Zain Read online

  Zain

  Steel Cobras MC

  By Evie Monroe

  Copyright © 2019 Evie Monroe and BookBoyfriends Publishing LLC

  Contents

  Zain

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

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  Evie's Books

  Acknowledgements

  About Evie

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 Evie Monroe and BookBoyfriends Publishing LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of the trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Chapter One

  Zain

  The Hell’s Fury—our rival gang and the biggest thorn in our side—was out for blood. And I was the start of it all.

  Once again, the Steel Cobras sat around church mulling over the hot topic of conversation: how the hell we were going to put an end to the Fury’s shitstorm once and for all. It had been going on for three years for fucks sake.

  I glanced at my brothers. Each one of them officers in the best motorcycle club in Aveline Bay. Hell, the whole West Coast. They all looked like they’d aged decades in the three years since I’d met them.

  Being part of the Steel Cobras was the best thing that’d ever happened to me. I knew I wanted to be in a motorcycle club from the time I was about seven or eight years old. When all of the other kids were playing sports in the recess yard of my private school, I would sit and watch this big dude fixing up his bike in the row houses outside the playground.

  Big, jacked dude with tattoos up and down his arms and a fuck you attitude. Even the biggest bullies respected that dude. And he had the sweetest ride. A Harley he spent most of the day polishing up so that the chrome sparkled like diamonds.

  Sometimes at recess, a pretty lady would come and jump on the back of the bike with him and they’d tear off to wherever.

  In school, I never wanted to be an astronaut or a lawyer or a doctor like the other kids. No, I wanted to be that guy—the fucking biggest badass I’d ever seen.

  The problem was, I was so hyped up on becoming that guy, I didn’t care how I got there. And I fell in with some bad dudes.

  The Hell’s Fury.

  No bigger bunch of assholes had ever existed.

  And now here we were, trying to put out a fire I’d ignited three years ago when I’d jumped ship from Hell’s Fury to the motherfuckin’ Steel Cobras.

  I wasn’t far off from the guy I admired as a kid.

  I was jacked.

  I had the tattoos.

  I had the Harley.

  I had the same fuck you attitude.

  The only thing I didn’t have was the pretty lady. Although, I did have a selection of blondes, and brunettes, and red-heads, one for every day of the month. And I liked that a hell of a lot better.

  So I’d gotten the life I’d dreamed of. The life most of the men around this table had dreamed of, too. They’d all had similar ideas of becoming bad-asses, or else they wouldn’t have been here.

  If only I hadn’t gone straight to the Cobras and hadn’t messed with the Hell’s Fury to begin with. Then my life would have been perfect. But I was stupid back in the day.

  That little incident, about three years ago, had started this whole feud.

  Slowly, it’d been building, and now it had come to a head.

  Three years. Three years of fighting back-and-forth, of watching all the guys I called my brothers suffer, walking around with eyes on the backs of their heads.

  We sat around the table at the clubhouse that evening, tense. It’d been a long night, with all of us agreeing we needed to take out the Fury, but none of us keen on waiting for the right time to do that.

  So far, there’d been battles here and there. They’d kidnapped our girls, threatened us, shot at us, tried to destroy our clubhouse. But when they killed Joel, the little brother of Hart’s girl, they went too far. Way too far.

  The all-out war was coming. It was just a question of when.

  And every fucking time something like this happened, every time the Fury drew Cobra blood, I was reminded that I was the start of it all.

  I was the reason Joel was dead.

  I was the reason Jet had taken a bullet in the stomach.

  I was the reason several of the Cobra’s girls were afraid to go out at night.

  I was the reason the other Cobras had to watch their backs.

  Hart, our Secretary and tech guy, ran both hands through his hair and growled. The night was getting to him, the hour, his anger over what they’d done.

  “It’s time,” he announced, pounding the table. “Joel was the last straw. They killed him purely out of spite. We need to avenge him. I want to tell Charlotte we’re going to take care of it, for her brother. She’s scared to death they’ll come after me now or her.”

  Nix shook his head in disgust. “Liv is, too. She keeps wondering what’ll happen when she has our baby.”

  All the guys nodded to signal they were ready.

  But I couldn’t say a word.

  I hated the Fury as much, if not more, than all of them, but I was the only one of them without a girl. My reasons for getting rid of the Fury were my own. They’d given me shit since the early days when I’d been a prospect with them. And it only got worse when I defected to the Cobras.

  It was a good thing I could hold my own in a fistfight. But having a good right hook could only get me so far. I lived every day knowing I was Public Enemy Number One in their eyes. They made it no secret that they wanted me dead. Executing Joel in cold blood for the same crime showed me they weren’t bluffing.

  They were sending me a message, one I read loud and clear. You’re next.

  But as much as I wanted them gone, I didn’t want any more Cobra blood spilled because of a fire I’d struck the match to start.

