Cold Fury (Royal Bastards MC: Minneapolis, MN), page 1
COLD FURY
ROYAL BASTARDS MC: MINNEAPOLIS, MN
DAPHNE LOVELING
Copyright 2023 Daphne Loveling
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
CONTENTS
Credits
Dedication
Blurb
Royal Bastards MC Series Fifth Run
The Royal Bastards Code
Note for the Reader
1. Fury
2. Kat
3. Fury
4. Kat
5. Fury
6. Kat
7. Fury
8. Fury
9. Kat
10. Kat
11. Fury
12. Kat
13. Fury
14. Kat
15. Fury
16. Fury
17. Kat
18. Kat
19. Kat
20. Fury
21. Kat
22. Fury
23. Kat
24. Fury
25. Fury
26. Kat
27. Fury
Epilogue
Join My Mailing List
Books by Daphne Loveling
About Daphne Loveling
Cover model: Gabe Laduke
Cover photo by Wander Aguiar
Cover design by Lucian Bane
To Melissa Machado, for helping me “scout” locations. ;)
And to another Melissa, the inspiration for the character Little Big Mama.
FURY
Years ago, I fell in love with an angel.
Only problem: her brother was in a rival MC.
My prez gave me an ultimatum: her or my club.
Fool that I was, I chose the club.
Years later, I run into her when she moves back to town.
She still hurts from the way I treated her back then.
But this time, I’m not giving her up.
Her brother’s club and mine are still bitter enemies. And claiming Kat threatens to throw us into full-on war.
But none of that matters. I’m going to win her back.
This time, Kat is mine. No matter the cost.
KAT
Years ago, I fell in love with a biker.
He hurt me more than I ever thought I could be hurt.
But I never stopped loving him.
The next time I see him years later, when he saves me from a man who won’t take no for an answer.
I find myself falling for him all over again.
But my brother makes it clear: stay away from Fury and the Royal Bastards MC.
I know I can’t hide the relationship forever.
And when it comes out in the open, all hell will break loose.
Fury vows to protect me.
But loving him means risking everything I know.
And harder still, loving him means trusting that he won’t destroy my heart again.
ROYAL BASTARDS MC SERIES FIFTH RUN
Kristine Dugger : Ride it, My Pony
Lucian W Bane : Butterfly and Kult
Morgan Jane Mitchell : Royal Pain
Crimson Syn : Coerced into Submission
Claire Shaw : REIGN
Daphne Loveling : Cold Fury
Liberty Parker : Waking the Dragon
B.B. Blaque :
Kristine Allen : FACET
Erin M Trejo : Cross The Line
KL Ramsey : LEGEND
Darlene Tallman : Banshee's Lament
M Merin : THROTTLE
Chelle C. Craze & Eli Abbott : SLEEPER
Nicole James : Enforcing the Rules
Nikki Landis : Jigsaw's Blayde
J. Lynn Lombard : Aftermath's Exposure
Kris Anne Dean : No Way Out
Katie Latronico : Wherever I May Roam
India R. Adams : Praying For Lightning
Kathleen Kelly : REAPER
Dani René : REBEL
Amy Davies : Kink's Redemption
Murphy Wallace : Injustice and Absolution
Jessica Ames : Out of the Storm
Jax Hart : Desert Sky
Sapphire Knight : Dirty Boy
Elle Boon : Royally Destroyed
J.A. CollardAuthor : In Too Deep
Verlene Landon : Bitten by Zombie
J.L. Leslie : Worth the Fight
Royal Bastards MC Facebook Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/536100377161216
Website:
https://www.royalbastardsmc.com
THE ROYAL BASTARDS CODE
PROTECT: The club and your brothers come before anything else, and must be protected at all costs. CLUB is FAMILY.
RESPECT: Earn it & Give it. Respect club law. Respect the patch. Respect your brothers. Disrespect a member and there will be hell to pay.
HONOR: Being patched in is an honor, not a right. Your colors are sacred, not to be left alone, and NEVER let them touch the ground.
OL’ LADIES: Never disrespect a member’s or brother’s Ol’ Lady. PERIOD.
CHURCH is MANDATORY.
LOYALTY: Takes precedence over all, including well-being.
HONESTY: Never LIE, CHEAT, or STEAL from another member or the club.
TERRITORY: You are to respect your brother’s property and follow their Chapter’s club rules.
TRUST: Years to earn it… seconds to lose it.
NEVER RIDE OFF: Brothers do not abandon their family.
NOTE FOR THE READER
Below is a list of the other RBMC chapters in this book, in order of appearance or mention:
Ankeny, IA: Kristine Allen
Dallas, TX: Kristine Allen
NOLA/National Chapter: Crimson Syn
Jacksonville, FL: Kathleen Kelly
Omaha, NE: Kristine Dugger
Toponah, NV: Nikki Landis
1
FURY
“Let me out of here! Goddamnit!” the prisoner shouts.
