Crank: The Devil's Highwaymen Nomads #1

  ‘CRANK’

  The Devil’s Highwaymen Nomads #1

  by

  USA Today Bestselling Author

  Claire C. Riley

  Writing as

  Cee Cee Riley

  Crank

  Copyright © 2018

  Written by Claire C. Riley / Cee Cee Riley

  Edited by Amy Jackson = seriously awesome badass!

  Cover Design by Eli Constant of Wilde Book Designs = also an awesome badass!

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or have been used with that person’s permission.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work that went into producing this book and for purchasing it from a reputable place and not stealing it like a seriously un-cool pirate!

  About the Book

  ‘Crank’

  The Devil’s Highwaymen Nomads #1

  I found my deliverance in the form of a bottle of whiskey and a woman named Hope.

  Hope was the opposite of everything I stood for and believed in; she was innocent and pure and beautiful in a way that was soul deep, yet I couldn’t help falling for her. We only had one night—just mere moments in a lifetime really, but it was enough to change me forever.

  Maria tasted like venom and looked like sin. She was beautiful and poisonous. She was dangerous—way more than I knew at the time, and she never pretended to be anything but my worst nightmare.

  I never stood a chance.

  Whiskey was bad for me, but in the end, Maria was probably worse.

  I was young, too young to have seen the things I had. On the run from my past. Chasing my nightmares away with sex and booze and praying to any god that might be listening to finish me off sooner rather than later.

  The day our worlds collided was the day that everything came apart. Our lives were set on a path that none of us could change.

  Maria was my Demon.

  And whiskey was my escape.

  But Hope? She was my redemption

  Coming in the series:

  The Nomad men are waiting for you to take the ride of your life… are you ready?

  Crank #1

  Sketch #2

  Battle #3

  Fighter #4

  Cowboy #5

  Life’s hard.

  So we have to be harder.

  ‘CRANK’

  The Devil’s Highwaymen Nomads #1

  by

  USA Today Bestselling Author

  Claire C. Riley

  Writing as

  Cee Cee Riley

  CRANK PLAYLIST

  What I’ve Done – Linkin Park

  Running Up that Hill – Placebo

  You Do Something To me – Paul Weller

  Gold Dust Woman – Fleetwood Mac

  Another Love – Tom Odell

  Ocean – Martin Garrix

  London Thunder – Foals

  The Night We Met – Lord Huron

  Hello (reggae cover) – Conkarah & Rosie Delmah

  Bitter Sweet Symphony – The Verve

  ~ 1 ~

  Fleetwood Mac played from the dusty jukebox in the corner of Lincoln’s bar. Stevie Nicks’ soft crooning filtered over the top of the many voices surrounding me, soothing my fractured soul.

  A rage burned deep inside of me, clawing at my insides and begging to be unleashed. I had to shut it out. I had to shut everything out. And the only way to do that was to fill my gut with as much alcohol as I could get before hopefully passing out. Deep enough to block out the nightmares, if I was lucky. But never deep enough to stop the screams that punctured my soul.

  I took another sip of the amber fuel in my glass. It wasn’t doing anything to dampen my rage. Even Stevie’s beautiful voice wasn’t calming the animal within me that night.

  I was young—only eighteen coming up to nineteen—but I’d done more and seen more than most twenty-five-year-olds. If only I knew then what I know now. Perhaps things would have worked out differently for everyone involved. Would have saved a lot of heartache for a lot of people too; I knew that much.

  And I know for damn sure that it would have saved a lot of blood from being spilled.

  I took another sip and stared at my reflection in the glass. Dark hair and even darker eyes, and a beard just growing through. I looked haunted—fuck, I was haunted. I needed to go home—well, back to the rundown motel that I’d been calling home for the past week. Home. That was a joke. It wasn’t exactly home, but a place to lay my head. To wash my sweaty body after a hard night’s drinking or a hard day’s laboring for a few measly bucks to get me by while I decided on a real plan.

  I had no home.

  I didn’t deserve one either.

  Not after what I had done.

  Someone nudged my arm and my elbow slipped off the sticky bar. I almost dropped my glass, and I snarled and turned to look at the guy next to me.

  He was tall. Fuck that, he was Goliath and I was David—a mere mortal in the vicinity of him. Didn’t stop me from sliding off my bar stool, my heavy boots landing on the dirty bar floor with a thud as I squared up to the guy. He ignored me in favor of signaling the waitress to bring another tray of drinks to table five and to put the bill on the tab. He glanced over at me as he turned away from the bar, a small smirk on his face. I recognized the fire ignite in his eyes as he saw the fury burning bright in mine.

  “Go the fuck home, kid,” he said, “while you still can.”

  He was tall, with long dark hair hanging down his back. A thick beard hung from his chin, hanging almost to his chest, and he reached up and ran his fingers through it as he smirked again and continued walking away.

