The Knot
⚠️ AUTHOR’S DECLARATION & CONTENT WARNING ⚠️
Before you step into the world of this story, please take a moment to read the following declaration carefully. This book handles dark, challenging, and highly sensitive themes. It is intended strictly for mature audiences.
Content & Trigger Warnings
This narrative explores heavy subject matter, including:
The psychological manipulation of cult dynamics.
Depression and mental health struggles.
The positive depiction and mentions of pagan religions.
A Note on Mental Health & BDSM
Within this story, BDSM and alternative lifestyle dynamics are explored as a profound vehicle for personal healing and trauma processing. However, as the author,I firmly assert that alternative practices should never be used as a replacement for professional, clinical therapy.Clinical therapy is a scientifically studied, proven, and effective method for healing. Alternative dynamics should only be viewed as an adjunct exploration of the self, and never a substitute for professional mental healthcare.
My Philosophy on Pleasure and the Body
This book is a rejection of shame.
Sex is not a sin.
Women’s bodies are not inherently sinful.
Female pleasure is liberating—for both men and women alike.
True sexual and emotional liberation is a mutual journey; you cannot fully have one without the other. If you choose to proceed, please do so with an open mind, a respect for boundaries, and a care for your own emotional well-being.
Proceed with discretion.🖤
GRIMM
The clubhouse was quiet for once, which meant something was about to go sideways.
Voss pushed through the heavy steel door with a manila folder in his hand and that particular look on his face—the one that said he was about to ruin someone’s fucking day. His wire-rimmed glasses caught the shitty fluorescent light as he scanned the common room, zeroing in on his target like a fucking missile locked on coordinates.
Grimm was at the bar, nursing a whiskey he’d barely touched, a habit he’d picked up from Scarlett’s relentless campaign to “civilize” him. Civilize. What a load of horseshit. She’d dragged him to some overpriced barber three weeks ago—some guy named *Antoine* who smelled like lavender and judgement—and now his hair was cut proper, short on the sides, longer on top, the copper strands tamed into something that didn’t look like he’d been sleeping in a ditch. He was clean-shaven too, jaw sharp enough to cut glass, the scar from temple to jaw pulling slightly when he scowled.
Which was always.
“You look like a GQ model who kills people,” Hound had told him that morning, grinning like the oversized idiot he was.
“Say that again and I’ll shave your fucking head while you sleep,” Grimm had replied, voice flat as a two-by-four.
He hated the haircut. He hated that he didn’t hate it. He hated that he’d caught himself checking his reflection in the bike’s chrome that morning, and he *really* fucking hated that Scarlett had noticed and smiled that knowing little smile of hers, the one that said *I told you so* without actually saying it because she was too smart to poke the bear directly.
So when Voss stopped in front of him and cleared his throat—a dry, precise little sound like a fucking accountant clearing his throat, which was exactly what it was—Grimm already knew his day was about to get worse.
“No,” he said before Voss could open his mouth.
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“Whatever it is. No. Fuck off.”
Voss adjusted his glasses with his middle finger. It was the closest thing to insubordination the man ever managed. “Salt and Iron. The restaurant front. It’s under your name.”
“Because Axle put it under my name. Doesn’t mean I do anything with it.”
“And yet here we are.” Voss opened the folder and extracted a sheaf of tax documents thick enough to choke a horse. He tapped a highlighted section with one precise finger. “IRS requires an in-person signature. The docks office. Apparently digital filing wasn’t sufficient for this particular form because the government is staffed by sadists who jerk off to bureaucratic inefficiency.”
Grimm stared at him.
Voss stared back.
“I break bones,” Grimm said, voice dropping to that lethal whisper that made prospects piss themselves. “I have conversations with people who don’t want to have conversations. I make problems disappear. That’s my fucking job, Voss. Paperwork is your job. Numbers are your job. Making the money clean is your *entire fucking existence*.”
“And yet the IRS requires the owner’s signature, not the treasurer’s.” Voss didn’t flinch. The man never flinched. It was one of the few things Grimm respected about him. “I don’t make the rules.”
“You literally do. You make the rules. You made half the shell companies we use.”
“I don’t make the IRS’s rules. Unfortunately.” Voss closed the folder. “I need you to come with me. Now. The deadline is today.”
Grimm set his whiskey down with deliberate care. “You’re coming with me.”
“The fuck I am.” The words came out flat, a mirror of what Grimm knew was coming.
“This isn’t my fucking jurisdiction. I’m not your errand boy. If I’m doing your work, I’m getting your share of the month’s cut. Every fucking dollar.”
“That seems excessive.”
