Where it all begins…

“Why? Why are we doing this again, Kellen?” I beg. “We’ve been over this a million times.”

He grabs me by my shoulders. “Because, you need to listen to me. You need to know what to do in the event that something happens to me in order to save yourself, to protect yourself.”

“Jesus, Kell, you’re acting a fool here. I know what I have to do, but I don’t understand why you’re making this such a big damn deal right now,” I whine.

“Because you’re not listening to me, Lily-bean.”

I fight the prickling of tears in my eyes. “I am, but I don’t care, nothing is ever going to happen to you,” I tell him with false conviction.

He turns on me, hard. “You can’t say that. You don’t know that.”

“Then why are you so convinced that something is going to happen to you?” I beg him to explain this to me, but I know it’s feeble. He’s never been very forthcoming with me and odds are good that this has something to do with club business, which means his lips are sealed.

“Just promise me, please?” he begs.

“Fine,” I snap and go charging for the back door.

Kellen grabs me hard around the upper arm and pulls me back. “Lily, don’t! I need you to stay here,” he snaps before slamming the inside door shut.

“What the hell is your problem?” I argue with him. My blood pressure is rising with each tick of my heartbeat.

Kellen never treats me like this.

My brother is pissed and on edge for reasons I don’t know or understand. If this is club business, I’ll never know. According to Kellen, my place isn’t in the club, but in school and eventually away from here.

“What’s wrong with you?” I all but growl at him.

“Nothing,” he snaps before opening the door again. I follow him, but he slams the door in my face as he marches into the back yard. “Stay inside,” he hollers through the closed door.

Where’s he going? He never goes back there.

I turn around, racing for the stairs and my room. It’s on the backside of the house and I can see him better from up there.

Time seems off. Like I’m living in a dream. Running slowly through murky water, but I’m not. Something is going down and I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around what it is. It irks me to know that Kellen is keeping me in the dark. If something’s about to happen to him, the least he could do is tell me instead of being pissed at me for wanting answers.

I reach my room and slam my door shut behind me. In the off chance he hears me, he’ll know I’m pissed at him, but he knows my anger towards him never lasts.

My brother has done some fucked up things in the past, but I can’t stay mad at him.

He’s all I have left.

Pissed off and irritated, that seems to be the name of his little game the closer I get to eighteen. I already graduated from high school. I spent too much time in my room studying and overachieving because it kept my mind occupied and kept me busy.

In a little over a week, my choices are my own.

I’ve never made a secret about my desires to be a part of the club. It’s something I’ve always wanted, ever since I was a little girl, and he knows that once I’m eighteen, technically, he can’t stop me. Over the last four or so years, I never could understand his desire to keep me out of club business, but he’s done everything in his power to do just that. He won’t talk about it to me. Every time I broach the subject with him, he gets pissed, he shouts and stomps off. We were raised in the club, he’s a part of it, why can’t I be, too?

In a way, I understand why he doesn’t want me around the club. Four years ago, when I was only thirteen, our mom and dad were killed. Though Kellen tells me it was a car accident, I knew better then and even more so now. The only true explanation for it is that something happened inside the club’s walls that changed the dynamic of the Wicked Angels MC. I tried for years to convince myself that it truly was a car accident and nothing more, but that’s hard to fathom when mom and dad never drove a car unless I was with them. When they went anywhere without me, they were always on dad’s bike.

Up until their deaths, I’d always been surrounded by my brother, his friends, my parents and their friends, and extended club family. I was old enough to catch onto a lot of conversations going on between the older people, yet young enough to be naïve about the things they were talking about.

Kellen is nine years older than me. He was twenty-two when our parents died which meant he was old enough to take care of me. He was also old enough to be a fully patched member of the Angels.

Within a couple weeks of our parents’ passing, Kellen started disappearing for long periods of time. There were many days when I heard him leave long before I had to get up for school, and other times when he wouldn’t come home until sometime in the middle of the night. I learned quickly that even though Kellen was old enough to care for me, to keep me out of the state system, he didn’t do a very good job at taking care of me. Unless you count the roof over my head, the clothes on my back and a kitchen full of food, then I guess he did alright. I fed myself, did my own laundry, cleaned the house and made sure my homework was done. Kellen was here, but I was on my own.

A couple of years after their deaths, Kellen started staying around more. He was home more often and things seemed to be settling into a routine. Though he would be home for dinner, that I cooked, he often took off shortly after and wouldn’t come home until three or four in the morning.