  My nostrils flared, rage filling my veins like heroine. I should have let him go. I should have downed the remaining whiskey in my glass and gone back to my motel room like he’d said. Not drunk enough to pass out, but not sober enough to kill anyone either.

  But I didn’t.

  I was an asshole, and I was lusting for blood.

  I glared after him, my drink forgotten. And then I followed him through the crowd, watching as people automatically moved out of his way, like he was surrounded by a forcefield that didn’t allow anyone to get too close. Their gazes were wary as they moved from him to me, and to the anger that was no doubt pouring from me in violent waves. Pretty sure a couple of people even made for the door. It was a good move.

  He reached his table, unaware that I had followed him, and slid into the booth, his arm automatically draping along the top of the old leather-backed seating and snaking over the shoulders of a beautiful blonde. My gaze roved over the rest of the table, to the hard-faced men he was sitting with, and to the beautiful women pressed into the side of each man.

  If I had any sense I would have left it, but I didn’t.

  I hadn’t had any sense in a long damn time.

  Each of the men were almost as big as he was: as wide as a car and as tall as a giant. Muscles upon muscles, and tattoos that sounded alarm bells in me.

  I was a big guy, especially considering I was only eighteen, but I’d been fighting for at least ten of those years and had developed enough muscle to take down most men, so I wasn’t concerned.

  I stopped in my tracks, my senses coming a little too
slowly and a little too late as Goliath slowly looked up at me, one dark, pierced eyebrow quirking in question. He slid back out of the booth and stepped toward me.

  “Can I do something for you, son?”

  I bristled at the term. I wasn’t anyone’s son.

  “You nudged me,” I growled out. “Back at the bar.”

  His eyes were as dark as hell, and the smile on his face told me that he’d probably put enough bodies in the ground to make even the Devil weep. Yet my shoulders stayed back, my chin stayed up, and my hard gaze bored into his like I could kill him with it if I so chose.

  “I nudged you?” he asked, his smile falling.

  I wasn’t scared of anyone or anything. After the things I’d seen in my short life, there was nothing left to fear anymore. If anything, I welcomed death. Begged for it, almost. It was probably why I didn’t shut my damned mouth and get the hell out of there.

  “Yeah,” I replied through gritted teeth. My fists were clenching and unclenching at my sides. Balling up tightly, ready to deliver pain and punishment to anything and anyone in my way. And right then, Goliath was in my motherfucking way.

  He looked back over his shoulder, his dark gaze moving over his friends. They chuckled lightly, as if this was nothing. But I saw the tension around their eyes, and the hard set of their jaws. They were waiting, just like I was.

  Each man wore a dark leather cut, and different patches were sewn on each of them. At the back of my mind I knew that represented something—probably something I didn’t want to be getting mixed up in. Yet there I was, mixing shit up.

  Goliath looked back at me, blinking slowly as if the whole thing was boring him so much he was going to fall asleep. The woman he was with gave a soft giggle, her tits jiggling in her low-cut top as she ran her tongue across her painted red lips.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, kid.”

  “I told you not to call me k—”

  *

  Her screams filled my ears. Blood-curdling and chilling, they dragged me back from the abyss and vomited me back out into the unforgiving night. My cheek was pressed against something hard. Something hard and wet. Fuck, what was that?

  My eyes sluggishly opened, the screams dying out and making way for Bob Dylan singing about needing shelter from the storm. Don’t we all, brother? Don’t we motherfucking all.

  “He’s waking up, Bull.” A woman’s soft voice slurred from next to me and I tried to turn my head toward her. She sounded familiar—or maybe I just wished she was. I could have really done with someone familiar right then. I was sure as hell hoping it was her hand running up and down my thigh too.

  Something grabbed the back of my tee and dragged me upwards. I groaned as my world spun and twisted in one huge vicious circle that threatened to make me spill my whiskey-soaked insides onto the table. I squeezed my eyes closed, begging for my head to stop spinning, and thank fuck the gods listened, because when I opened them again, everything was as it had been before I’d—

  “I knocked you the fuck out,” Goliath said. “Thought you needed a time-out to consider your options before you did or said something you might regret later on.” He pushed a drink toward me—beer, not whiskey—and I shook my head, ignoring the chuckle he let out. “Oh yeah, you’re a whiskey boy, right?”

  “Right,” I replied. I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth, tasting blood on my teeth.

  He reached over and grabbed a glass from one of the other men sitting around the table. I expected him to argue or yell about it, but the other man only smirked and continued to run his hand up the leg of the woman that was draped over him.

  “Name’s, Bull,” the Goliath lookalike said, sliding the drink over to me. “Don’t worry about Jack.”

  My gaze flitted back to the guy whose drink he just took, but he was too busy burying his face in the woman’s neck, his hand fisting in her hair like he was about to fuck her right here on the table in front of a packed-out bar.

  I took the drink, my shaking fingers wrapping around the glass and automatically feeling better for having the security of it there. Bull’s hand slammed down on my wrist as I started to lift the glass up toward my mouth, slamming it back down and almost spilling its contents over the sticky wooden surface of the old table.

