Doc (The Kings of Mayhem MC Tennessee 2)

Three years after my brother disappeared, I left for nursing school. The only reason Max let me go was because he believed I was firmly caught under his spell, and he recognized the benefits of me being a nurse for the Inferno. He didn’t believe for a second that I wouldn’t return, and at the time, neither did I.

But I didn’t return.

Instead, I fell in love with the outside world, with all its color, freedom, and opportunities. The longer I stayed away from the seedy world of the Inferno, the more I saw how insane Max really was and how diabolical the club had become.

I didn’t want to go back to that life, so I stayed gone.

For ten years.

Until two nights ago when Max ambushed me by showing up on my doorstep.

“What are you doing here?” After all these years, the shock of seeing my father standing at my front door sent a sharp stab of panic through me. A minute ago, he was a distant memory as I sat on my couch drinking my glass of wine. Now, after answering the knock at the door, I was face-to-face with the man I’d turned my back on ten years earlier.

He looked different.

Older.

Scarier.

“Ten years, and that’s all you have to say to your daddy?” He tried to joke, but I didn’t crack a smile.

Max knocking on my front door could only mean bad news.

“What do you want?”

The smile on his face vanished.

“It’s time to come back, Tiger Lily.”

Hearing him say my name sent chills down my spine.

I didn’t want to hear him say my name.

I didn’t want anything to do with the madman.

“I can’t help you.”

When I tried closing the door, Max put his big boot in the way.

“We need your help, and if you don’t come, my wife could lose the baby and die.”

My eyes shot to his. “What are you talking about?”

“My wife, Sunshine, she’s due any day now. But it’s been a complicated pregnancy, and Jerimiah was concerned about the labor.” He shook his head and looked worried. “We found Jerimiah dead in his bed this morning. It was probably a heart attack… the old fuck was eighty years old. But it means we don’t have no medical person at the compound. I’m worried Sunshine will run into trouble giving birth.”

The last time I saw Sunshine was ten years ago when she was a twelve-year-old girl. For a moment, I wondered what happened to Max’s two other wives, but I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t going to give my father the chance to worm his way into my brain.

“Take her to the hospital,” I said.

“She can’t go to the hospital,” was all he said.

He didn’t need to say anything more.

I knew the type of women my father favored—female versions of himself.

Sunshine probably had a warrant out for her arrest.

I tried to close the door again.

I didn’t need nor want this.

But my father stepped forward. “If you won’t do it for me, do it for your baby brother.”

“My brother?”

“Yes, she’s carrying my son, and that makes him your brother. You’ve already lost one brother. Don’t lose another.”

My father was a master manipulator. He knew he’d get his own way by dangling my unborn baby brother in front of me.

So two hours later, I was back in the clutches of the Appalachian Inferno MC.

The moment I stepped inside the building, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck and remained like that for hours. The vibe was different—much worse than before. The sense of family was completely gone, and in its place was a weird cult-like vibe. Everyone looked at my father like he was some kind of demigod, and that was scary.

The two other wives I’d wondered about. Yeah, they were gone, and no one talked about them.

I kept telling myself it’d be okay. That I’d help Sunshine deliver her baby, then be on my way. But when it became obvious Sunshine needed a lot more than my help to deliver her baby, I stood up against my father and insisted she be taken to the hospital. My father refused, so I tried to leave, but he pointed a gun at me and pressed it right up against my temple.

It was then I knew I wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

Then Otto and Lucien dragged the unconscious biker in and laid him on the bed in the room next to where Sunshine was in labor, and I realized just how far my father was prepared to go to get what he wanted.

The father I once knew wasn’t a kidnapper.

But the father who brought me here was capable of anything.

And now, here we all are.

Two captives and one incredibly dangerous, extremely violent motorcycle club.

DOC

The biker on the bed is in a bad way.

Covered head to toe in saturated pieces of torn bed linen, he’s out cold from the morphine Lily gave him earlier.