Page 3 of Pain

I recognized him now. He was one of the prospects. Devil hadn’t even given me to a fully patched member. He’d given me to a damned newbie.

The newbie in question looked furious, and I didn’t doubt that he was. Anything that happened to me would come right down on him, and he was in no position to make mistakes. This would mean his life.

One look at the bike sitting next to me, though, and he came to a screeching halt himself, his face turning white and slack. Then, to my surprise, he turned around, ran back to the truck, jumped in, and hauled ass down the road.

I watched, confused as all get-out, and then looked up, wondering what he’d seen on the bike that had scared him so badly.

When I saw the face of the man sitting next to me, I knew exactly why he’d run.

Because that face belonged to Knight Arthur. Head of the Banshees MC and Devil’s sworn enemy.

I’d just thrown myself out of a truck and right into the lap of the one man who would treat me even worse than Devil himself.

CHAPTER 2

KNIGHT

My gaze darted from the girl at my feet to the man running toward us, and then back to the girl... and then back to the guy.

What the actual fuck was going on here? I’d been flying across the pavement, my thoughts far away on a drive my crew was planning to take next weekend—and the party that would come at the end of it—and suddenly this girl had come flying out of the truck in front of me, hitting the ground so hard I was surprised she hadn’t splattered across the fucking concrete and then nearly getting under my own tires on her rebound.

I’d nearly hit the girl, and that would have killed her. If she was even still alive.

Three seconds of attention on the guy who’d been driving the truck told me that he was now hightailing it out of here and no longer an issue. Which left me free to see to the girl who’d just evidently tried to kill herself.

I hit the kickstand on my bike and dove for the girl on the sidewalk, my mind still caught back on the vision of her flying out of the truck, her scream tearing through the air and the thud of a body hitting the sidewalk.

A girl. A girl flying out of a truck that I now realized had been going way too quickly for being inside this town’s limits. What. The. Fuck.

I landed on my knees next to the girl’s body and was just reaching out a hesitant hand toward her neck, thinking I’d better at least figure out whether she was still alive, when the girl in question suddenly shot up on all fours and started scrambling away from me.

Okay, this was getting weirder and weirder.

“Hey, where are you going?” I snapped, grabbing for her. “Be careful! You can’t—”

She turned and cast a terrified glance at me, the one eye I could see large and incredibly frightened, and I realized several things at once.

First, the girl was definitely not dead if she was doing her best to get away from me as quickly as she could. Second, she evidently wasn’t as broken as I’d expected her to be, given her actions.

And third, and perhaps most important, I recognized her.

I hadn’t at first, given the fact that she was wearing a blindfold over one eye, but now that I was getting a closer look at her, or at least half of her face, I realized that this wasn’t the first time I’d seen her. Tanned, flawless skin, cheeks rounded enough to make her look a lot younger than she actually was, and that pert little nose. A mouth that I’d never seen smiling. A chin that I’d only ever seen jutted out in anger and defensiveness when it came to looking at me. Her wrists tied together in front of her.

Striking green eyes so bright that they looked fake.

Yeah, I could only see one of them right now, but I’d never have mistaken those eyes for any others. Because as far as I knew, Saraya Post was the only person who had eyes that color.

I rocked back on my heels, all the breath fleeing my lungs.

Shit. I’d thought this might be complex before, with a girl suddenly flying out of a truck right in front of me and almost getting herself tangled up in the wheels of my ride.

But I’d had no fucking idea.

“Saraya Post,” I said quietly.

She flipped over onto her ass and yanked the blindfold off her head, exposing another glaring eye. “Curtis Arthur,” she said coldly. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Knight,” I said firmly, giving her my call name—and the nickname my father had given me when I was only thirteen. Just before he was rubbed out by a member of another MC. “No one calls me Curtis except my mother.”