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Chapter 78

last update publish date: 2026-10-20 15:25:43
RAINE

"Down!"

Someone had a fist in the back of my cut, and then I was on the boxcar floor with rust against my cheek and the world turning into a hammer. Bullets punched through the thin metal in rows, like someone nailing the night shut.

"Isla!"

"Here!" She was flat beside me, pistol out, red hair dusted with flakes of old paint.

The radio screamed. Dan: "Ten men on foot! We're pinned behind the switcher!" Ghost: "Tower. Lead driver's down." A flat crack from above, and headlights swerved
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  • Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw    Chapter 91

    RAINEThe garage roof was burning when I reached it.I went up the ladder through smoke so thick I couldn't see my own hands. The fifty lay on its side, its barrel bent. Beside it, half buried in a spill of broken planks, lay Hollis.He was still breathing.I dragged him clear. Blood in his beard, his legs wrong, his eyes cloudy as old glass. He looked up at me, and God help me, he smiled."Told you," he rasped. "Never dropped one yet.""Don't talk.""Queen." His hand found mine. "Your mother brought me soup when my Ruth died. I never could look at that bowl again." A tear ran into his ear. "I'm sorry. Tell the club...""You tell them.""Can't." His grip loosened. "Tell them I held the wall.""You held it." My voice broke. "You held it, Hollis."His eyes fixed on something past my shoulder. I don't know what he saw. I held his hand until it was only a hand.I wanted to scream. I wanted to forgive him, and I wanted to hate him, and I couldn't make either one come, and below us the comm

  • Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw    Chapter 90

    RAINENobody moved.Hollis looked at the letter. Then at me. Then, very slowly, his hand rose to his chest like a man feeling for a heartbeat."He wrote it down," he said. "That stubborn son of a bitch. He actually wrote it down.""Is it true?"The old man didn't answer. He didn't need to. I watched thirty years crack across his face like ice on a pond.I don't remember crossing the floor. I remember the blade in my hand, the fine steel I'd used on the tank, and the cold wall against Hollis's back, and the skin of his throat under the point. Cole said my name twice. Isla's breath hitched."Say it.""Raine—""Say it, Hollis!""Yes." It came out of him as a whisper. "It's true."A drop of blood slid down the blade."Ten years ago," Hollis said, "your father was pushing me out. Bad knee, old man. He had the new boys. And I'd bet everything I had on a deal that went sour. I owed money, Queen. To the wrong people. And Beltrán's father's man came to me and said, 'Tell us which road Vex's fa

  • Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw    Chapter 89

    RAINE"Ghost. Two men on the shed door. Nobody gets in. Nobody. I don't care who.""Even—""Everyone."He understood. I watched him not ask.The back shed was an old tin box behind the garage I hadn't been allowed inside since I was fifteen. Vex kept it padlocked. Cole cut the lock with bolt cutters from my toolbox. Isla came in behind us with a lantern, Eli's blanket still around her shoulders. She'd left the boy sleeping in the infirmary with Pike keeping watch. The door scraped open on a smell of old oil and ten years of dust.A tarp, gray with age, humped over something in the corner.I knew what was under it before I touched it.David's bike.Bent frame. Scorched fork. The front wheel gone. On the fender, a faded sticker, a cartoon serpent with a wrench in its jaws that he'd drawn himself the summer he turned sixteen. Somebody had kept it. Not scrapped it, not sold it. Ten years in the dark, under a tarp, in a shed I'd been forbidden to enter."He kept it," Isla whispered.My han

  • Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw    Chapter 88

    RAINE"Ramón Beltrán," said the voice from the vest. "My father held your note. My uncle Alejandro was patient enough to wait ten years to collect it. You were very rude to cut that short.""Beltrán." Vex leaned against Tomas, gray as a ghost. "Your father was a better man than you sound.""My father was a man you owed, and he's been dead six years, which makes it my debt now." The soft click of ice in a glass. "You killed my uncle tonight. That's a second invoice. I'm feeling generous. I'll take them as one.""What do you want?" I said."Ah. Blackjack." He chuckled. "Do you know how much you sound like your mother?"I nearly lunged at the vest. Cole's hand closed around my arm like a vise."The ledger," Beltrán said. "And Victor Mercer, alive. The Marlow Bridge at midnight, no one but the old man and the book. Do that and the boy walks away. Bring so much as a stray dog, and I make him a fountain.""He's nineteen!""He's a very useful pulse. Which reminds me. Eli?"The boy's eyes wen

  • Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw    Chapter 87

    RAINEWe covered five miles in eleven minutes.I rode with the phone jammed between my helmet and my ear, and Isla's voice in it was flat and strange, the voice of someone carrying a very full glass. "He's nineteen, Raine. He's shaking like a leaf. Hollis has a rifle on him, and I told Hollis if he fires I'll shoot him myself.""Don't let anyone touch him.""Nobody's touching him. Nobody's breathing near him.""I'm coming.""I know," she said. "That's the only reason I'm still standing."Cole rode a captured dirt bike on my right, his bleeding arm tucked against his ribs. Ghost and the riders fanned out behind us. On the back of Tomas's bike, my father sat pillion with his forehead against the other man's shoulder blade, the white of his bandages gone dark at the edges. Nobody said a word. Nobody had to. We were all thinking the same thing. Cruz is dead. So why does it feel like we just lost?The compound looked like a body that had been in a car wreck. The south wall was a heap of br

  • Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw    Chapter 86

    RAINECole didn't put down his weapon.He smiled. It was the first real smile I'd seen on his face in two months, small and crooked and absolutely lethal."You knew," he said. "Good. That saves time."He fired twice.Not at Cruz. Not at the six men. He fired twice into the air above our heads, two sharp cracks that rang off the concrete ceiling, and then the whole world went black.The generator died with a shriek of sparks somewhere beyond the walls. Ghost's rifle, from eight hundred yards, through a gap in a shed. Floodlights, work lamp, the dispatch office bulb, everything blinked out at once. I heard the room gasp. Then every gun in it began to fire."Down!"I threw myself flat. Bullets tore the dark apart, muzzle flashes strobing white and red across the floor. I crawled toward where I'd last seen the chair, razor blade slick in my fist. A boot slammed past my face. Somebody screamed and fell. I found a leg of the metal chair with my left hand, followed it up to a wrist, and sawe

  • Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw    Chapter 6

    COLEI rode out of that garage and down the road, feeling every muscle in my body tense with anger. Vex Mercer was a complete asshole, everyone knew that. I myself had known that in theory, but actually meeting the man… that was a whole other level of irritating. The way he’d towered over me, all

  • Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw    Chapter 5

    COLEThe second hit came immediately after the first, right across the side of my face. My ears rang so hard that I lost the sound of the rain, the workshop, the mechanic woman, everything. I staggered forward with my hands out, trying to catch myself, but whoever swung at me wasn’t done.A strong

  • Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw    Chapter 4

    COLE“Great!” she muttered somewhere near me. “Perfect timing.”I could barely see her outline, just the faint shape of her shoulders in the dim glow from outside. The rain roared even louder now, hitting against the roof like it wanted to get in.I was angry and dripping from head to toe, and very

  • Claimed By My Father’s Outlaw    Chapter 3

    COLEDahlia wasn’t awake just yet, and I wanted to keep things that way. She’d been pissed when I told her what I’d heard yesterday, and how I’d had to send money to the girl from Iron Serpents. I had no idea why she was so riled up, anyway. I was the vice for the president of the Revenants, so the

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