DESTINED TO YOU 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ VERY SPICY VERSION (A SONS OF ASH MC SAGA — BOOK 7-RAZE X RINA)

RAZE

The clubhouse was loud

It was always loud these days—kids shrieking, brothers arguing, old ladies laughing in the corner like they’d known each other their whole lives instead of a handful of years. The Sons of Ash had become something Raze never expected: domesticated. Not soft. Never soft. But full. Full of noise and heat and the particular chaos of people who’d chosen each other and kept choosing, every day, against all evidence and reason.

Raze sat in the corner armchair—the one with the busted spring that everyone avoided—and read Camus.

He turned the page. The noise washed over him. Axle was arguing with Scarlett. Scarlett was winning and Axle was pretending to be angry about it, which was still funny after all this time—the former cartel-targeting, federal-informant-turned-old-lady reducing the president of the Sons of Ash to a man who’d apologize for breathing wrong. Grimm had Rain in his lap, his hand buried in her hair, his mouth at her ear, whispering something that turned her cheeks the color of the shibari ropes he kept coiled in their private room. Hound was sprawled on the floor, being used as a footrest by Tara, who was explaining to Natasha the precise structural requirements of a seven-tier champagne tower. Natasha was taking notes like a CEO, which she was, except now she was also Sydney’s fiancée, which meant she’d been absorbed into the chaos like she’d always been here. Sydney was throwing pretzels at Knuckles, who was catching them in his mouth with a success rate of approximately thirty percent. Voss sat rigid in his corner, laptop balanced on his knees, Cray draped over his shoulders like a particularly inappropriate shawl, her dyed-red hair a violent slash against his grey sweater vest.

“The Vasectomy King is still trending,” Cray announced, scrolling her phone. “Number four on Twitter. You’ve been dethroned by a dancing cockatoo.”

Sydney caught a pretzel mid-air. “A cockatoo.”

“A very talented cockatoo.”

“Fuck the cockatoo.”

“That’s illegal in seven states,” Hound said from the floor.

Tank stood by the wall, silent as stone, watching his daughter Luna organize the younger children into what appeared to be a coup. Alexander—Tank’s son, still wobbly on his feet—was the muscle. Maggie, Julian and Sebastian’s adopted daughter, was the strategist. Elijah, Sydney’s soon-to-be-adopted son, was the diplomat. Luna was the dictator. She’d been back from Switzerland for three weeks and had already reestablished absolute authority.

“The final reward of the dead,” Raze said, not looking up from his book, “to die no more.”

Silence. Brief. Incomplete.

Hound twisted his head around from the floor. “The fuck does that mean?”

“It means dead people don’t have to deal with this,” Sydney said, gesturing at the chaos with a pretzel. “Lucky bastards.”

“He’s reading Camus,” Voss said, still not looking up. ”The Myth of Sisyphus. He’s being philosophical. Ignore him.”

“It’s not fromThe Stranger?” Hound asked.

Raze turned a page. “No.”

“Then why are you reading it?”

“Because I’ve read The Strangerseventeen times. Sisyphus is new.”

“You’ve read the same book seventeen times?”

“Eighteen, technically. I read it twice in one week after the Diablo shit went down.”

Grimm’s mouth curved—the closest thing to a smile he ever produced. “He was insufferable.”

“He quoted the death scene during church,” Axle said. “Scarlett threw a candle at him.”

“It was a small candle,” Scarlett said.

“It was not a small candle.”

Raze didn’t defend himself. He’d been a brother for eight years. An enforcer for six. An artist his whole life. He didn’t know how to be anything else, and he’d long since stopped apologizing for the books, the quotes, the way his mind worked—patterns and shadows and the particular beauty of things that hurt.

“I can’t ignore him,” Hound said, still twisted around on the floor. “He’s sitting there being all—” He gestured vaguely at Raze’s entire existence. “—broody and silent and shit.”

“I’m reading.”

“You’re always reading.”

“Reading is preferable to listening to you discuss buttercream for forty-five minutes.”

“IT WAS THIRTY MINUTES,” Tara called from above him.

“It was forty-five,” Raze said. “I timed it.”

Tara paused. “It was forty-three. I was rounding down.”

Hound threw a plastic cup at Raze’s head. Raze caught it without looking up, set it on the arm of the chair, and continued reading.

“Show-off,” Sydney muttered.

“I’m going to the shop.” Raze closed his book—a worn paperback, spine cracked in seventeen places. “Client at seven.”