“That seems like you should’ve forged my signature and saved us both the trouble.”
Voss sighed. It was a small sound, barely there, but it spoke volumes. “I tried. They required a state ID verification. Apparently, forgery has become more difficult since they updated their systems.”
“Fucking government.”
“Indeed.”
A club girl—Tiffany, maybe, or one of the newer ones whose names Grimm hadn’t bothered to learn—slid up beside him, all perfume and bare skin and obvious intention. She’d been circling for weeks, ever since Scarlett’s influence had made him look less like a mountain man and more like something out of a goddamn magazine. She ran a finger down his arm.
“Hey, Grimm. You look tense. I could help with that.”
He didn’t look at her. “No.”
“Come on. You’ve been so—”
“Get your hand off me before I break it.”
She retreated. Smart girl. Some of them had survival instincts.
“Fuck,” Grimm said, pushing off the bar. “Fine. Let’s get this the fuck over with.”
He grabbed his cut off the back of the chair and shrugged it on. The leather settled across his shoulders like armor, familiar and heavy. Outside, the bikes were lined up in their usual formation, gleaming despite the overcast sky. Voss pulled his keys, but Grimm was already swinging a leg over his own machine—a matte black Dyna with apes high enough to make a statement but low enough to ride hard.
“I’ll follow,” Voss said.
“You’ll fucking try.”
The income tax office wasn’t far from the docks—a squat grey building that looked like it had been designed by someone who actively hated joy. Concrete walls. Tiny windows. A parking lot with more potholes than asphalt. The kind of place where souls went to die and got audited on the way out.
Grimm killed the engine and swung off the bike in one motion. Voss pulled up beside him, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. Which was rich, considering this was *his* fucking errand.
When they pushed through the glass doors, every head in the waiting room turned.
Two bikers. Full cuts. One of them built like a blade with a scar that said *don’t fucking ask*, the other looking like he’d wandered out of a corporate boardroom and somehow ended up in a one-percenter club. They didn’t fit. They didn’t belong. And every single person in that room knew it.
Grimm scanned the space without moving his head. Exits. Threats. Cameras. The habit was bone-deep, carved into him by fifteen years of violence. The security guard by the metal detector was fat and slow and already sweating. The receptionist behind the bulletproof glass looked like she’d been dead for a decade but hadn’t stopped breathing yet.
“Get it over with, Voss,” Grimm murmured. “Before I shove that whole fucking roll of paper up your ass.”
“You can try,” Voss murmured back, and approached the desk.
The man behind it looked like a photocopy of a photocopy—grey suit, grey face, grey soul. Voss said something too quiet to hear, and the grey man pointed a grey finger toward a cubicle at the far end of the room.
Cubicle 17.
Grimm followed the line of that finger and felt something in his chest go tight.
“This is what I’m fucking doing,” he said, voice flat. “Running errands. Signing papers. What’s next, Voss? You want me to pick up your dry cleaning? Walk your fucking dog?”
“You don’t have a dog,” Voss said.“I’ll get one just so I can make you walk it.”
They moved through the maze of cubicles, past drones in bad suits and worse ties, past the low hum of fluorescent lights and the clack of keyboards and the smell of burnt coffee and despair. Grimm watched the back of Voss’s head and contemplated, not for the first time, how satisfying it would be to slam it into one of these shitty beige partitions.
Then they reached the cubicle.
And Grimm stopped.
She was sitting behind a desk that was too small for her, or maybe she was making herself too small for the desk. Dark hair pulled back in some kind of twist—a chignon, his brain supplied, because apparently Scarlett’s fucking antique magazines had seeped into his vocabulary against his will. A turtleneck the color of oatmeal. A cardigan over it, because apparently one layer of beige wasn’t enough. Glasses with plain frames. No jewelry. No makeup. No color.
She was the greyest thing in a building full of grey things.
And she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
Big dark eyes. Delicate features. A mouth that was made for something other than pressing into a thin, nervous line. She sat with her shoulders back and her spine straight, but it wasn’t confidence—it was armor. It was the posture of someone who’d learned to make herself small and quiet and invisible because being seen was dangerous.
No one had ever told her she was beautiful. He knew it instantly, the way he knew when a man was lying or a deal was about to go bad. It was in the way she held herself, the way she didn’t look up, the way she seemed to be apologizing for existing in a body that deserved worship.
His dick got hard.
*What the fuck.*
Grimm didn’t get hard in tax offices. He didn’t get hard over women in oatmeal-colored turtlenecks. His type was loud and easy and temporary—club girls who knew the score, who didn’t want anything but a good time and a quick exit. This woman looked like she’d never had a good time in her life. This woman looked like she’d apologize if she accidentally enjoyed herself.
