All Chapters of Claimed By The Outlaw: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

50 Chapters

The Wrong Town At The Right Time

The truck broke down on a Tuesday, which felt exactly right.Tuesday was the kind of day that never promised anything good. Tuesdays were when your landlord called about the rent. Tuesdays were when doctors delivered the kind of news that rearranged your whole understanding of your life. Tuesdays had never once done Sloane Vega any favors, and the engine giving one last asthmatic shudder before going completely silent on a mountain road outside a town she had chosen by closing her eyes and pointing at a map felt like Tuesday being Tuesday.She pulled the truck as far onto the gravel shoulder as it would coast, turned off the headlights, and sat in the dark for a moment with both hands still on the wheel.Outside, the Colorado sky was doing something almost aggressively beautiful. The last of the sunset was bleeding out across the peaks in shades of orange and deep pink that no painter would dare use together because no one would believe it was real. Pine trees crowded the road on both

The Room Above The Bar

Sloane deleted the text from Mira and then sat very still on the bar stool for thirty seconds, which was all the time she could afford to panic before she had to start thinking clearly again.Fourteen missed calls from an unknown number. Which meant Garrett had either already found her trail or was casting a wide enough net to scare her into making a mistake. She had been careful. She had used cash for the truck, cash for gas, cash for the two nights she had spent in motels so forgettable that she could barely remember the towns. She had not used her bank cards. She had not called anyone except Mira from the burner phone, and Mira knew better than to slip up.She exhaled slowly. Okay. Think.The text said get off the highway. She was already off it. The text said do not use her real name. She had not given anyone her real name tonight. She glanced at the charging cable still connected to her phone, then at the man behind the bar who had simply handed it to her without asking who she w

Her Name In Someone Else’s File

Sloane stopped on the third step from the bottom.The woman at the bar had her back turned. She was maybe forty, dark hair pulled into a neat braid, and she was talking to Pearl in the low focused way of someone conducting an interview. The photograph was face up on the bar. Even from across the room Sloane could see it clearly: a photo taken outside her apartment building in Chicago, maybe three months ago, on a day she had been wearing the grey coat she had eventually left behind.The smart thing was to go back upstairs. Pack the bag. Leave through the window if she had to and worry about the truck later.She did not do the smart thing. She had never been very good at the smart thing when someone was threatening to take something from her, and apparently that included this room, this town, and the first decent night of sleep she'd had in nearly two weeks.She came the rest of the way down the stairs.The woman heard her footsteps and turned, and in that same moment Sloane saw what w

The Job She Didn’t Ask For

She drove the truck around for an hour because she could.Not to go anywhere. Not toward Denver or Chicago or any point on a map that meant something. Just the mountain roads curving through pine trees with the windows down and the cold October air filling the cab. The engine ran smooth and quiet, and every mile felt like an argument she was having with herself about what came next.Cross's card was in her jacket pocket. She touched it every few minutes without meaning to, the way you touch a bruise to see if it still hurts.She thought about what it would mean to cooperate. It would mean coming out of hiding. It would mean putting her name on documents and sitting in rooms with lawyers who worked for people she did not know and trusting that the system she was being asked to trust was actually trustworthy. It would mean Garrett knowing exactly where she was.But Cross was not wrong. Sixty dollars a night and a dwindling envelope of cash was not a plan. It was a delay.She pulled over

Everything She Did Not Say

She did not run.She wanted to. Every instinct she had spent the past two weeks sharpening told her to move, to be gone before that conversation in the parking lot ended, to be back in the truck and down the road before Colt came inside with whatever that man had told him about who she really was.She stood in the hallway beside the supply closet and breathed.Think. If that man worked for Garrett, this was already over. He would not have needed to show Colt her photograph. He would have simply told Colt to hand her over, and the question was whether Colt would, which she could not answer because she had known him for four days and four days was not enough to know what someone did when it cost them something.But if that man did not work for Garrett.She thought about what Cross had told her: the cartel had been pressuring the Iron Vow MC for eighteen months. She thought about suits that did not belong in mountain towns. She thought about Garrett's firm being the legal nerve center of