  “It’s gonna get worse and worse for us until we take them out,” said Nix, the Vice President of the club. “We keep going over this. Same shit, different day.”

  Our president, Cullen, took a swig of his beer and stroked his beard. “Look. If it was just a matter of pressing a button and dropping a bomb on the Fury, I’d be for it. But the fact remains, th
ey’re a much bigger club than the Cobras. They have clubs and clubhouses everywhere, and we never know where they’re gonna be. Every time we see them, they’ve got more guys. We can’t just walk in there and take them out without some serious casualties.”

  Hart scowled. “Yeah, but you saw what they did to Joel. We should rip their fucking hearts out by hand for that.”

  Jetson, our Sargent at Arms and the baby of the group, stirred in his seat. He was a little pissant most of the time, saying shit that usually had us wanting to kick his ass. But he’d gotten a lot better since he’d taken that bullet in the stomach and started shacking up with Nora, that hot surgeon of his. “They’re asking for it,” he said, sounding wise for once in his life.

  “Sure they are. Because they know that if they keep provoking us, we’ll fly off the handle and do stupid shit. We do something stupid like attack them with the numbers they have, they can go and pick us off one by one.” Cullen said.

  “What the fuck? You were there! They blew the kid’s brains out and laughed about it,” Hart ground out, shooting eye daggers at Cullen. I was sure he’d gotten more than an earful from Charlotte, his girl and Joel’s older sister. “They did that out of spite for us. We can’t just let them walk all over us.”

  It’d been a fucking nightmare. The nineteen-year-old kid made the mistake of becoming a prospect for the Fury, just as I had. We’d caught him taking pot shots at Nix and Jet, learned that he was just a naïve, scared little kid, and eventually we all came to like the guy and offered to make him a prospect. He liked us too, decided to bolt from the Fury and gave us some fresh intel on their recent operations. And because we liked him?

  He got a bullet in his head for that trouble. They executed him right in front of us.

  “It’s no secret the Hell’s Fury is a bad club. The kid knew what he was getting into.”

  Hart slammed his fists down on the table. “This is bullshit!”

  Cullen didn’t flinch. He leaned back and checked out his fingernails, unimpressed by the show of testosterone.

  I could’ve set the record straight on that one. Not everyone was as well informed as Cullen was. Bad meant different things to different people. I’d gotten in with the Fury because I wanted to be part of the biggest, baddest club in Aveline Bay. I hadn’t done any research, just acted on what I’d heard on the news. I’d thought the Fury was it.

  By the time I’d learned I was wrong, that the Fury were bad as in total assholes, I was in too deep to simply back out and say I’d made a mistake.

  When you’re accepted into the Fury? You’re Fury for life, however long that might be. And if you try to leave? Your life expectancy just got a hell of a lot shorter.

  Cullen reached for his pack of cigarettes and tapped one out, then put it back. He’d been trying to quit but had been doing a shitty job of it. “You give me a good way we can get to them without killing ourselves in the process, and maybe I’ll bite. But they have twice as many men as we have. I’m not leading the Cobras into a bloodbath.”

  Our president did have a point. He hated the Fury as much as the next guy, but we didn’t have the numbers to launch into a full attack.

  “So what?” Jet put his elbows on the table and winced a little. “We just sit back and do nothing? That’s fucked.”

  “You have any better ideas, put them on the table. But yeah. Right now, there’s nothing we can do,” Cullen said.

  The room erupted, men shouting and trying to be the loudest in the room. Hart pushed away from the table and stalked back and forth, raking his hands through his hair. All talk, no listening. My head pounded.

  Cullen banged his fist on the table and quieted everyone down. He looked at me, the only person who hadn’t said a word. “Zain. It’s clear how all these guys feel. But you’ve been too quiet. What about you? What do you think?”

  Since I’d once been a prospect for the Fury, Cullen usually turned to me for advice. Sure, I knew stuff about them, but I wasn’t sure I had anything new to help us now.

  “We may have taken Slade out, but now they’ve got Scar. Bad dude, man. He’s just as bad, if not worse than Slade. Whatever Joel told us about them falling apart without a leader ain’t gonna be in effect anymore. It’s a risk,” I said.

  Cullen nodded, but the rest of the guys? That wasn’t the answer they wanted to hear. Hart especially. “I don’t fucking care,” he said, drumming his hands on the table. “If we don’t do something about them now, I’m going to have to take Charlie out of here. She can’t live this way. She wants to leave Aveline anyway, knowing what happened to her little brother.”

  Jet nodded. “Yeah. Nora’s flipping out. She’s been talking about transferring to another hospital, just to get away from this Fury bullshit.”

  Nix, his older brother, added, “I have to escort Liv to her dance rehearsals. No way in hell am I letting her go by herself. She’s too little to protect herself against those assholes.”