“Who?” Axle asked.

“Carter. He wants the tiger finished.”

“The one on his back? The one that looks like it’s eating his spine?”

“That’s the one.”

“Creepy.”

“He’s paying triple.”

“Good enough.”

Raze pulled on his kutte. The leather was worn soft at the shoulders, the ASH RISE patch faded from years of sun and sweat and blood. He’d put the phoenix on Axle’s chest twelve years ago, when they were both younger and stupider and convinced the world was something you survived rather than something you built. Now Axle had a wife and a shibari room and a reason to stay still. They all did. Every brother except Raze.

He didn’t think about it. He’d trained himself not to think about it.

“Raze.” Grimm’s voice, quiet. Raze turned. Grimm’s pale grey eyes were steady—the eyes of a man who’d buried a cult leader alive and slept better for it. “The run tomorrow. We’re taking the north route. Weather’s turning.”

“I know.”

“You’re point.”

“I know.”

“Don’t get dead.”

“The final reward—”

“If you quote at me, I’ll put your book in the blender.”

Raze almost smiled. Almost. “I’ll be at the shop.”

He walked out into the grey afternoon. The sky was bruised—purple and green at the edges, the kind of sky that promised violence. The air tasted like rain and exhaust and something metallic, something electric, the charge before a storm. His bike was where he’d left it, parked between Grimm’s blacked-out Street Glide and Hound’s ridiculous custom chopper with the flame decals that Tara claimed were “ironic” but Hound absolutely meant sincerely.

The ride was short. The streets were empty—people staying inside, waiting for the sky to split open. The wind had teeth. Raze felt it bite through his kutte, his shirt, his skin. He didn’t mind. The cold was clarifying. The cold made it easier to think, or maybe easier to stop thinking, which was the same thing sometimes.

Iron & Ink was dark when he pulled up. He unlocked the door. The bell chimed—a soft, silver sound that he’d hung himself eight years ago. The shop smelled like ink and antiseptic and the faint ghost of Zane’s cheap cologne.

Zane looked up from the counter. He’d been working here three months—a skinny kid with nervous hands and a gift for lettering. Raze didn’t trust him yet, but he respected the work. In this world, that mattered more than trust.

“Carter’s in the back,” Zane said. “He’s early. He’s also an asshole.”

“They’re all assholes.”

“True.”

Raze walked through the shop. Carter was sprawled in the client chair, scrolling through his phone, his back already prepped and stenciled. The tiger was half-done—muscle and fur and teeth, a monstrous thing crawling up his spine. It was one of Raze’s darker pieces. Carter had asked for “something that’ll make people uncomfortable.” Raze had delivered.

“Lie down,” Raze said.

“Finally. Been waiting twenty minutes.”

“You were early.”

“So?”

“So shut up and lie down.”

Carter shut up. Raze pulled on gloves, arranged his inks, tested his machine. The buzz filled the silence. He worked for two hours—steady, methodical, his hands finding the rhythm that had become second nature. The tiger took shape under his needle. Stripes. Shadows. The suggestion of claws. The suggestion of hunger. He didn’t think about anything while he worked. The needle was meditation. The ink was prayer.

When he was done, Carter admired it in the mirror, twisting to see the full spine. “Fuck. That’s sick.”

“Don’t pick at it. Aquaphor twice a day.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Carter paid. Left. The bell chimed. The shop was quiet again.

Zane was cleaning his station. “You going up?”

“In a minute.”

“You want me to lock up?”

“I’ll do it.”

Zane nodded, grabbed his jacket, left. The bell chimed one last time.

Raze locked the door. Turned off the lights. Climbed the stairs to the apartment above the shop.

The apartment was small. Two rooms. A bathroom with a shower that only worked if you turned the knob exactly thirty-seven degrees to the left—he’d measured, once, out of frustration and the particular obsession with precision that made him good at his work and terrible at letting things go. A kitchenette with a hot plate and a minibar he’d built himself from salvaged wood and stubbornness.

It was sparse in furniture. Sparse in things. But not sparse in element.

Books. Everywhere. Stacks against the walls, on the windowsill, on the nightstand. Camus. Nietzsche. Murakami. Morrison. Baldwin. A worn copy ofThe Strangerthat he’d read eighteen times, the pages soft as skin. Sketchbooks filled the shelves—black Moleskines, each one dated on the spine in silver ink, each one full. His drafting table was covered in flash paper, tattoo designs, anatomical studies. Pens. Pencils. Charcoal. Ink. A mug of brushes. A jar of murky water.

