Page 1 of Summer's Edge

PROLOGUE

Edge

I ain’t had nothing much to live for since I was eighteen years old when my entire family was wiped out over a drug deal gone bad. Mine and my best friend’s and it was all my fault.

So, yeah, there we were, me and Ruin—or Nick, as he still went by in those days, before he got his road name—riding across the country on one bike. My dad’s Harley Davidson Road King to be exact, customized to perfection and the only thing I had left of him. Or any of my family. Nick didn’t even have that much. We didn’t talk about that. Tried not to think about it either. But Nick woke me almost each night by screaming in his dreams and I’m sure I was no better. We didn’t talk about that either.

We turned a lot of heads on that bike and not in a good way. A couple of kids riding a bike we could hardly steer. The little money we had got us from Michigan to California. The plan was to get to a place where the weather was nice year-round. But by the time we reached San Francisco we were broke.

We’d started sleeping in the wild then, on beaches and in parks, sometimes just by the side of the road. And it’s a good thing we did. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been there to save that poor, sad girl from throwing herself off the Golden Gate Bridge. Melody. She had lost her whole family too.

And for a while I tried to fool myself into thinking saving her life was the good deed that erased my guilt over ruining Nick’s life and destroying our families. But a deed like that didn’t exist. My guilt would never be lessened. Not by anything. And it would never be washed clean.

The three of us couldn’t all fit on my dad’s bike. And we couldn’t afford to keep riding it either.

So, I made the decision to sell it at the first seedy biker club we ran across. I thought I was real clever asking ten thousand for it. The bike was worth a lot more than that. Too bad we were just a couple of scrawny teenagers and a pretty girl. Too bad I was too stupid to realize my mistake in time.

By the time I had, the “buyers” lured us into the alleyway by the bar, five towering bikers with leering smiles and soft promises. I figured the bike was as good as sold given how in awe of it and all the customizations they claimed to be. But then a fist collided with my kidneys hard enough to take my breath and make me see stars. It was the first punch of many.

I could hear Melody screaming and Nick yelling and grunting as they beat him up too. But it was as though I was standing beside myself, looking at another mess I made, another thing I’d never be able to fix. If I lived long enough to try.

“What the fuck is going on here?” a man said harshly in a deep, carrying voice.

He was tall and built like a mountain. The tag on his cut said Ice, the back of it said Devil’s Nightmare MC.

“What the fuck is it to you?” the guy kicking me in the stomach growled.

I saw it all very clearly because I was still standing right beside my bleeding, shivering body on the cold ground.

“They’re just kids,” Ice said.

He wasn’t alone. Four other guys in Devil’s Nightmare MC cuts were beside them.

“Not your problem, man,” the guy kicking me said and kicked me again. I almost lost consciousness then. But I still saw it all clearly.

“I’m making it my problem,” Ice said.

Then they did.

And when they were all done, it was the five guys who tried to rob us shivering and bleeding on the ground.

“You all right, kid?” Ice asked me, his face real close to mine. I wasn’t, but I nodded anyway.

“You got somewhere to go?”

I shook my head.

I couldn’t speak, because my mouth was broken.

“Let’s take them back to the clubhouse and we’ll see what’s what after Doc looks at them,” one of the other guys said. His tag read Tank. And Vice-president right beneath it. So I figured we were in good hands.

And we were.

We stayed at their clubhouse, never left. That was ten years ago.

That’s how I became one of the Devils. And that’s why I owe Ice my life. It’s also why I would never do anything to cross the guy. Above all, I would never mess with his daughter.

But that was before I did.

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