  Drake, our treasurer, tucked his long hair behind his ear. He didn’t say anything at first, but he didn’t have to. His girl Cait and her mother, Roxanne were daughter and wife of Slade, the Fury’s former president. Ever since we’d offed Slade, we’d had his family in hiding. Months, now. It had to have been getting old for him.

  Drake added, “Cait thinks that the more we wait, the weaker we look and the stronger they’ll get. They’ve been prospecting as far as San Fran. For Aveline Bay. Fuckers are cold blooded killers.”

  Cullen nodded slowly. He was probably thinking of his girl, Grace, and his daughter. They all had a lot riding on this war with the Fury.

  I didn’t have anyone but myself. The only thing I felt was responsible for the whole shitty affair. Countless lives were either over or in danger because of my one stupid move.

  After all, if I hadn’t defected, it was possible that the two clubs could’ve coexisted in Aveline Bay, California.

  Not now. And it’d just gotten worse over the years.

  We had to do something. I’d take care of it myself, but I’d already caused enough shit for these guys. I didn’t want to be the one that ended up getting all of them killed.

  So I’d come in here knowing I wouldn’t talk unless I had to.

  Everyone restless, they started throwing out their opinions again. The shouting rose to a head, loud enough that I couldn’t take it anymore. It felt like someone was drilling into my goddamn brain with a corkscrew. This was fucking petty drama, which I hated.

  I put up my hands. “Fuck this. Y’all are driving me insane. I’m heading out.” I pushed away from my chair as they all turned to stare at me. Grabbing my helmet, I said, “Let me all know what you decide. I’m in, either way.”

  I strode to the door, flung it open, and went out to my bike, leaving them staring after me. They didn’t get it. I felt like shit. They were my brothers and seeing them go through this felt like a fucking cement block tied around my neck.

  Because I’d started the whole damn thing, so I didn’t deserve a vote.

  Chapter Two

  Sasha

  “Where are you, solnyshka?”

  Even though it was only a voicemail, the voice of my ex-husband nearly made my skin crawl.

  I dropped the phone on my desk with a clatter that made everyone in the office look up.

  Glancing at the clock, my pulse skittered. 5:05.

  I grabbed my handbag and left the pile of papers for the Wilson insurance fraud case scattered on my desk. I’d clean it up tomorrow.

  I was late. Only five minutes late, now, but Viktor was the kind of man who did not like to be kept waiting.

  I pushed in my chair and headed for the door.

  As I waved goodbye to the interns and a few of the other friendlier faces in the office, my co-worker, Marina, called loudly, “Look who’s checking out early. Bye Sasha!”

  I frowned at her as I pulled my jacket over my blouse and hefted my folio bag onto my shoulder. “It’s not early.”

  “Well, for some people,
it might not be,” she said with a hint of superiority, fluffing her curly black locks.

  “I understand, Marina. But I’ve got to pick up Alena.”

  “Or so you say.”

  I frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  She huffed like it wasn’t a good enough excuse and stepped over to her cubicle.

  I suppressed the urge to curse under my breath. Marina Lopez clearly wanted the promotion to head paralegal so much she was salivating for it. Happily married to a doctor with no children, she didn’t know the struggle I went through, day after day. She was always making me look bad in front of my boss, Mr. Robert Simms, the most important half of Simms and Simms, the downtown law firm headed by him and his younger brother.

  As I headed for the door, my heels clicking too loudly on the hardwood floor, I ventured a look in Robert Simms’ office. Luckily, he was busy on the telephone, his chair turned away from the door, so I made it out of the office without him seeing me slip past him.

  I didn’t dare believe I was so lucky as to have not gotten caught. Undoubtedly, Marina would fill him in the second he hung up the phone.

  As I pressed the DOWN button for the elevator, Sarah Chin stopped me in the hall. “You’re going? So soon?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Please don’t, Sarah. I already got a guilt trip from Marina.”

  She checked her phone and patted my arm. “Oh. I didn’t realize what time it is. I didn’t mean to imply anything. I know you have to get Alena.”

  I sighed. “Thanks, Sarah.”

  She looked around to make sure we were alone and leaned in. “And don’t worry about Marina. That girl’s a witch with a B. You’re fine. We were almost done here, anyway. The Wilson case will be fine. I’ll handle everything.”

  Sarah was a true star. She was sweet, kind, dedicated, a true team player. I smiled at her as the elevator bell dinged above me and the doors slid open. I stepped inside. “Thank you so much, Sarah. I owe you for this.”

  “No you don’t!” Sarah called as the doors slid shut. “Have a good weekend!”

  Sarah had been my ally at Simms & Simms since I started there a year ago, after my divorce was final. My only ally. I loved the job, and the Simms brothers always complimented my work. What I loved most about working was making my own money and having my independence.