His being around more meant Kellen and I got into many arguments about school work. In the beginning, I argued that I didn’t need school because one day I was gonna be an old lady. That sent Kellen over the edge. He refused to let me anywhere near the club and all but told me that being an old lady was for whores. He never explained to me why I wasn’t allowed around the club, or why no one ever came around the house anymore. I haven’t seen any of the men or women who used to come over for summer bar-b-q’s, and holidays got lonely with just Kellen and me. It was like when my father died, so did the rest of my family.

I didn’t understand why.

Kellen spent his life consumed with business, Wicked Angels MC business. It’s where my father used to spend his days, too, and somewhere I was never allowed to go.

So, I went to school, I made friends, I did everything to fit in, but something always nagged at me. I never fit in with anyone. I always felt like an outsider with them and until the last six months or so, I could never understand why.

The club is where I belong. I’m the daughter of a Wicked Angels leader.

I haven’t stepped foot inside that clubhouse since I was thirteen, but I know where I belong. My mother was an old lady and she was happy to be just that. My father was a badass biker who loved my mother more than life itself, and I want that.

My attention is brought back to the reason I came up here when I see Kellen come out from between the trees that create our property line in the backyard. I watch as he paces around the backyard, something he rarely does unless something is really bothering him. He has light brown, almost dirty blonde hair that is cut short on the sides. Around the time mom and dad died, he wore it in a faux-hawk cut. But now he keeps the sides short and the top, from his forehead to the base of his skull, is longer, too long to make a Mohawk anymore, but he likes it that way. He often has it pulled back in a ponytail at the crown of his scalp. Today it’s down, blowing in the breeze. His eyes are a gorgeous green, pretty enough to make me envious of his eye color. Though mine are more emerald green in color, his are bright, vibrant.

His fists are clenched tight at his sides and his face is red with anger. The only time I see him relax is when he looks toward the house, almost as if he’s waiting for something or someone to show up.

“Loki?” I ask myself as I cock my head, watching Kellen below.

I shake my head; my brother wouldn’t look so tense if he was waiting for Loki to show up.

Loki is Kellen’s best friend and while I know Loki is his club name, I can’t remember his real name. I’ve only really ever known him as Loki except on the rare occasion when my brother would call him by his real name.

Loki and Tryke (Kellen’s club name) have been friends for as long as I can remember. They’re the same age, and if you didn’t know any better, they could be brothers.

Kellen disappears from my line of sight as he ducks into the garage. I sit in my window watching, waiting for him to come back out, but time passes and he never does. After almost an hour I give up and toss myself on to the bed face first.

I scream into my mattress with frustration overload.

Kellen can be such a pain in my ass.

Lying there, my mind wanders back to Loki and all his sexiness and the wicked little way he smiles at me. It never fails to send shivers across my flesh, igniting my deepest desires in my core.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve always staked a claim on him. At one point, I called him my Loki, and he never stopped me. In fact, I think he liked it. He’s always been mine. But he’s always kept me at arm’s length, despite my best efforts to get closer to him. He might not know it, but I think I was three when I fell in love with him and it’s only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older and he’s just gotten sexier with age.

Loki is the only Wicked Angels MC member I’ve seen, besides my brother, since my parents’, passing. It was like Kellen did everything he could to keep the members out of our house and while I hated being alone, it was a welcome relief from the late-night parties that I had to try and sleep through before.

Having Loki around to keep my brother in check was a godsend, both for my brother and for my infatuation with him. I would notice his little sideways glances at me when I’d throw on something skimpy to get his attention. Eventually he returned the infatuation with little sexy smiles and flirty advances. The occasional weak drunken moment confirmed all I needed to know about how he felt about me.

One of those times, not so long ago, he told me that one day, soon, I would be his woman.

I would happily be his woman if Kellen wouldn’t stand in the way of it. Loki is a club member, my brother’s best friend, and he represents everything my brother has tried to keep me away from since our parents died.

Loki is tall, about six-three, maybe six-four, and compared to my tiny five-six, skin and bones frame, he’s massive. With electric blue eyes and dark brown hair that’s long, stretching down to the middle of his back when it’s not braided – which is more often than not.

I smile at the memory of braiding Loki’s hair when he’d come over to chill with Kellen. He’d sit on the floor next to the couch and let me play with it. I chuckle a little, washing away other memories of my brother’s erratic behavior when I was fourteen and braiding pigtails in Loki’s hair.

