For the Pride of a Crow (Red Dead Mayhem Book 3) Read online

  Ethan poured a glass of water for her and settled his hand on her thigh under the table like this big, strong, rogue crow and rough-and-tumble biker couldn’t keep his hands off her. She realized something huge.

  She fucking loved him, too.

  And now she was good at five things: falling a lot, kissing, annoying people, making friendship pictures…and loving Ethan.

  Chapter Eleven

  Then kill him.

  It wasn’t Lucian’s voice in Ethan’s head this time as he sat in the rocking chair in the early morning light, watching his mate sleep. It was Ma’s voice.

  Then kill him.

  What did she mean he’d been feeding his ghost?

  Something was building just above his senses. It had been happening for a while. Lucian was around every second Leah wasn’t with him and sometimes, like now, he could be around Leah, too.

  Lucian was standing over her, staring at her with an empty expression. He hadn’t moved in an hour. Ethan had woken from a nightmare he couldn’t remember, hugging Leah tight against his chest. He’d opened his eyes to find Lucian just standing there, watching them. It was weird. He was like some robot being charged. The ghost was just…standing there.

  Ethan needed to be a better man.

  He’d never had the motivation before. He had a rap sheet a mile long from shit he used to do with his brother and Red Dead Mayhem.

  Red Dead Mayhem. Just the thought of them spread ache through his chest.

  He’d made so many mistakes.

  He’d morphed more and more into his father, and now look? This was his future if he didn’t put a stop to everything. Haunting people and feeding off their anger. Feeding off shadows and darkness.

  The chair under him creaked as he shifted his weight to get a better look at Leah around the sheets she’d pulled up to her chin. God, she was so beautiful. The dawn light was soft on her face, her dark eyelashes resting on her cheeks, her full lips slightly parted, face relaxed like she didn’t have a care in the world. She wasn’t wearing one of his T-shirts like she usually did to bed. Last night they’d slept naked, all tangled up. Fuck, his body loved hers, his soul loved hers. He just loved everything about her. Leah’s hair was curly and wild on the pillow behind her. That was his fault. He’d fucked her twice, made her come over and over before he let himself get lost. He loved taking care of her needs before his. A first. She’d taken his selfish nature and flipped it.

  She took very little seriously, but it was her way. She wasn’t naïve to who he was or what he was. She wasn’t naïve to what he was capable of. The bright red slash scars on her throat said as much. She just accepted him. Him. All his grit. For the last three days, since that family dinner, he’d been unloading to her. Confessing, more like. Part of it was to test her and part of it was to be completely open and honest with her so she could choose to stay or go. If she stayed, he wanted her to go into this with her eyes wide open. If they kept building like this, and he kept falling deeper, someday soon he would be opening his palm to her and asking her to cut him and claim him back. Because that’s what his crow had done that first night. He’d clawed her immediately.

  Picked her immediately.

  The devil in him was trying to save himself, and Leah was the only shot he had at being okay someday.

  And so he owed her. Before he let her cut him, he had a responsibility to make her life with him a safe one. Or as safe as it could be for an outlaw crow.

  He’d seen Ma almost get destroyed by a man, and he didn’t want to ever put Leah at the same risk. And if he was destined to become Lucian, to become the next Blackwood Crow, he had to keep Leah protected, even if it was from himself.

  So…he needed to make changes. He’d been set in his ways for so long, but she was a once in a lifetime woman. She was a gift, and he couldn’t take her for granted. He needed to go to work for her.

  With a sigh, he leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and set up a group message to all the crows he’d stolen from Ramsey.

  Meet me at the lumber yard outside of Corvallis at 1. Send.

  They would be there, every one of them. How did he know? Because being rogue was hard on a crow, and they were all feeling it. The day Red Dead Mayhem had imploded, it was like being severed from a family. And it wouldn’t get fixed until Ethan did something about it.

  The ghost looked up from Leah’s sleeping form and disappeared.

  Eat that, Lucian.

