The President's Captive

The intruder is small, dark-clothed, wearing a cap pulled low, and she does not raise her hands. She stands behind his desk breathing steady, measuring the distance between them. *You're Lachlan Maddox.* She tells him he will not shoot her, and she is right about why: the desk is glass, a bullet through her shatters it, and the noise brings the whole club down on him before he has a single answer. So he takes the cuffs off his belt and locks her to the radiator pipe under the window instead. Then he pulls her sleeve up to check for a wire, and finds a crescent moon inked on the inside of her wrist. He has seen that shape a hundred times. His father drew it in blue ink at the bottom of every letter he ever sent from prison, and never once explained it. Her name is Paige. Her mother, Elena Devlin, wrote to Declan Maddox every week for twelve years and never met him once. Declan was president of the Iron Serpents for seventeen years before somebody put a bullet in him, and Paige came to Redemption because her own father died in a car crash that was not a crash, and because the police did nothing about either. What she finds is not in the desk. It is behind a vent grate: an audio file, six minutes and forty-two seconds long. A chair scraping on concrete. A jukebox with a skip on track four. And a voice she had heard two hours earlier, easy and laughing, at the table where she ate dinner. *And the father?* *Already handled.* Kellan is Locke's vice president. He has been riding with the Blood Hounds the whole time, and he has been planning this since before Declan died. Locke has known that voice for fifteen years. That leaves a woman cuffed in a clubhouse who cannot prove what she knows without exposing herself, and a president who swore over his father's body that he would never again let another person close enough to matter. A dark motorcycle club romance set in a Colorado mountain town, with a captive who refuses to behave like one, a traitor wearing the same patch as the man he killed, and a recording that starts a war whichever way it gets played. The romance is closed-door.