He shoved Voss. Hard. The treasurer stumbled forward a step, caught himself on the edge of her desk, and shot Grimm a look that could’ve frozen whiskey.
“I’m the owner,” Grimm said, stepping around him. “What’s the issue?”
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Voss hissed under his breath.
Grimm flipped him off behind his back.
Voss’s eyes flicked to the woman, then back to Grimm, then down to the—*oh, for fuck’s sake.* His expression went from annoyed to horrified in the space of a heartbeat.
*VP. I can’t fucking believe you,* his look said. *You are fucking hard over a tax employee.*
Grimm’s jaw tightened. *She isn’t a club girl. I know what the fuck she is. You think I want to be hard in the income tax office, Voss?* He tried to telegraph it with his eyes. He failed. Voss looked like he was going to have an aneurysm.
The woman still hadn’t looked up.
She was focused on the papers in front of her, a pen in her hand, her movements precise and careful. “Mr. Garrett,” she said, and her voice—
*Fuck.*
Her voice was sweet. Soft. Melodic. It had a quality to it, a breathiness, like she wasn’t used to speaking above a whisper but every word was worth hearing. It crawled down his spine and settled somewhere low in his gut. Somewhere *very* low.
No one called him Mr. Garrett. No one. Not his brothers, not his enemies, not the women who screamed his road name in the dark. It was a dead name, a ghost name, the name of a boy who’d died fifteen years ago in a knife fight that left a scar from temple to jaw.
But when she said it, he wanted her to say it again. He wanted her to moan it. He wanted to hear that sweet, soft voice break on the syllables while he—
*What the fuck was wrong with him?*
“Your signature here, please,” she continued, still not looking up, pointing to a line on the form with the tip of her pen. Her nails were short and unpolished. Her fingers trembled slightly. “And here. This section needs to be initialled on every page. The form will be filed today, and you’ll receive a confirmation in the post within seven to ten business days.”
She paused.
“Please fill out the attached questionnaire and return it next week. In person. To this office. Thank you.”
She was dismissing him. Politely. Efficiently. Without ever once meeting his eyes.
Grimm didn’t move.
“Mr. Garrett?” Another pause. “Is there something else?”
*Yeah,* he thought. *You. Bent over this desk. Screaming that name until your throat gives out.*
Voss made a strangled noise beside him. The treasurer had gone pale—well, paler than usual, which was saying something for a man who looked like he’d been carved out of ice. He was staring at Grimm with the expression of a man watching a train derail into a fireworks factory.
Grimm grabbed the pen. Signed. Initialled. His handwriting was a jagged scrawl, the letters sharp as knife blades.
“Thank you,” she said. “That will be all.”
He didn’t want it to be all. He wanted her to look at him. He wanted to see those big dark eyes focused on his face. He wanted to know what color they were when they weren’t hidden behind plain-framed glasses and downcast lashes.
She didn’t look up.
He walked away with the bluest fucking balls he’d ever had in his thirty-one years of life.
The moment they cleared the office doors, Voss rounded on him. “What in the actual fuck was that?”
“Shut up.”
“You were hard. In an IRS office. Over a woman wearing a turtleneck.”
“I said shut up.”
“Her name is Rain Abara,” Voss said, because he was a fucking machine who absorbed information like a sponge and remembered everything and never knew when to let something go. “She’s been there three years. No disciplinary actions. No complaints. Model employee. Lives alone in a studio apartment on the south side. No social media. No dating profiles. She’s a ghost, Grimm. A complete fucking ghost.”
Grimm stopped walking. “You ran a background check. In the thirty seconds we were in there.”
“I was curious.”
“You’re a fucking psychopath.”
“And yet you’re the one who got an erection over a woman who didn’t look at you once.” Voss adjusted his glasses. “That’s never happened before, has it? You. Silent. Staring. Practically drooling. I thought I was going to have to hose you down.”
Grimm grabbed him by the cut and slammed him against the side of the building. Not hard enough to hurt—not really. Just hard enough to make a point.
“Say one more word,” he breathed, “and I’ll make you eat those fucking glasses.”
Voss, to his credit, didn’t flinch. “Noted.”
Grimm released him and swung onto his bike. The engine roared to life, drowning out anything else the treasurer might have said. But he didn’t need to hear it. He knew.
He was fucked.
Completely and utterly fucked.
And somewhere in that grey cubicle, a woman in an oatmeal turtleneck was filling out forms and filing papers and existing in her quiet, invisible little life, completely unaware that she’d just detonated a bomb in the chest of the most dangerous man in the Sons of Ash.