  Ethan texted Rike next. It was good to see you the other day, brother. I’m going to make things right with Ramsey so you don’t get reamed for family dinners. Leah wants to have it at her house this week, and she lives in Red Dead Mayhem territory. You’ll have to ignore the pink curtains and glitter glued to everything. She’s been crafting. Send.

  Yeah, I fuckin’ know. Bailey’s been doing something called mod podge? There are pictures of us in frames that she’s glued purple glitter to. Vina is doing them, too. Ramsey is going to shit himself if he finds one more speck of fuckin’ sparkles in the clubhouse.

  Ethan snorted at the vision of Ramsey going beast over glitter. Well, obviously the girls have been bonding. Send.

  Why can’t they bond over new BJ techniques?

  Ethan tried to keep his laughter quiet so he wouldn’t wake Leah up. She was so fuckin’ cute. He wouldn’t admit it, but he loved that she was all bright colors and glitter. It was a good contrast to him. He also liked that she was corrupting the females of the Red Dead Mayhem Clan.

  I’m meeting with the boys at the old lumberyard today at one. I’m gonna fix what I broke. Send.

  There were a few minutes with no answer, so Ethan relaxed back into his seat and studied the rawness of his mate’s face. He was going to fix that, too.

  As he stood to make his way to the bathroom, his phone vibrated with a text.

  Rike said, I’ve set up a meet with Ramsey. We’ll all be there at one. No guns. Let’s bury this.

  Holy shit, they were getting everyone back together again for this meeting.

  This could go really bad if tempers flared.

  Ethan tossed the phone on the side of the sink and locked his arms on the counter, forced himself to look at his face in the mirror. He was the spitting image of Lucian, and he’d always hated that. He’d grown out this huge beard just to look as different from his father as he could, but that was weak. He wasn’t some runner or hider. He wasn’t a coward. He’d been reminded of that when he’d seen himself get thrown into the air on that first flight. He’d glared down at Lucian like he was nothing. Eight years old, and he’d told Lucian he was going to grow bigger than him and kill him, and now look? He’d grown bigger than him, and it was his choice to give that old bastard power or not.

  He grabbed the beard trimmers from the counter and straightened up, lifted his chin.

  “Are you okay?” Leah asked in a sleepy voice from the doorway. She was wrapped in the comforter, her hair all mussed, looking so damn beautiful.

  “I’m okay.”

  She looked down at the trimmers, and he could see the pride in her eyes. Oh, his mate was sharp. Leah knew exactly why he’d been keeping the beard. Without a word, she padded across the tile to him and pulled her little pink pocket knife out from under the covers. She didn’t have to wait but a few moments for him to stretch out his hand, palm up—his offering to be hers if she was brave enough to cut him and bind them forever.

  With no hesitation, she gripped his hand firmly and cut a deep slice across it. She whispered, “You are the next Blackwood Crow, Ethan. But you’re my Blackwood Crow. You’re a good man, and I’m going to keep you that way.”

  And then she took the trimmers from his hand and turned them on. “You aren’t your father. He’s nothing but ashes, and the legend of the Blackwood Crow restarts now.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Ethan had told her blades only, and being the innocent, law-abiding little human that she was, Leah hadn’t understood what he meant until he shoved her pink knife i
n the front pocket of her cut-off jean shorts right before they’d taken off on his Harley.

  Blades only. Right. Knives. Was today the day she would be involved in her first shanking? Good thing she had been practicing flipping it open.

  It was hot out today, so the wind on her face was welcome. Ethan had said if she got too hot on the back of his motorcycle, that just meant he needed to go faster. Like he needed to. The man had blasted down the mountain roads going eighty. It was weird she wasn’t scared. They were cruising at high speed, and she was on the back, relaxed against the backrest, hands on Ethan’s leather biker cut. She was headed to a meet-up with Ethan’s old Clan, and he’d warned her over and over as she’d been getting ready that she needed to listen to everything he said there. He’d ripped off the Red Dead Mayhem patch today, and she had a feeling that was significant for him.

  There would be no going back to that life for him.

  That part of his story had ended before she’d even met him.

