Page 1 of Hades

CHAPTER ONE

Hades

Diamond Creek, Nebraska...

Morning light cut through the hole where the front door of the Silver Shadows’ clubhouse used to be, illuminating the carnage like a spotlight on hell itself. An hour after the last gun fired, bodies still lay where they fell, piled over each other like discarded meat. The stench of death hung thick in the air. The coppery tang of blood mixed with piss and shit from loosened bowels felt like it coated the back of my throat with every breath.

They called me Hades, not because I ruled with fire and brimstone, but because I understood death better than most. As VP of Gods of Mayhem MC, I ruled over the dark places where secrets festered and rotted, where the dead told stories the living were too fucking scared to hear.

Brothers wearing allied cuts dragged corpses out one by one, leaving crimson trails across the scarred wood. No one would remember these fuckers’ names. No one would record their deaths. Enemies didn’t deserve a proper burial.

Instead, their bodies would burn in a pit until the flesh melted off their bones, and the fat rendered down to nothing. Then the bones would turn to dust in the kiln King had built out at the back of the property, ostensibly for the club whores to make pottery.

That was the official party line, anyway.

In reality, it was the perfect way to dispose of a problem so it couldn’t come crawling back out of the ground to bite us in the ass. We knew all too well what happened when you didn’t bury the evidence deep enough. Bodies had a way of surfacing when you least expected them. Bloated and rotting and screaming truths no one wanted to hear.

Sirens wailed in the distance, shattering the silence.

“We gonna end up in a fucking cell because of this shit?” I asked, wiping the blood off my hands onto my jeans. The denim was already soaked through, stiff with gore.

“No. King’s brother has us covered. Those sirens should be ambulances to take the wounded we can’t help here,” Asclepius said, his voice steady despite the gore coating his hands up to his elbows.

“NO!”

The guttural roar came from a familiar voice that could command a room or shatter it. I spun around to find my best friend and president, Zeus, on the ground, cradling his father’s body. The sight hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest, knocking the fucking air straight out of my lungs.

I rushed over and dropped to my knees in a puddle of congealed blood, feeling it soak through my jeans, warm and sticky against my skin. I stared down at the corpse of my former president. A man who’d taught us everything we knew about being Gods of Mayhem.

Lucas ‘Kronos’ Cooper lay in his son’s arms, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, glazed over with the milky film of death. His throat was sliced ear to ear, exposing the white of his severed windpipe and the glistening meat beneath. Blood had poured down his chest, thick and dark, already crusting at the edges.

“No!” The whispered plea came from Asclepius, Kronos’ younger brother and Zeus’ uncle, as he collapsed beside me. His knees made a sickening thud against the wooden planks. “Who did this?” He picked up Kronos’ hand, already cold to the touch, and checked for a pulse we both knew wouldn’t be there.

Atlas tapped me on the shoulder. “We have to take the body.”

“NO!” Zeus growled, the sound more animal than human. Raw and wounded and fucking feral.

Atlas shifted beside me, his cut soaked in blood that gleamed in the dim light. Some his, most not. As sergeant at arms, third in command, he was the fixer when shit turned south. The one who carried the burden of cleaning up after us.

“Zeus, we don’t have much time.” Atlas’ voice was quiet but filled with the kind of steel that came from carrying the weight of our world on his shoulders. “If the cops show up and see Kronos like this, none of us are walking the fuck out of here. Let me take care of it. Let me do my fucking job.”

“Give him a little more time,” I told Atlas, knowing we’d have a fight on our hands when the moment came. I sat beside Zeus as he stared at his father’s body, at what was left of the man who’d been larger-than-life. I reached over and closed Kronos’ eyes, feeling the cooling skin beneath my fingertips. “Kane, I’m so fucking sorry.”

“This wasn’t our goddamn fight. This wasn’t our fucking war,” Zeus ground out, his voice breaking on the last word. “We never should have been here.”

“Your sister was here. Both of them.”

“Fuck them. They should have come home.”

I closed my eyes, knowing this would change my best friend, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Losing a parent broke you in a way you never came back from, shattered something fundamental inside that could never be put back together right. That kind of hell festered and rotted until it consumed everything.

And I ruled that hell. I understood it. I would walk him through it because that was what brothers did.

No one spoke. Brothers moved around the room silently, dragging bodies, cleaning up blood with mops and bleach. The air held the smell of chemicals mixed with death, creating a nauseating cocktail that would linger for days, in the wood, our clothes. In our fucking lungs. I sat next to my best friend, my brother in every way that mattered, even blood.

At ten years old, Kronos had given us both a pocketknife for Christmas. We’d used them to cut our palms and slap our hands together, mixing our blood.

Blood brothers.