The minibar held whiskey—a decent Islay, a bottle of Japanese single malt his mother had sent him seven years ago, still unopened. He poured two fingers of the Islay. Drank it standing in the dark.

The storm was coming. He could feel it in the pressure, in the way the air thickened. Lightning flickered at the edges of the window. The rain hadn’t started yet, but it would. Soon.

He took off his shirt. His body was a canvas—black and grey ink from collarbone to wrist. The geisha on his ribs. The tiger on his back, the mirror image of Carter’s piece, except Raze’s was older and better and meant something he’d never told anyone. The woman’s face on his chest, the one he’d inked himself using a mirror, the one that looked like no one and everyone—a composite of every woman he’d ever seen and none he’d ever touched. His muscles ached from hunching over Carter’s spine. He rolled his shoulders. Drank more whiskey.

Then the light changed.

Golden. Amber. A slant of warmth cutting through his dark room from the building opposite.

He looked up.

The abandoned building across the alley had been empty for years. Boarded windows. Water damage. A place the club used for storage when they needed to hide things that couldn’t be found—paper trails, dead men’s possessions, the kind of secrets that required darkness and dust and the kind of silence that came from neglect. But someone had moved in. Someone had unboarded the window directly across from his.

Someone had turned on a light.

And in that light—

She was braiding her hair.

Raze went still.

She was—no. Words didn’t work. Words were inadequate. He’d spent his whole life translating the world into images, into ink, into the particular language of shadow and line, and none of it—none of it—was sufficient for what she was.

Her hair was obscenely long. Black. Thick as rope. She was braiding it with practiced hands, weaving the strands into a plait the circumference of his wrist. It hung over her shoulder like a serpent, like a promise, like something he wanted wrapped around his fist. Strands had escaped at her temples, curling against her skin in the humidity, and he wanted to lick them smooth.

Her eyes were the biggest he’d ever seen. Hazel—brown and green and gold, flecks that caught the amber lamplight and held it. Even from this distance, even through two panes of glass, they were devastating. A small nose. Full lips, the lower slightly plumper than the upper, the kind of mouth that would look obscene wrapped around a spoon. Or his cock. Small gold hoop earrings that glinted when she moved. High cheekbones. A jaw that was soft from the front but sharp in profile.

She wore a modest white shirt. A pale blue skirt that fell past her knees. No makeup. No artifice. Just her—skin the color of honey in lamplight, luminous, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

Her breasts were full beneath the modest white cotton. He saw that. He let himself see it. She couldn’t see him looking. She’d never know. Her waist was narrow—his hands could span it, he thought, and then he let himself think it, let himself imagine his fingers meeting around her ribcage, her spine arching, her head falling back. His thumbs would rest in the divots above her hipbones. He’d press. She’d gasp.

Shut up.

His jaw tightened. His hands were fists at his sides. He was hard—painfully, ridiculously hard, like a teenager, like a man who’d never seen a woman before in his life.

He was not a virgin. He was thirty-two years old. He’d had women. Club girls. Clients. Strangers in bars who wanted a story to tell. He’d never—not once, not ever—had this. This instantaneous, gut-punch, world-tilting want. This was not attraction. Attraction was manageable. Attraction was a woman at a bar with a nice smile and an interest in Nietzsche. This was something else. Something that had teeth.

He yanked the curtain shut.

The room was dark again. Just him and his books and his whiskey and his cock throbbing against his zipper like an accusation.

He stood there. Breathing. Not breathing. His heart was a fist punching the inside of his ribs. The darkness pressed against his eyes, but behind them she was still there—the braid, the lamplight, the unbearable curve of her throat. He could still see her. He would always be able to see her.

What the fuck was that?

He didn’t want to know. He wanted to finish his whiskey and go to bed and forget the woman in the window, the braid like a rope, the eyes like a forest. He wanted to go back to ten minutes ago when his life was books and ink and the manageable loneliness of a man who preferred his own company.

He pushed the curtain back open.

She was still there. Still braiding. Still unaware. She’d turned slightly, and he could see the curve of her neck, the delicate shell of her ear, the way her lips moved—humming something he couldn’t hear, some melody that traveled through the glass only as silence but registered in his chest anyway.

He unzipped his pants.