I blush when I remember that he kept those pigtails in his hair for two days. A big, bad, cut wearing, scary ass biker with pigtails is a sight to be seen and Loki rocked it like it was a badge of honor. I think I fell in love with him a little more after that. But he never made a move. Sure, when he’d get too drunk, he’d get me pinned against a wall. My head would spin out of control at the scent of bike grease, faint cologne and the hint of body wash whenever he got close like that. It was like my brain would short circuit and I’d be a helpless animal, ready and willing to turn myself over to him if he said the magic words. But he never did. Eventually his mind would clear and he’d back away, leaving me bereft and needy.

Thoughts of Loki keep my mind occupied until I doze off.

I’m not sure what wakes me up sometime later, but the setting February sun is streaming through my window.

I rub my eyes and roll over.

Then scream at the top of my lungs.

“Jesus, Lily, relax.”

“What the hell are you doing in here?” I snap at Kellen who hasn’t moved from where he was standing next to my bed.

“I came up here to wake you up.” He sits down on the side of my bed. He has a composed and somber look on his face. It’s the same face I remember him having when he’d told me about mom and dad and my heart sinks into my stomach.

“What’s wrong? Did something happen to Loki?” I cower away from him, wrapping my arms around my legs, holding them to me. He scowls at me but shakes his head, ignoring my question about Loki.

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything,” I whisper without hesitation.

“No matter what happens, remember that I will always love you. That you’ll always be my baby sister. Can you do that for me?”

Just as his words leave his lips, there is a roar of motorcycles from down the street.

“Get in the safe room, now!” he growls as he stands up. “Do not come out until you know it’s safe. Do you hear me?”

I stiffly nod, not understanding what he’s implying or what’s happening.

After my parents died, Kellen went a little crazy. Paranoia was his middle name and it showed. He spent thousands of dollars turning a closet into a safe room. A room we’ve never had to use until now. After he’d finished the project, he spent weeks teaching me how to use it. Anytime he made upgrades to the room, he would always spend time showing me the new features. There are cameras that cover every inch of the house, every detail, and most importantly, the pictures are crystal clear.

“I mean it, Lily, go, and do not come out until you see it’s safe. No matter what happens.”

I stand up and he pulls me into the tightest hug I’ve ever felt from him. He kisses the top of my head. “Love ya, kid.”

I squeeze him a little tighter as the reality of what’s about to happen starts to wash over me. I start to sob.

He grabs me by my shoulders and pushes me back. “Promise me, Lily. Promise me that you will stay in there. Promise me?”

Through tear filled eyes, I nod my head.

“Go, now,” he orders as he stomps from the room. I go out the door of my room and I place my hand on the knob. My fingerprints open the door and I step inside.

Tears flow down my face as I close and press the switch to seal the door.

I never understood why Kellen had this thing installed, until a couple of unexpected club members showed up and he sent me into the room to hang out until they left. I never thought anything of it.

Until I walk into the room tonight.

I shake my head in disbelief as it occurs to me that maybe this is more than paranoia with Kellen.

He’s been protecting me, keeping me safe. Keeping me away from the club meant keeping me away from someone who wants to hurt me. By keeping the guys away, by keeping the families away, he’s been keeping me safe. “Damn you!” I curse him loudly.

I shiver. The room is cold and grey, with steel walls and no windows. There’s a bed, a couple of computers and a wall of monitors tied to cameras all around the property. Apparently, paranoia is his motivation and protection was his game.

I watch the monitors as two bikes pull into the driveway. I immediately recognize Loki, but his face is grim. He’s staring daggers into the back of the head of the other guy he’s with. I don’t recognize the guy from anywhere, but their cuts are obviously Wicked Angels, the same as what my brother and father wore. Though Kellen wears one with similar patches to the one my father wore, Loki’s isn’t all that different from theirs, but it’s enough to be able to tell them apart.

I continue to watch on the monitors. Kellen has made his way into the kitchen. He is standing stiffly with his hand on his hip, no doubt grabbing hold of the gun he always carries at his side.

Something is off.

Something is wrong with this situation.

I don’t understand what’s going on and I fight every ounce of my being to not flee the room. I look at the wall. “Dammit,” I mutter as I realize that Kellen got in here first. I shake my head as I watch the countdown clock slowly tick down. Twenty-nine minutes and fifteen seconds left. Twenty-nine minutes before I can even consider opening the door. “You bastard,” I growl at the screen.

Something is off, something is very wrong. I’m so confused. Nothing makes sense. They’ve come for Kellen, why? Tears start streaming down my face, again.

