Page 1 of Eden's Joker

PROLOGUE

Joker

I’ve lived with this hatred for so long I never knew a life without it. Hatred for the man who caused my mother and father to die. Hatred for the men who helped him carry it out. The hatred never went cold. It burns inside me from the minute I wake up to the moment I pass out at night. Never wavering. Never fading.

I learned to encase it in ice. I had to. Because the saying that revenge is best served cold isn’t just a cool thing to say. It’s solid advice. The only way to make it work.

I was only six years old when Devil’s Nightmare MC overtook my parents’ car on a lonely, empty road. Their bandana-covered faces are etched into my brain, the roaring sound of their bikes as they forced us offthe road is something I always hear somewhere deep in the back of my mind, and the cold murder in their eyes is not a thing I’ll ever forget. I hear the shot that killed my mother in the same way. It rings out clear when I least expect it. Usually when something is off around me. Or when I need to pay attention to something I haven’t been paying attention to. Like a warning. It has saved my ass more times than I can count.

But I’d give that up in a second if I could just have her not die on that dusty road. Maybe my father had it coming, but not her. She had nothing to do with his crimes and his transgressions. There was nothing she could’ve done to stop him.

I would give anything to erase that day from my memories. By rights, I shouldn’t be able to remember it at all. I was too young, and the Devils left no one in our party alive. Except me. The dumb, silent witness to their ruthless, sadistic revenge.

I sat in that stuffy car for hours, watching flies buzz around my dead parents, too scared to move, too terrified to go outside and hug them goodbye. I regret that now.

But even if I had taken my last goodbye from them, it would change nothing.

They’d still be dead.

I’d still be plagued by the nightmares of seeing their murder.

And the hatred.

But all that will end now.

Because I have her. Eden. The vehicle of my revenge. The one that will bring me peace at long last.

She’s the purest of the Devil’s Nightmare MC princesses. The most innocent. The one whose torture and death will bring the most pain.

After all these years, her father will know the pain he caused me to drown in my whole life. And I’ll make sure he never stops seeing his beloved daughter’s mutilated body for the rest of his miserable life.

And then I will have peace.

Peace through blood. Given back the same way it was taken from me all those years ago.

1

Eden

Late summer mornings are a very bittersweet thing. They’re bitter because the long, hot, carefree days of summer are ending, but sweet because the cycle is getting ready to turn again, bringing autumn and winter and spring. The perfect months to stay in and read. Which is all I ever do anyway. The season doesn’t really matter at all.

I woke up just before the first light of day started creeping up from behind the dense forest I can see out the window by my bed. Something startled me, I think. Maybe a dream. Something to do with excitement. And adventure. I racked my brain, trying to remember, but the dream floated away like the night’s forest mists beforethe sun.

I’ve never been one to take risks and have adventures. The wild rides I go on through the books I read are adventurous enough for me.

Or so I’ve been telling myself my whole life.

And I’ve only recently begun to doubt the truth of that.

At twenty-five, I’ve never even been kissed properly, let alone anything more. And now all my best friends are getting married, my sister has found love, and here I am, still just living on vapors of other people’s descriptions of love.

I couldn’t get back to sleep. And I couldn’t get lost in a book either.

I’ve just been lying here for the past two hours, maybe more, rethinking everything I knew to be true.

And I’m doing that because of a guy. One I met online of all places. We’ve been chatting non-stop since he replied to one of my TikTok videos—a review of a sweet small-town romance, no less—claiming he loved the book too.

Bullshit, was my response.

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