Asphalt Demons MC My Boyfriend Cheated, Now Four Want Me At The Same Time

Chapter 3

POV — LEXI

"Who let you in?"

Three words. That's all it takes to turn the guy in front of me from a shadow into a wall.

He's standing dead center in the gate gap, arms loose at his sides, and the porch light behind him cuts him out of the dark like a silhouette target at a shooting range. Tall. Black jacket. Storm-gray eyes that look at me the way a customs officer looks at a suspicious suitcase.

I know who this is. Noah mentioned him maybe twice, both times with the tone people use for load-bearing walls. Damon. President.

And my brain — my stupid, wonderful, mechanic brain — does the only thing it knows how to do under pressure. It runs a diagnostic.

*Subject: male, early twenties. Idle: aggressive. Cooling system: nonexistent. Probable cause of hostility: unknown. Recommendation: do not touch the engine while hot.*

"Nobody let me in," I say. My voice comes out sanded down, raw from forty miles of screaming into a helmet. "The gate was open."

"The gate is open for family." He doesn't move. "I don't know you."

"Damon." Noah's voice, from behind him. Heavy boots on gravel. "I told her to come."

"You told her." Damon still hasn't taken his eyes off me. "Funny. I don't remember a vote."

"It's midnight, not a church meeting—"

"It's MY yard at midnight."

Okay. Great. I drove forty miles with my life in pieces to get carded at the door by the world's angriest bouncer. Fantastic birthday. Ten out of ten. Would recommend.

I flip my kickstand down because my legs have officially resigned, and I get off Phoenix, and I pull my helmet off. And I know exactly what he sees, because I saw it in Phoenix's mirror at the last red light: mascara relocated to my jawline, eyes like I went three rounds with an onion factory, hair flattened into a helmet-shaped disaster.

"Look," I say. "I get it. Strange girl, midnight, tears — I'm a walking soap opera and you didn't order cable. So here's the short version. I have nowhere to go. My boyfriend of three years is currently—" the word jams in my throat like a stripped bolt, I force it through anyway, "—busy. With my sister. My parents' house has her name on the guest towels. So Noah said come. And I came. If that's a crime here, arrest me, I'll take the cell, honestly a cell sounds cozy right now—"

"Lex." Noah, quiet. A warning wrapped in wool.

I shut up. Turns out I've been talking faster and faster, like an engine with a stuck throttle, and my voice cracked somewhere around "sister" and never quite recovered.

Damon looks at me. Long. In the porch light I watch his jaw work like he's chewing on words and spitting out the bones.

"This is a club," he finally says. "Not a shelter for girls with boyfriend problems."

And that — THAT — is the moment the door behind him bangs open for the second time.

* * *

"Whoa-whoa-whoa, what is this, a duel? Do we get pistols? I call being the second—"

A guy bounces down the porch steps like the ground is a trampoline. Barefoot, in sweatpants and an unzipped hoodie over nothing, hair sticking up in nine directions, grin arriving three seconds before the rest of him. Behind him, slower, a fourth figure detaches from the doorway — lean, quiet, hands in pockets, face like an unread book.

"Kai," Noah says. "Go back inside."

"And miss this? Big man, there's a GIRL at our gate. Do you understand how historic this is? The last girl at this gate was the lady from the county census, and Damon made HER cry too—"

"I didn't make her cry."

"You asked her if the clipboard was a weapon."

"It was a reasonable question."

The bouncing guy — Kai — reaches me, actually looks at my face, and the grin drops off him like a chain slipping a sprocket. Just — gone. For a second he looks eleven years old.

"Hey," he says, softer. "Rough night?"

I open my mouth to say something ironic and armor-plated. What comes out is a wet, humiliating hiccup.

Kai turns to Damon. So does Noah. Even the quiet one by the porch shifts his weight, and somehow that half-step says more than a speech.

"She's not staying," Damon says.

"She's not standing in the yard all night either," Noah says.

"Noah—"

"She fixed my bike today." Noah moves — not fast, just forward, until he's next to me, and standing next to Noah is like parking next to a fuel truck: suddenly you feel very small and very safe at the same time. "She's fixed it for a year. Never overcharged. Never asked what we do or who we are. Today's her birthday. You want the rest, or is that enough?"

"Her birthday," Kai repeats. He looks at me. Looks at my wrecked face. Does the math out loud: "It's her BIRTHDAY and she's crying at a gate at midnight. Okay, cool, I've heard enough, I'm getting blankets—"

"Nobody's getting blankets," Damon snaps.