  The bike slowed, and Ethan revved the roaring engine a couple times as he turned onto an old dirt road outside of Corvallis. Here, it was all ancient pines and ferns covering the forest floor. It didn’t matter how long she lived here, she would never take it for granted how pretty it was.

  Ethan expertly wound around potholes dug out by logging trucks and pulled under a towering wooden sign that read Corvallis Lumber. They were early, but there were already a half dozen bikers gathered near a row of Harley Davidsons.

  The rest of the lumber yard was an overgrown ghost town. Lucian would probably love it. She glared at him as they passed the asshole ghost leaning against a tree. Today he was pulverized and gory, his face swollen and bleeding, missing teeth, the works. This morning, he’d graced her and Ethan with the vision of the night he beat the shit out of Ethan and Rike had killed him with his bare hands. It was super graphic and traumatizing. She was pretty sure Lucian was the first person, alive or dead, that she’d ever actually hated. She couldn’t even bring herself to pity him being killed by his own son. Fucker deserved it. He’d tried to kill a nineteen-year-old Ethan that night and damn near succeeded. Rike had snapped, and good for him. By the end of the vision, Leah had slow-clapped for Rike. Lucian didn’t look amused. He’d lifted his head from the slow death he was showing them and glared at her through his gory face. Ethan had laughed.

  He pulled his Harley to the end of the row of bikes and parked it, settled it on the kickstand, and pulled his sunglasses off.

  Gawd, he was a total hottie. No more huge beard hiding his face. He had short facial scruff that looked badass and designer all at once, and now she could fully appreciate his chiseled cheek bones, straight nose, perfect, sexy man lips, and a scar that ran down the left side of his jaw. Hot, hot boy.

  “I wanna have, like, seven of your babies,” she enlightened him.

  He pointed out that, “Yesterday it was only five.”

  “Well, then you trimmed your beard, so plus two baby points.”

  He snorted and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Woman, what am I going to do with you?”

  “I always wanted to do a sixty-nine.”

  His surprised laugh echoed through the clearing, and she felt pretty confident about herself right about now. So she slid right off that bike, straightened her cut-off shorts, checked that her tits were still in the low-riding Harley tank top Ethan had bought her for their one-and-a-half-week anniversary, and unclipped her helmet.

  Ethan pulled her by the hand toward the bikers as he called out a greeting. “Hey, boys.”

  “Alpha,” a man whose nametag read Triston growled.

  “I know what I did to all of us,” Ethan told them. “I’m gonna try and fix it today.”

  “Yeah? How?” snarled a tall man with a round beer gut.

  Woooo, these men were pissed!

  The roar of motorcycles turned deafening behind them, and Leah spun to find another six bikers riding under the dilapidated lumber yard sign, headed straight for them.

  She recognized the first man from the interviews on the news. Ramsey, King of Crows, as people called him. He had reddish blond hair and a short beard, bright blue eyes, and was as wide as the broadside of a barn. Behind him was his moose shifter mate, Vina. And on the next Harley was Rike and Bailey. The rest of Red Dead mayhem followed, parking in a row on the other side of the dirt parking lot. Uh-oh, a face-off. She better act quickly.

  “I brought olive branches!” she called, striding out into the middle toward the scary looking bikers. And also her handmade autograph book, because if she got the chance, she was getting signatures.

  “Leah!” Ethan called. “What are you doing?”

  She pulled the dozen Slim Jims from her little leather riding pack and handed one to a baffled looking Ramsey.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “A Slim Jim. I Googled what bikers like. Beef jerky was on the list. I got the spicy kind because you all are badasses.”

  Slowly, he took the jerky from her. “Thank…you?”

  “Ramsey,” Ethan said from right beside her, “this is my old lady, Leah.”

  Scoffing an offence, Leah said, “Being old is a state of mind, and I have the maturity of a twelve-year-old boy, so really, I’ll never be an old lady.”

  When Rike laughed behind Ramsey, Bailey took some of the Slim Jims from Leah and began passing them around. Ethan was chuckling but Ramsey was staring at her like she’d grown Fruit Loops for nostrils.