  My head snapped to face Bull, my lips pulling back like a pit bull ready to attack. He held my arm in place, his gaze steady and revealing nothing but dark benevolence toward me.

  “I don’t take too kindly to someone coming over to my table, in my bar, when I’m with my brothers, and making idle threats against me.”

  If looks could kill, Bull would be ninety feet under already. As it were, all my glaring was getting me was his grip tightening on my arm.

  “Who said my threat was idle?” I snapped back, once again trying to lift my arm, but he pressed down harder. Hard enough to make me think he was going to snap my arm at any moment. Wouldn’t be the first time it had happened to me.

  “You’re young, angry, desperate for violence.” He talked like he knew me, and my brow furrowed, hating that everything was so obvious to see. “I got a place in my crew for someone like you, if you’re willing to take orders and pay your dues.”

  He let go of my arm and sat back in the booth. He picked up his beer and downed half of it in one gulp before slamming it back down on the table, his gaze never leaving mine.

  I had no desire to be a part of anything. In fact, it was the opposite of what I wanted. What I needed was to be as far away from people as I could get. What I needed was to wash the blood from my hands, my body, and my mind. What I needed was to be done with this world and all of its bullshit.

  “You got wheels?” he asked, as if I’d already agreed to join him and his crew. He drank the remaining beer in his glass, his gaze still on me. “You don’t want in? That’s cool. Drink your drink, get up, and walk away. But make sure never to show your face around here again.”

  “And if I do?”

  “Show your face around here or join me and my brothers? Because each answer has very fucking different outcomes, kid,” he chuckled darkly.

  “Join you.”

  I looked around, wondering who the hell had spoken, because it couldn’t have been me. But there was no one around but a bar full of drunk people and me. And who the fuck was I?

  An orphan.

  A nobody.

  A murderer.

  Someone with a death wish, that’s who I was.

  “Well if you do, then I’m about to show you a world you never even knew existed.” He grinned like he already had me, and maybe he did. “What’s your name?”

  My name? Hell, I didn’t even know anymore. I’d given so many different ones out during the past six months, while I was on the run. New personas, new people I wanted to be. Anything to make the old me go far far away. But he always found me.

  Always.

  So I decided to stop running. Stop hiding. And stop pretending.

  “Dillon,” I replied.

  Bull held out his hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Dillon.”

  I shook it, not sure what was happening. I’d come to get drunk. To pass out into oblivion. And now I had a banging headache, a gut full of whiskey, and was shaking hands with the Devil reinvented.

  “Like I said, I’m Bull. And these are my brothers. That’s Jack, who’s mauling the sweetbutt. This is Hammer, Wolf, and Ranger.”

  The other men nodded in my direction and went on about their business, either drinking, feeling up their women, or watching the exchange between me and Bull.

  I nodded at them all, a heavy frown still on my face. “Strange names for brothers. Your mama not treat you right as kids?”

  Bull smirked again and Wolf barked out a sharp laugh. I glanced over, understanding immediately why he was called Wolf. His eyes were the coldest blue I had ever seen, just like a wolf’s. And with his dark hair and beard, speckled with gray, yeah, I got it.

  “We’re the Devil’s Highwaymen,” Bull replied, grabbi
ng a shot of whiskey from the table. “Las Vegas chapter.”

  ~ 2 ~

  “Why me?”

  I stared down at the naked woman on the dirty bed in front of me. The room stank of beer and oil. Boxes were piled in every corner, bike parts spilling out of some of them. After we’d finished our drinks I had ridden in a truck with one of the Highwaymen, my piece-of-shit bike thrown on the back along with my sole piece of luggage. I’d half expected to be blindfolded so I couldn’t tell anyone where their clubhouse was if I changed my mind. But no one stopped me from looking.

  It wasn’t a given that I was in yet, apparently. And that was okay, because it wasn’t a given that I wanted in yet either.

  I had only been there minutes when the naked woman on the bed in front of me right now had come over and dropped to her knees. Bull had slapped me on the back as she’d started to unzip my jeans and pointed to a back room, and I’d gladly dragged her off caveman-style to fuck some of my anger and unease away.

  “Answer me,” I said, still waiting for her to reply.

  She licked a tongue across her lips. “Because word travels fast, baby. You’ve got balls of steel fronting Bull like that,” she replied with a hooded gaze, her long brunette hair draping over her shoulder. “You’re lucky to still be alive, baby. You should thank whichever god was watching you tonight.” She cupped my balls, squeezing them the right side of painful.

  I looked across at her, loathing and loving every inch of her naked flesh in equal abundance. She was beautiful, drunk or sober, though I loved the faraway look in her eyes right then that told me she was probably flying high on alcohol and drugs. It would make this easier on her.

  “Ain’t no god I believe in,” I replied, grabbing her ankles and pulling her to the edge of the bed.