He didn’t think about it. Didn’t analyze it. His hand was on his cock—already leaking, already aching—and his eyes were on her, and the shame should have come. He waited for it. Braced for it. It didn’t arrive. There was only her. Only the golden light. Only the unbearable, inexplicable, devouring need tohave.

He stroked himself slowly. His grip was too tight—the way he liked it, the way he never let himself ask for. He watched her fingers twist the dark rope of her hair and imagined those fingers twisted in his sheets. Imagined that braid wrapped around his wrist while he pinned her to the mattress. Imagined her mouth—that full lower lip, that impossible softness—parting on a gasp, a moan, a scream.

His hand moved faster. His breath went ragged. He watched her stretch—her arms lifting above her head, her shirt riding up, exposing a strip of honeyed stomach, the shadow of her navel, the flare of her hip. He wanted to put his mouth there. He wanted to bite the curve of her waist and leave a mark she’d feel for days. He wanted to spread her open on his drafting table and draw her from the inside out—every inch, every sound, every tremor.

The orgasm hit him like a blade. He grunted—a raw, animal sound he’d never made in his life—and his release striped his hand, the floor, the windowsill. His hips kept thrusting into his fist, riding it out, his eyes locked on her. He didn’t blink. He didn’t look away. He watched her finish her braid, watched her stand, watched her reach up—

And switch off the light.

Darkness.

He stood in the aftermath. His pants were open. His hand was sticky. His chest was heaving. The window was dark and empty and she was gone, and the absence felt like a wound.

He cleaned himself up with a rag from the sink. His hands were shaking. His hands never shook. He’d tattooed his own chest, stitched his own wounds, held a needle steady while Grimm dug a bullet out of his shoulder. But now—now his hands were shaking like a boy’s.

He poured another whiskey. Drank it. Poured a third.

Then he sat at his drafting table and opened a fresh Moleskine. Not one of his dated ones. Not one of his flash books. A new one. Black cover. Blank pages. He uncapped a pen.

He began to draw.

The braid first—the way it fell over her shoulder, thick and serpentine, the individual strands catching light. Then her neck, the vulnerable curve of it, the place where her pulse would beat if he pressed his mouth there. Her ear with the small gold hoop. Her hands—those practiced, clever fingers twisting the dark rope of her hair.

He drew her face. The enormous eyes. The small nose. The mouth—that obscene, devastating mouth. He drew it open, gasping, the way he imagined it would look when he finally got inside her.

He drew her body. The full breasts beneath the white cotton. The narrow waist. The flare of her hips. He drew her naked. He drew her spread open on his bed, on his table, against his window. He drew her with her hair wrapped around his fist. He drew her with her mouth on his cock—those lips stretched around him, those eyes looking up, those gold hoops swaying with every thrust.

He drew her until the sun came up.

The storm broke somewhere around four in the morning. Rain lashed the windows. Thunder rolled through the alley like artillery. Raze didn’t notice. He was lost in the ink, in the curve of her shoulder, in the particular shade of graphite that matched the shadow beneath her collarbone.

When the light changed again—grey dawn instead of amber lamplight—he set down his pen. His hand was cramped. His back was screaming. The Moleskine was half-full, page after page of her, a catalogue of obsession.

He didn’t know her name.

He didn’t know if she was real or if he’d conjured her from ink and whiskey and the particular loneliness of a man who’d spent his whole life watching the world from behind glass.

But he knew—with the cold certainty of someone who’d survived things that should have killed him and come out the other side scarred but standing—that everything had just changed.

He’d been waiting for something. He hadn’t known it until this moment, until the click of a light switch across an alley, but he’d been waiting. All these years. All these books. All these hours at the drafting table drawing women who didn’t exist because the ones who did exist were never quite right, never quite enough, never the thing he was looking for without knowing he was looking.

She was the thing.

He closed the Moleskine. Looked at the curtained window across the alley. The storm had passed. The sky was clearing. The light behind her curtain was still off. She was sleeping. Or maybe she was awake, reading, drinking tea, existing in the quiet space of her life with no idea that a man across the alley had just rearranged his entire understanding of himself around the shape of her silhouette.

“Who are you?” he said aloud.

The silence didn’t answer. He didn’t expect it to.

But he would find out. He would watch. He would draw. He would wait. And when the moment came—when she stepped into his shop, or walked past him on the street, or looked up and finally saw the man in the window—he would be ready.

He was an artist. He understood patience. He understood that the best work took time.

He understood that some obsessions were worth cultivating.