"I'm getting blankets AND cocoa—"

"Kai."

"You can't stop the cocoa, Damon, the cocoa is happening—"

"KAI."

The quiet one by the porch says nothing at all. He just walks — unhurried, like he's got a different clock than everyone else — crosses the yard, and stops beside Noah. On my side of the invisible line.

Three of them. Facing one.

Damon looks at his club standing around a stranger like a windbreak, and something crosses his face — fast, ugly, there and gone, like a misfire you hear once and then spend a week hunting.

"Fine," he says.

The word comes out through his teeth like it's costing him molars.

"One night." He steps out of the gate gap, finally, and the way clears, and cold air rushes past him at me like even the wind was waiting for permission. "She sleeps, she leaves in the morning. She sees nothing, touches nothing, asks nothing. And if her pretty boyfriend shows up here with his problems—" he looks at me, and it's a strange look, too long for hate, too sharp for anything else, "—they become YOUR problems. All three of you voted with your feet. Remember that."

He walks past me. Close. He smells like engine oil and cold night, and for a half-second I get the completely insane urge to say *thank you* — to THAT.

"Hey," I say instead, because my survival instinct died on a stairwell two hours ago. "Great hospitality. Five stars. The doorman really makes the place."

He stops. Doesn't turn around.

"One night," he repeats to the dark, and disappears around the building.

Kai whistles, long and low.

"Congratulations," he says. "You've been Damon'd. Most people need a week here to earn a full glare, you got one at the door. That's basically a medal."

* * *

* one cocoa, one blanket, and one Kai monologue about census ladies later *

The clubhouse is not what I expected.

I expected — I don't know. Skulls? A pool table with knife marks? Something out of the shows Dylan watched to feel dangerous while sitting on a couch.

Instead it's — warm. A long room with a worn leather sofa, a kitchen that smells like somebody actually cooks in it, a wall of photographs I'm too tired to look at, and a hallway of doors. Noah moves through the kitchen like he owns gravity, making cocoa I didn't ask for and putting a sandwich in front of me I didn't ask for either, and I eat it in six bites because apparently heartbreak burns calories like a drag race.

Kai talks the entire time. I catch maybe forty percent. It's soothing anyway, like leaving the radio on.

The quiet one — "That's Ryder," Kai says, "he speaks four words a fiscal quarter, don't take it personally" — disappears down the hallway at some point. I don't even notice when.

"Okay, birthday girl." Kai claps once. "Sleeping arrangements. The couch is technically mine which means it's technically a biohazard, Noah's room has a bed but Noah also snores like a diesel with a cracked manifold—"

"I don't snore."

"He snores IN CHORDS. So." Kai points down the hallway, where a door at the end stands open, warm light spilling out. "You get the good room. Clean. Quiet. Best mattress in the house, and I know because I've napped in every bed here, it's called quality control."

I'm too hollowed out to argue. I'm too hollowed out to do anything except follow the light like a very sad moth.

The room is small and unreasonably neat. Bed made with actual corners. A shelf with a row of paperbacks arranged by height. A desk with tools laid out on a cloth, parallel, like surgical instruments. Somebody lives here the way I organize my socket set and the rest of my life never.

The bed's already turned down. Fresh pillowcase — I can smell the detergent. Someone did this in the last ten minutes. Quietly. Without being asked.

"Whose room is this?" I ask.

"Doesn't matter," Kai says from the doorway, too fast, grinning. "Sleep. Bathroom's across the hall. If Damon growls at you before coffee, growl back, he respects that. Night, birthday girl."

The door clicks shut.

I stand there in the middle of a stranger's carefully ordered world, in the wreckage of my own, and for the first time in three hours nothing is required of me. Not driving. Not talking. Not holding my face together with willpower and spite.

I sit down on the edge of the bed. The mattress really is good. Quality control confirmed.

And that's when I see it.

On the chair by the desk — folded over the backrest, sleeves hanging like it just got home and got comfortable — a jacket. Leather, black, older than it looks, elbows worn soft and pale from miles I can't count. On the back, a patch.

A demon riding a wheel of flame.

Whoever sleeps in this room didn't just give up a mattress tonight.

They left their skin on the chair.

I reach out — I don't even know why, my hand just goes — and my fingers stop an inch from the leather.

Whose jacket is this?