he’d survived before I’d turned eighteen and convinced the judge to let him live with me. Six months in which I’d turned my life around, found a job and done everything right.

      Rocker and I don’t talk about our dad or that night everything changed. Once a month, we send a check to the state prison where dear old dad is serving a twenty-five-to-fifty-year sentence, and he sends back a postcard with a scrawled thanks. He also sends the occasional Christmas and birthday card. Mostly, Rocker and I pretend our childhood is a big happy blank. Nothing to write home or talk about—just something we got through on our way to being reasonably happy, productive adults.

      At least, that’s what I do. I’m a business owner and halfway to a degree in finance at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I have a mortgage, a minuscule retirement account and enough shit that I had to rent a medium-sized U-Haul when I moved into my new house. It’s wonderful and scary at the same time—I’m so close to finally getting us out of the series of bad neighborhoods and loser streets we’ve lived on all our life and I should be celebrating. I should be able to go out on a Friday night and cut loose for the space of a song or two. And yet I’m so tired that I just want to crawl into bed and sleep instead.

      “Jack says he’d love to meet you,” Samantha announces triumphantly.

      “Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll do it.”

      While Samantha texts an opus to Jack and Carlie cackles gleefully next to her, I pack us up. I need to double-check the site, too, and make sure no one’s leaving anything behind. I’m busy tying up our loose ends when I hear the small plop from the lake followed by Carlie’s giggle and Samantha’s curse. Yeah. Guess we’ll be stopping by the Apple store, too.

       Chapter Two

      Rev

      I’M NO SUPERHERO. Definitely no Prince Charming. Your first clue is my ride. I’m all about the Harley Davidson—not a fucking white horse in sight. The Hard Riders club president must have ignored that memo when he put me in charge of today’s mission, because the woman in front of 837 Second Street is dressed exactly like a princess, right down to the tiara. Although the diamonds have to be fake, like so many things in Vegas, the crown still sparkles in the setting sun. A disorganized mob of small girls in rainbow-colored dresses surrounds her, talking and shrieking in an ungodly racket. Fucking looks like a rainbow exploded everywhere and rained glitter.

      “Goddamn,” Vik announces loud enough to be heard over the pipe’s roar as he pulls his bike into the curb. I kill my engine and follow, both of us focused on the commotion happening on the lawn of the run-down rental. The lawn isn’t much to look at—the Nevada sun has cooked the grass to a crispy brown and the place hasn’t had a paint job in decades. Two bedrooms, one bath, based on the visible square footage, but gone to seed like a hooker working the nearby Strip, still open for business even though she won’t command top dollar. The neighborhood hosts mostly working class, the usual mix of single moms and family units where cheap rentals are always in demand. The place squats on the edge of Hard Rider MC territory, and it might be time to expand our holdings. Claim this block, make it ours, put it back to rights.

      I fucking love that idea.

      Princess sticks out. The neighbors hanging over the chain link watching the show have dressed down for the heat because East Las Vegas in August is hotter than any armpit of hell I’ve visited as a US Navy SEAL. Today’s audience wears mainly shorts and tank tops. Princess, on the other hand, sports a puffy yellow dress made out of some kind of fluffy shit. The fabric bells out revealing a really nice pair of legs as she gets into it with...a dragon? The thing’s about ten feet tall, bright purple, and has a tail with floppy cloth spikes on it. Princess retrieves a ginormous plastic sword from somewhere and proceeds to attack. While I applaud the enthusiasm that makes her tits bounce, she doesn’t know the first thing about fighting.

      Vik groans. Brother’s a fucking drama queen. “I could have taken that dragon in the first twenty seconds.”

      As the dragon collapses in mock death on the crap lawn, Princess whirls, declaiming something that wins applause from her host of mini-me’s. I can’t see her face, which is a pity, because her back’s damn spectacular. Soft, honey-colored curls are piled up on top of her head, kinda pinned in place by the tiara, and the dress dips all the way to her ass, the straight line of her spine a lick-me-here-big-boy invitation I’d like to take her up on. As I watch, some of those curls go AWOL, bouncing around her face and down her neck. I want to take her apart, undoing first her hair and then her dress. Wouldn’t stop either until I had her screaming my name as she came undone in my arms.

      “Showgirl?” Vik’s mutter interrupts the unwelcome fantasy. Daydreaming on the job is a rookie mistake. We’ve seen some crazy shit in our day, but this is unfamiliar territory. Since Princess doesn’t show so much as an inch of tit and the dress drags on the dead grass rather than stopping two inches short of her ass, I’m certain she isn’t working a Vegas show on the Strip. Her audience is our second clue. Third clue? The enormous pink-and-purple inflatable castle poking up over the roof of the house from the backyard and the equally outsized sheet cake with a number 5 candle poking out of the center. We’ve crashed a birthday party.

      “You sure we got the right address?” GPS isn’t a magic bullet and maybe we aren’t parked in front of Eve Kent’s workplace.

      Vik leans back on his bike, folding his arms across his chest as he surveys the front lawn. A happy grin lights up his face, because he’s definitely enjoying the show and most of the audience is female because hello...birthday party for kids. Vik likes women. Women like him. It all works out, usually with Vik naked, in bed, and banging his newest acquaintance. He may be the vice president of the Hard Rider motorcycle club, but you can bet every one of us gives him shit about the mileage on his dick. “Let’s go introduce ourselves.”

      Vik also subscribes to the act first, think later school of thought. Probably explains why our prez put me in charge of this particular mission. If it involves pussy, Vik’s gonna want to make a detour before he gets down to business. While he checks out the women on the lawn, I check my phone and confirm we’re hitting the right party.

      “We can’t just go in there and make demands.” I do a quick headcount and arrive at fifteen possible adult witnesses in addition to the dragon and the screaming, frosting-smeared horde. Never mind that we’re not doing anything illegal—yet.

      We’re assholes, but we’re not criminals. Being a biker isn’t a crime, even if the boys in blue sometimes act as if it is. There’s no free pass—you earn your place in the Hard Riders MC. To ride with the Hard Riders, you have to be ex-military. Most of us are SEALs or Spec Ops, but we got a few exceptions. We ride in East Las Vegas, but the Vegas area is home to multiple MCs and tensions run high. The steady flow of drugs controlled by Los Angeles–based gangs like the Hells Angels, Mongols, Crips and the Vagos add to the tension. Too many fighters, too little turf. That’s a bad fucking recipe right there, and the Black Dogs MC recently made it their personal mission to be a pain in our ass.

      Sin City is the country’s playground, but almost two million people also live and work here, just trying to make a decent life for their kids and that’s a goddamned right, to my mind. Forty thousand decent, hardworking people in East Las Vegas and almost seven square miles of streets of working-class apartment complexes, bars, liquor stores, check-cashing businesses and single-story adobe ranches with palm trees in the front yards and fucking geraniums in pots. You don’t get much more American than that.

      We

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