The room is not only a safe room, but also fireproof and soundproof. Nothing happening in here can be heard outside this room and vice versa. I return to the cameras and press a couple buttons, increasing the volume so I can hear what’s happening in the kitchen and throughout the rest of the house.

I know where all the cameras are, but you can’t see one of them from any room in the house. I don’t know how he did it exactly, but he’s managed to conceal every single one of them, which makes it easy to record everything and no one is any wiser.

I hear a door burst open through the speakers and my eyes land on the living room camera. The two men, Loki and the other man, come stomping into the house. The older guy calls out for Kellen. “In the kitchen,” he replies. His voice is calm, steady and there is conviction in his voice.

“Where is it, you son-of-a-bitch?” the older man snaps as he steps into the kitchen.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Kellen asks with a cold stare in his eyes. I’ve only ever seen that look when Kellen was lying to my parents about something. It’s like his own little way of ensuring he can’t be read.

“The money, motherfucker, where is it?”

What money? Not that Kellen would tell me anything, but money isn’t something he’s ever had a problem with. Why would this asshole be looking for money from Kellen?

Kellen just shakes his head and my eyes wander over to Loki who is looking at my brother, pleading with him behind the old man’s back.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kellen says and I watch as Loki shakes his head in disbelief. It’s almost as if Loki believes that Kellen has done whatever it is that’s gotten them to this point. But I know Kellen, and he’d never do anything to put himself in danger like this.

Then everything shifts and the next thing I know, Kellen and the old man are pointing guns at each other. “No!” I scream.

“One more chance. Where’s the money?” the old man snarls.

“Go fuck yourself,” Kellen states as he steps closer to the old man.

Everything falls into a surreal slow motion.

Yet it all happens so fast.

Loki pulls his own gun from his side holster, under his cut, and points it directly at my brother.

Then everything shifts again.

Shots go off.

I can’t tell for certain, but it looks like they come from Loki’s gun.

“Noooo!” I scream.

The shots stop.

Kellen’s chest is splattered red with blood.

The old man drops his gun and grabs his shoulder. He’s hit, right? Please tell me someone got him.

Kellen’s limp body goes crashing to the floor. His head ricocheting off the refrigerator.

His eyes meet mine in one of the cameras.

Tears pour down my face, making it impossible to see anything. I swipe at my eyes, clearing them as best as I can, just in time to see the light in my brother’s eyes go out.

“No, no, no, goddammit, Kellen,” I cry.

My eyes roam to the other cameras and I see Loki step over to my brother and place his fingers on his neck. “He’s gone.”

“Fuck you! Goddammit, Loki!” I scream at the camera.

“Good, let’s get out of here.”

“If you’re so fucking convinced he stole the money, why aren’t you looking for it?” Loki questions him angrily. He’s trying to sound hard, but I know Loki well enough to know that he’s anything but alright after that. His best friend is dead.

“We will,” the old man growls in irritation. “Let’s just get out of here, let the heat cool off, clean up this fucking mess.” He points to his shoulder. “Then we’ll come back to search and level the place.” He heads for the front door, leaving Loki behind with my brother.

The screen door slams shut and I jump. The sound ricochets around the eerily quiet safe room from the speakers.

“Lily,” Loki says softly as his eyes look up at me through the camera. His voice is a soft, an unwanted comfort. Without thinking I reach out to touch the monitor, secretly wishing I was touching him instead. “I know you can hear me. I’m sorry, but you have got to get out of here, now. You know what to do.” He disappears off-screen.

I wish I could respond to him. Tell him that I don’t want to go anywhere, that I can’t leave, but he won’t hear it. He also won’t let me deviate from Kellen’s plans. No matter how hard I beg him to let me stay.

My eyes roam over to the driveway camera. The old man is still clutching his shoulder as he fires up his bike. Loki follows him, swinging his leg over and starting the engine. I lower the volume on the monitors and the roar of the bikes fades into the background.

The old man backs out first and Loki’s eyes find the driveway camera. They’re narrowed at me, pleading with me. I know what has to be done, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it.

Loki backs out of the driveway and takes off down the street. Within a second he’s gone from the camera’s line of sight and I’m left alone. Locked in a safe room, unable to get out, unable to do anything. What if they come back before I can get out of here?

My eyes roam back to my brother. His eyes have closed some, but they are facing the direction of the camera. “Fuck you, Kellen,” I cry into the camera.

The house is eerily quiet.

Dark.

Scary.

I’m alone.

Not even two weeks from turning eighteen and I have no parents, no brother, and no family.

“You’re gonna pay for this, you dirty old son of a bitch,” I growl.