  “‘Old lady’ is a term in biker culture for significant others.”

  “Awww!” Leah turned to Ethan and scrunched up her face and shoulders. He was so nice and cute and sweet. If one ignored his murdery eyes, ghost dad, dangerousness, and all that. She handed him a jerky stick, and he patted her on the ass. Leaning in, Ethan muttered, “Hey, remember when I told you to let me do the talking?”

  “No.”

  “I told you three times this morning.”

  She crinkled the paper, trying to get to her meat stick. “I forget.”

  “Can I have one of those?” Vina asked from behind Ramsey.

  “This isn’t how this was supposed to go,” Ramsey said with a dead-eyed look.

  “Mmm,” Vina said, biting into her beef jerky stick. She pointed to the woods. “Do you want us to go over there so y’all can fight?”

  A dozen male voices rose at the same time. About half said, “Yes!” and half said, “No!”

  “Look,” Ethan said, shoving a couple of men from opposite sides who were pushing against each other. “I didn’t come here to settle that unfinished Alpha challenge. That’s in the past. I want to move forward.”

  “Stop,” Ramsey demanded of the pushing that was escalating between a couple more guys from each side. When one of them went straight to his knees in the dirt with a grunt, Tristan pointed at him and laughed. “Sucker!”

  Tristan wasn’t getting a Slim Jim.

  “Why are we here?” Ramsey barked.

  “Because I don’t want to be Alpha!” Ethan’s voice echoed through the trees, and everyone went still and silent. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “One, I never fucking wanted to be Alpha. I was just tired of watching your broken bond tear everyone apart. And I was there, Ram. I was there when Kasey killed Grant. Best friends. I watched Kasey kill his best friend, and he wouldn’t stop. I had to pull him off the body.”

  “Fuck!” a dark headed man yelled, linking his hands behind his head. He paced toward the woods and back, his eyes as black now as Ethan’s. He was tall but leaner than Ethan, and his shoulders lifted and fell with a huge sigh. “Ethan calling an Alpha challenge on you was just as much my fault as his,” he told Ramsey.

  “Kasey,” Ram murmured.

  “I’m serious. And I get to live with all of it. I was the weakest link. I went crazy first with your broken mating bond. I was relentless in telling Ethan to challenge you and save us. I killed…” He swallowed hard and dropped his gaze to the ground.

>   Leah wanted to cry for these men. She hadn’t realized how broken everyone had become. She hadn’t known. And the more she saw, the more she hurt for the burden all of them must’ve been carrying.

  Ethan was humming with power, or tension, she wasn’t sure which, so she slipped her hand into his and leaned on him.

  Ramsey asked, “What do you want, Ethan?”

  “He wants permission to start his own Clan,” came a voice from behind them.

  Leah spun to find Kade. “What are you doing here?”

  The lone wolf was sitting on a giant rock on the edge of the parking lot, his eyes bright silver, his hair mussed and hanging down in his face. “Watching after Rike and Bailey and Ethan. And you.” The werewolf let off a terrifying snarl and shook his head hard. “Ethan needs a Clan. His mate lives in Red Dead Mayhem territory. He needs permission from Ramsey to set up a new MC.”

  “Who the fuck is this?” Ramsey demanded, approaching Kade. Red Dead Mayhem followed.

  “I’m trouble,” the wolf said with a feral smile as he stood. He seemed excited, like he wanted a fight.

  Rike and Ethan blocked off the Clan, pushing them back. “He’s with us,” Ethan ground out, shoving one of Ramsey’s men back.

  “He’s with you?” Ramsey yelled. “Please explain to me what the fuck is going on. Because you all have blurred the lines of loyalty. I have me, my mate, and Red Dead Mayhem, including Rike and Bailey, so Rike ain’t with you. Ethan, you have you and your old lady and apparently the men you stole from me…my men! My Clan—my friends—are all rogue now. And now there’s a…what?” Ramsey looked Kade up and down. “Wolf chiming in on crow politics?”