Panic sharpens Spanner’s voice like a knife. He strains against the ropes holding his wrists, which are tightly bound above his head. The hook he’s attached to pulls him upright so that he’s almost suspended in mid-air. The balls of his feet scrabble to stay connected to the ground.
A sheen of sweat slicks his bare chest. His eyes bulge. He stinks of fear.
It’s a scent I know well.
“No can do, motherfucker.” My words are casual, but there’s an undercurrent of tension in my voice. It betrays the anger that I keep on a tight leash. “You know better than that. You done fucked up, son.”
“I didn’t do anything!” Spanner insists, still grappling for purchase on the ground.
I gotta hand it to him, he’s dumb, but he’s holding onto the lie. Too bad it won’t do him a damn bit of good.
Looking over to one side, I make eye contact with Venom and Voodoo. They’re the President and the Sergeant at Arms of the Ankeny, Iowa chapter of the Royal Bastards MC. This isn’t my chapter. Mine’s up in Minneapolis. I’m down here on the orders of Magnus, my own President, to oversee the punishment of a former prospect for the Minneapolis club.
I’m the Sergeant at Arms of the Minneapolis chapter. As such, I’m here to make sure that this son of a bitch pays for what he’s done. And to make goddamn sure he’ll never have the chance to do it again.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Spanner yells, still trying to convince me. “Fury, come on, man! This is a mistake! You know me, man! I didn’t do anything!” He locks eyes with me, hoping I’ll buy his bullshit. But I know better. The way his lips flick over his lips when he’s lying is one of his tells.
Besides, we have proof.
Spanner came to us as a hang-around. He moved up to prospect about a year later. The dude was eager. Ambitious for sure — a little too ambitious, as it turns out. We’ll never know whether he made the decision to prospect because he genuinely wanted to be a Royal Bastard, or for some other ulterior motive. Either way, a few months after he got his prospect patch, one of our rival clubs started making moves that made us suspicious that we had a rat in our midst. Based on the intel the rival club seemed to be acting on, we knew it wasn’t someone high up in our ranks. But it was clear there was someone on the inside, selling secrets to our enemies. And we had our suspicions that Spanner was the traitor.
We caught the motherfucker by setting him up to eavesdrop on a conversation between our prez and VP, Magnus and Norse. They fed him false info about the location of a storehouse that supposedly held a shipment of guns we were set to transport up north to Canada. When the storehouse was broken into and ransacked a couple days later, we knew for sure Spanner was the one who had sold us out.
He figured out we were on to him, and fled south across the Minnesota border before we could nab him.
But stupid fuckers do stupid shit. And Spanner forgot one crucial thing. The Royal Bastards are everywhere.
“Iowa is Royal Bastards territory, you dumb asshole,” I rasp. “Running down here wasn’t gonna get you anywhere. You sho
“I didn’t do anything!” he insists again. Christ, it’s getting goddamn old. I swear to fucking God, it’s a compulsion with some people, to keep lying in a desperate attempt to save their own skin even when it’s obvious the game’s over. It’s almost comical. Like he thinks we’re just gonna say, “Oh, you didn’t? Well, mercy me, our mistake! We’ll just let you go, then. Please accept our apologies!”
“Shut up, you piece of shit traitor,” Angel, the Enforcer for the Ankeny crew, barks. Lightning-fast, a blade appears in his hand. Before I have a chance to register the movement, he’s sliced a shallow trench across Spanner’s naked stomach. Blood beads on his skin and begins to drip downwards, mingling with his fear-putrid sweat in thin, pathetic rivulets.
“Lying to our faces is just gonna make this worse for you,” I snarl. “Besides, it’s too fucking late. There ain’t a single thing you can say to save your sorry ass now.”
Fury is my road name. Vengeance is my drug. Hurting people who need to be hurt gives me a hard-on. And no one needs to be hurt more than someone who has betrayed the Royal Bastards MC.
The Ankeny chapter of the Royal Bastards has a couple of legit enterprises. One of them is a biological cleaning business. The other one is a hog farm, which is where we are right now. We’re standing in the yard, only a couple dozen feet from the outdoor hog enclosure. The hogs are milling around, snuffling and making excited noises. Seems to me that the smell of Spanner’s blood has caught their attention.
The Ankeny club’s two legit businesses have some other, less legit applications as well. Both of them can help with cleanup of some less than legal biological messes.
Because these hogs? They’ve developed a taste for meat.
I step closer to the traitor. “You were an ambitious dude. You had promise, I won’t lie,” I say. He flinches at my use of the past tense. His chest is heaving in and out with fear. I take out a pack of smokes and shake one out, lighting it. “But ambition is a dangerous thing. Ambition without loyalty? Well, that can get you in some serious fucking trouble. Course, it’s really too late to be giving you advice. You ain’t gonna need it any longer. You’re done, Spanner.”
