Prologue 1

Seven years ago

“Ace.” Liam ‘Spider’ Valance’s brown eyes were wide with confusion and hurt. “Ace, please…. please, babe. Let’s just run, OK? Just run and leave Denver. We can start again someplace where nobody knows who we are. We can – we can be together. For real and openly and really together, for the first time since this whole thing between us began. Please.”

Ace Cuddy’s eyes were much darker than Liam’s, and unlike his soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend’s, his were nothing but hard, heartless pools of endless night. He stopped packing his bag and stared at Liam, and it was like he had no fucking idea who this tall, slim man with a spider web tattoo across his face even was. Like he’d never laid eyes on the man in the whole of his goddamn life, and sure as hell didn’t know his name. Like he’d never kissed him, or held him, or whispered how much he loved him as he thrust deep into Liam’s sweaty, trembling body.

Like Liam meant nothing at all to him.

Like Liam was nothing to him now, and he never had been.

Like he never would be.

“I told you.” Ace’s voice was disinterested to the point of sheer boredom. “This was fun while it lasted, but it was never going to be forever. It was always going to go this way, if things came down to you or the club. You knew this.”

“The club?” Liam spat out. He’d never said one word against the Fallen Angels, the one-percenter motorcycle club that Ace was a member of, not in the whole year that he’d been with this man – but the time for reticence was over. Way fucking over. “The club that would make sure that you suffered a slow, painful death if they knew that you like men? The club that would shoot me between the eyes for being a fag?” His voice was dripping with sarcastic venom by now as he deliberately emphasized that hated, hateful word. “That club, Ace? That one?”

A muscle in Ace’s unshaven, scarred cheek twitched, but that was the only reaction that he gave. “No, Liam. The club that just tapped me to be Vice-President. The club that took me in and took care of me when nobody else on the whole fucking planet gave a shit about me. The club that’s my family, a family made up of my brothers. That club.”

“Family?” Liam’s voice rose with incredulity. “Family? Those killers and rapists and kidnappers and drug- and gun-running monsters? God, Ace… they hate you, even if they have no idea that they do. They hate everything that you stand for and everything that you are. Everything that I am. That we are, babe. They’d rip your skin off your bones and let rats eat your insides if they knew what we’ve been up to. And these are the ‘brothers’ that you’re leaving me for? This is the ‘family’ that you’ll end us for?”

Ace shrugged his broad shoulders, the Fallen Angels patch on his leather cut moving up and down with the movement. He turned back to the bed, carried on packing, more quickly now.

“I thought…” Liam’s voice trailed off, and despite his resolve to stay detached and ignore his lover’s obvious pain and distress, Ace found himself looking at Liam again. “I thought – that I was your family.”

“You – what?” Ace was thrown, thrown totally and genuinely, and he gaped at Liam. “Why the hell would you ever think that? The club is my family, always has been. I belong with them, Liam.”

Liam was silent; when he sighed, it was with the muted breath of a defeated man.

Yes, this was over, and he knew it. Ace Cuddy had been trouble from the get-go, and God knows, Liam had clocked that the second that their eyes had met at the Fallen Angels bar. But what was supposed to just be a bit of fun with a bad boy had spiraled out of control – and fast. It was love now. Real, true, devastating and breath-stealing love, and Liam felt his heart crack right in two as he looked at Ace for what was probably the last time.

“You say that you belong with them,” Liam said slowly. “But if you stay with them, you’ll have to carry on lying every single second of every single day about who you are. You get that, right? If you choose them and you let me go, then you lose the only person on the whole damn planet that you can be who you really are with. With me, you can be yourself… I love you for who you are, and they hate you for the same thing.” He paused. “That’s not much of a family, Ace.”

Ace said nothing, mostly because he had nothing to say. Liam was nothing but bang-on right, of course he was, but he was also nothing but risk and ruin. Running away with him, running away from the only life that Ace had even known or understood – even if that life was teeming with danger and death and destruction – was impossible to imagine.