Dinner For Two

He was already there when she arrived.That surprised her. In her experience, powerful men were always late. Lateness was its own kind of power, a way of saying your time matters more than mine without having to say it out loud. Marcus had been late to their first date, their wedding rehearsal, and the dinner where she had tried, one last time, to tell him she was unhappy. He had arrived thirty minutes after her that night, kissed her cheek, and ordered wine before she could finish her sentence.Dorian was sitting at the corner table with a glass of water and his phone face down when she walked in. He stood when he saw her. Not a performance. Just a man standing because a woman he wanted to see had walked through the door.“You came,” he said.“I said I would,” she replied, and sat down.The restaurant was not what she expected. She had braced herself for somewhere that announced wealth, somewhere with impossible lighting and portions so small they were basically abstract art. Instead

Damage Control

She read it four times.Each time the words rearranged themselves slightly in her head, looking for a different meaning, a benign interpretation, something that would make the cold feeling spreading through her chest stop. There was no other interpretation. Five words, plain and simple and deliberate.I know about the baby.She typed back immediately: How.His reply came fast, too fast, like he had been waiting: Does it matter. We need to talk Sel. This changes everything.She put the phone face down on her lap and looked out the window at the city passing and breathed slowly through her nose the way Diana had once told her to do in high stress moments, in through the nose, out through the mouth, do not let the panic make decisions for you.She picked the phone back up and called Petra.“He knows,” she said when Petra answered.A sharp inhale. “Marcus? How does Marcus know? You have not even told your mother.”“I do not know how he knows.” Selene pressed her fingers against her forehe

Her Terms

Diana Cho’s office always smelled like strong coffee and quiet authority.Selene arrived at eight in the morning without an appointment and Diana’s assistant, a calm young man named Felix who had seen everything, took one look at her face and said: “I will let her know you are here,” without asking her to wait.Diana appeared in the doorway thirty seconds later, took in Selene’s expression, and said: “Felix, cancel my nine o’clock.” Then to Selene: “Come in. Sit. Talk.”Selene sat and talked. She laid out everything in order, the way Diana had taught her in their first meeting, facts before feelings, timeline before interpretation. Diana listened with her hands folded on her desk and her face giving nothing away, which was exactly what Selene needed.When Selene finished, Diana was quiet for a moment.“The story is already live,” Diana said.“Since midnight.”“And Marcus sent the texts before the story ran.”“Twenty minutes before.”Diana nodded slowly. “He tipped the journalist and t

Seven Seconds

Seven seconds.That was all she had before the agent at the door said her name a second time, louder now, with the particular authority of someone who was not accustomed to being made to wait.Sloane stood on the third step from the bottom and looked at Colt. He was behind the bar, hands flat on the counter, watching her with complete stillness. His face gave nothing away to the room. But his eyes were asking the question she already knew the answer to.Do you trust me.She had known Colt Mercer for six days. She had known Garrett Hale for four years. She knew which one had paid for her truck without being asked and which one had filed a missing persons report designed to make her sound insane.She looked at the agent. Then she looked back at Colt and gave him the smallest nod she could manage.It was enough.Colt moved out from behind the bar. Not toward Sloane. Toward the agent. He walked the way he walked everywhere, without hurry, which somehow made him harder to ignore rather tha

What Colt Builds in the Dark

She didn't sleep.She lay in the cedar-smelling room above the Ironside and stared at the ceiling and thought about Judge Briggs and golf courses and how a man could smile at you across a courtroom while already knowing how the verdict was going to read.At two in the morning she gave up, put on her jeans and the oversized flannel she had started leaving on the chair because it was warm and smelled faintly of woodsmoke, and went downstairs.The bar was dark except for the low lights above the counter. Colt was at the back table with his laptop open and three folders spread out around it. He had his reading glasses on and a coffee that had probably gone cold an hour ago and he looked up when she came in with the unsurprised calm of a man who had been expecting her."Couldn't sleep," she said."Neither could I."She went to the coffee pot. It was fresh, which meant he had made it recently, which meant he had expected her to come down.She brought two mugs to the back table and sat acros

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