I bled for two years to earn my patch in the state’s most notorious motorcycle club. But the night they finally let me behind the steel door, I discovered the sick, twisted lie our brotherhood was built on.

Chapter 1: The Gravel Run

My knees slammed into the crushed gravel of the clubhouse driveway.

The sharp rocks bit through my denim jeans, tearing into my skin, but I didn’t dare make a sound.

“Pick ’em up, Prospect,” a voice growled from the dark porch.

It was Bear, the club’s Sergeant-at-Arms. He was leaning against the splintered wooden railing, nursing a lukewarm Coors, just watching me bleed.

Someone had intentionally shattered a glass jar of axle grease and rusted bolts all over the driveway. My job was to pick up every single bolt. With my teeth.

My jaw ached. The thick, foul taste of motor oil and metallic rust coated the back of my throat, making me want to gag.

My hands were shoved deep into my pockets, forbidden to help. If I used my fingers, the beating would start all over again.

This was year two of my prospecting phase for the Iron Reapers. I was twenty-two, naive, and desperate for a family.

Growing up bouncing between foster homes in the rust belt of Ohio, the deafening roar of their Harleys always sounded like pure freedom. Like power.

I wanted that power. I wanted the heavy leather vest with the grim reaper patch on the back more than I wanted to breathe.

So, I took the beatings. I scrubbed the blood and teeth off the barroom floor after their closed-door meetings.

I slept outside in the dirt next to their bikes during freezing November rainstorms to make sure nobody messed with their chrome.

I thought I was proving my loyalty. I thought I was earning my way into a sacred brotherhood forged in honor, loyalty, and steel.

I grabbed another rusty bolt with my front teeth, swallowing down the sour bile rising in my stomach, and spat it into a metal bucket.

Bear chuckled. He flicked his cigarette butt at my head. It bounced off my cheek, leaving a brief shower of stinging orange sparks against my skin.

“Almost there, kid,” he sneered, his voice thick with cheap whiskey. “Keep this up, and the President might actually let you see what happens behind the steel door downstairs.”

A cold shiver ran down my spine that had absolutely nothing to do with the night wind.

The steel door. The basement. That was the club’s inner sanctum.

Only fully patched, made members ever went down there, and they never, ever talked about what happened inside.

I always assumed it was just where they kept the club’s money. Or maybe the illegal product they ran up the interstate.

I was dead wrong.