I take a long drag of the cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs. Then exhaling, I take a moment to contemplate the orange ember on the end. Reaching out, I extinguish the cigarette on the bare skin of his chest.
Spanner throws his head back and lets out a howl of pain that mingles with the squealing of the hogs in the pen. His body jerks back, straining and writhing.
“Oh, shit,” I chuckle. “If you think that hurts, you’re about to be in for a bad damn time, son.”
Still straining away from me, Spanner’s scream dies as he stares at me in terror, the whites of his eyes showing. He starts to babble, incoherent pleading noises that I cut off with a wave of the now-dead cigarette.
“I only wish the rest of the Minneapolis Royal Bastards could be here to enjoy this moment.” I let my lips spread into a grin. “But I’ll tell them all about it. Funny coincidence, you coming down here to Iowa like this. Fitting, too.” I nod back at the hog enclosure. “The punishment is gonna really fit the crime. You know what they say, Spanner. Pigs get fed. Hogs, though… they get slaughtered.”
I make a sign to Voodoo, who’s operating the Bobcat. He moves a lever, and the winch on the crane hoists Spanner by the ropes around his wrists. Spanner starts to scream again, flailing his legs wildly. The Bobcat lifts him up high, then over, until he’s suspended above the enclosure.
Next to me, Hawk lets out a snort. “They ain’t been fed for a while. Doubt this will take long.”
“Pity,” I murmur, and light another cigarette.
Voodoo lets the prospect loose. Spanner drops down into enclosure on top of a couple of the hogs, which startles them and pisses them off. They surround him, and within seconds, Spanner starts to shriek. That just enrages the beasts more. They begin to tear him apart, their squeals of excitement mixing with Spanner’s screams.
A sense of calm descends on me as I watch and listen to the grim spectacle in front of me. The bloody justice of the club has been done, the cosmic scoreboard rebalanced.
When the hogs’ feeding frenzy is over, we all turn away. The prospect is not only dead, he might as well never have existed. All that’s left of him now is his bike. I’ll leave it down here for the Ankeny club to remove the VIN and do whatever they want with it. A small thank-you gift for disposing of the body.
“You stickin’ around to party with us tonight, brother?” Voodoo asks me as we walk toward our own bikes.
“Yeah. Be good to let off some steam. Venom told me there’s an empty apartment at your clubhouse with my name on it tonight. I’ll suck down as much of your free booze as I can, and head back up to Minneapolis tomorrow.”
“Good deal,” Voodoo says, clapping me on the back. “We ain’t had a decent rager for a while. Got a feeling the club’s gonna be rockin’ tonight. We’ll pull out all the stops for ya.”
While we wait for the other men to get to their bikes, I call my prez, Magnus. Last I heard he was up fishing in northern Minnesota, so I ain’t sure whether I’ll get a hold of him. But he answers on the second ring.
“Talk to me,” Magnus — always a man of few words — barks into the phone.
“Yo, Prez. Thought I was gonna have to leave a message. Didn’t expect you to have decent cell service.”
“We’re on our way back down to the Cities. We’re fillin’ up our tanks before heading back down. You caught me just at the right time. You still down in Ankeny?”
“Yep. Mission accomplished.”
“Happy to hear that.” The edge in his voice sharpens. “That situation needed to be dealt with.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been dealt with and disappeared. The hogs took care of that.”
Magnus grunts his approval. “Where you at now?”
“On our way back to the Ankeny clubhouse. Planning to stay the night down here, if you’re good with it.”
“Yep. I’ll let Norse and the rest of them know you took care of the problem.”
“I’ll check in once I’m back in Minneapolis.”
“You do that. See you at home, brother. Good work.”
“Gotcha, Prez.”
I pocket my phone, fire up my bike, and head back with the others to the Ankeny clubhouse.
It’s gonna be a good night.
2
KAT
“So, brunch this weekend?” Christy asks.
“I don’t know,” I stall, trying to think of an excuse. “Can I get back to you?”
I’m sitting at the nurses’ station with one shoe off, massaging an aching foot. My colleague and good friend Christy is standing on the other side of the desk, looking at me hopefully. We’re in a rare lull in an otherwise chaotic and understaffed emergency department at Fairdale Hospital, where I’ve worked as a nurse for about six months.
I love being a nurse. The last couple of years have been difficult, to say the least. But even so, I still feel that this job is my calling. It’s a privilege to work with all of the talented people in this profession. And I’ve found that I thrive on the fast pace of emergency medicine. The highs are stratospheric, and I’ve learned to deal with the lows and think of them as just part of the package.
