The first time I saw Doc, he had blood on his collar. The second time, he asked if I needed help. The third time, I killed my husband on the floor of a Maine motel.

I came to Maine running. I'd been counting exits in every bar I'd ever walked into for five years, and the night I walked into the Brew Growler I counted them out of habit, not knowing one of them was going to belong to a man named Doc.

He was forty-one and the kind of man who carried his violence with the bored competence of a person who didn't need to prove it anymore. He had three garages full of bikes and the look of someone who'd ridden alone for a long time. He should not have asked me if I needed help. He did anyway.

And when the man hunting me showed up at the door of my motel room at midnight with a knife he meant for me, Doc was the one who carried the body out. Who buried it in a stretch of pine forest no one would find. Who told me my husband was the kind of man I'd been right to be afraid of, and that I wasn't going to be afraid anymore.

He didn't tell me he was about to found a motorcycle club. He didn't tell me he was about to put my name on the door of a bar in Stockton. He didn't tell me he was going to make me a woman who carries a road name and a Smith & Wesson and her own count of who lives.

He just rode in front of me into the rest of my life, and let me decide what I was going to do when I got there.

I decided. I am still deciding.

Found family. Age gap. Forced proximity. Dark MC. Possessive alpha. Survivor heroine. Brotherhood founding.

Property of the Phantoms is Book 1 of the Phantom Legionnaires MC series — a dark, brotherhood-founding, age-gap, forced-proximity romance from new author Sloane Vega. For readers of Joanna Wylde, Madeline Sheehan, Evie Mitchell, Tillie Cole, and Bella Jewel. 87,000 words. Spicy. Standalone HEA with series threads.