Lawless (King #3) by T.M. Frazier
Dedication
For Logan & Charley
For teaching me what real love is…
Note to Readers
This is Bear’s story and book three in the King series. It is recommended that you read both King and Tyrant in order to fully understand and enjoy all that goes on in Lawless. I hope you enjoy reading LAWLESS as much as I loved writing it.
—T.M.
“We’re lawless my friend.
Civilians can’t wrap their little fucking brains
around that without getting their frilly
panties in a fucking twist.”
—Bear, TYRANT
PROLOGUE
Bear
I was born a Bastard.
A soldier, in the lawless army of the Beach Bastards Motorcycle Club. Groomed to one day take the gavel from my old man.
Duty came before my conscience, before family, before everything.
I didn’t choose the life, it chose me, and living it came with knowing, and accepting, that every morning I got up to take a piss, could be my very last day above ground.
Or, depending on my orders…someone else’s last.
Being a biker, a Bastard, wasn’t just in my blood. I didn’t just live it.
I breathed it.
I drank it.
I fucking loved it.
It was everything.
Until it wasn’t.
I don’t remember the exact moment it happened, maybe after my first kill, maybe on the day I was patched in, but it happened. Motor oil, leather, violence, and a penchant for laying down enemies of the club, replaced the blood in my veins.
I became more biker than man.
And I was proud.
I never thought of it as a problem, but I also never thought there would come a day when I wouldn’t be a Beach Bastard anymore.
But it came.
And I wasn’t.
On the day I laid down my cut and walked out the door of the MC, I’d turned my own hourglass and set the expiration on my life.
Once a Bastard, you were always a Bastard.
Or you were dead.
They’d come for me. But the fucked up thing was that it wasn’t the thought of my brothers trying to put me to ground that bothered me most, it was the uncertainty.
I knew everything about being a biker.
I didn’t know shit about being a man.
I’ve been tortured and on the verge of death, violated for the amusement of my captors. Through it all I’d never lost that edge that kept me alive. That fight. The thing inside that makes your heart beat so fast it feels like it’s going to beat its way right through your chest, and tells you that no matter the situation, you’ll not only get the fuck out of it, but that you’re going to burn every motherfucker alive who tried to take you down.
I’ve been beaten, but I’d never been broken.
Until Thia…
CHAPTER ONE
Thia
Ten years old…
I don’t know where it all went wrong.
I never understood that saying. Because looking back on my life I can pinpoint the exact day, the exact hour, when it all changed and took a turn that no one could have predicted.
Especially me.
Three weeks away from my eleventh birthday, I had just ridden my little red bicycle the three miles to the Stop-n-Go. Dad wanted me to drop off a crate of oranges so I’d tied them to a skateboard and tied a rope from the front wheels to the seat of my bike with a rope I’d found in my dad’s old boat. “Will you watch the counter, Cindy?” Emma May asked, swaying her hips from side to side, she shimmied her way over to the door, clutching her little square purse in her hand. “I’m just going to pop next door to the salon for a bit. No one will probably even come in,” she added, leaning over the counter she opened the antique cash register using a series of button pushes and a slam of her fist on a spot at the bottom. She removed some cash and smiled back at me, pushing through the glass door that chimed when she opened it and again when it swung shut.
Emma May was right. She’d asked me to watch the store before and no one had ever come in.
Until that day.
It’s not like I was eager to get home. Mom had started acting weird. Cleaning the floors for hours until the wood lost its shine. Talking to herself in the kitchen. Anytime I asked her about it, she acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about. Dad told me that it would be okay and to just stay out of her way and give her some space.
I did what he said and stayed away as much as possible, most of the time not getting home until just after the sun set.
Watching the store was a good reason as any to prolong going home.
After an hour I got fidgety. I straightened the wall of cigarettes behind the register, turned the hot dogs on the rollers that didn’t work, and tried to read a magazine, but I didn’t understand what ‘Seventeen Positions to Make Him Ache’ even meant.