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

Chapter 14

POV — LEXI

Oh, I'm in trouble.

I'm still standing in the yard holding that thought like a hot spark plug when the clubhouse door opens and Kai appears on the porch in yesterday's hoodie, hair like a crash site, holding two mugs of coffee and wearing the expression of a man who has been waiting up.

"So," he says. "Interesting night for engine noises."

"Couldn't sleep. Went for a ride."

"Uh-huh. Solo ride."

"Very solo."

"Fascinating. Because Damon also went for a very solo ride at the exact same time, in the exact same direction, and you both came back within ninety seconds of each other, which — as a scientist —" he hands me a mug, "— I'm calling a coincidence of statistically criminal proportions."

"Kai."

"I said NOTHING. I am a vault." He sips his coffee. "Noa owes me five bucks though."

I don't dignify it. I dignify the coffee instead, and the coffee is good, and the morning is gold on the gravel, and somewhere behind the clubhouse Damon's engine ticks as it cools, and I am absolutely, definitely, professionally not thinking about the words *you kept up.*

"Get cleaned up, by the way," Kai adds, heading back inside. "Big day, Church at ten. Formal business."

"We just HAD Church."

"That was about whether you stay." The grin he throws over his shoulder is all sunrise. "This one's about what you become."

* * *

* 10:00 a.m. the table. cleared to bare wood again. I'm starting to fear this furniture *

They sit me at the end — same chair as last night, except last night it felt like a dock for the accused and today it feels weirdly like a place setting. All four of them are here. Even him, at the head, coffee in front of him he'll pretend not to drink, expression set to standard-issue granite. Whatever traveled sixty miles with us at dawn has been parked out of sight.

Fine. Two can play garage-face.

Noah runs it. Of course Noah runs it — some things you want delivered by a wall that cooks.

"Club voted. You stay. Now the shape of it." He lays a folded piece of leather on the table and slides it across to me. "Open it."

I unfold it. It's a vest. Worn soft, cleaned recent — and on the back, a single patch. Not the demon on the flaming wheel. A plain rocker, bottom arc only, one word stitched in white:

PROSPECT.

"Prospect," Noah says. "Candidate. It means you're ours to protect and ours to work. It means the top rocker isn't given, it's earned, and nobody can tell you how long that takes because it takes what it takes. Kai prospected fourteen months. I did a year. Ryder—" he glances over.

"Nine," Ryder says. A number instead of a sentence. Efficient.

"You wear it, you follow club rules." Noah counts them off on fingers the size of wrenches. "One: club business stays in the club. What you see here, what you hear here, dies here. Two: you don't ride alone on club work — you're not patched, so someone's always got your back, that's not an insult, that's a seatbelt. Three: the table is sacred. Church votes are final, even the ones you hate. Four: no lies inside these walls. Out there, tell the world whatever keeps you safe. In here — truth or silence, nothing between. Five—" and here his voice goes even quieter, which for Noah means it matters most, "—if you're in trouble, you call. Doesn't matter the hour, doesn't matter the reason, doesn't matter if you think you earned the trouble. You call. The road doesn't betray. Neither do we."

The vest is light in my hands. It weighs about four thousand pounds.

"There a rule about crying at the table?" I manage.

"Rule six," Kai says solemnly. "Tears must be hidden in coffee. It's why Damon drinks so much of it."

The look Damon levels at him could strip paint. Kai beams into it like it's a suntan lamp.

"Questions?" Noah asks.

"One." I look down the table, at all of them. "Why does it feel like this is a bigger deal than you're saying?"

They trade a glance — one of those four-way glances that clubs and families do, a whole meeting in a half second.

"Because it is," Noah says simply. "You'd be the first."

"First what?"

"First woman to wear anything of ours. Ever." He doesn't dress it up, doesn't hand me a speech. Just the fact, laid on the table like a part. "Some clubs will have opinions. Some roads'll be longer because of it. We voted knowing that. You should put it on knowing that."

The room holds still. Even Kai.

And I think about eighteen years of being told what girls with grease under their nails get to be. I think about Dylan's voice — *my girl doesn't wear someone else's name on her back* — and how he meant it as a leash and called it love.

I stand up, and I put the vest on, and it settles across my shoulders like it was measured off me in my sleep.

"Opinions," I say, "can take a number and wait in the yard."

Kai whoops. Noah's smile arrives like bread rising. Ryder nods, once — and I've learned to read the tonnage now.

Damon says nothing. But he picks up his coffee and drinks it — openly, in front of everyone, no pretense — and somehow I file that under approval.

* * *

* afternoon. the workshop. operation: excavate the orphan bench *

The corner bench — MY corner bench, the one Damon assigned with four words and zero eye contact — turns out to be an archaeological site. Under the boxes: a dead battery charger, three bent rims, a milk crate of mystery bolts, and a sun-bleached magazine from nine years ago with a sticky note on it in handwriting I don't recognize that says *do not throw out* and no explanation. Clubs are like this, I'm learning. Sediment everywhere. History in layers.

I clear it. Scrub the wood down to honest grain. Hang my tools on the pegboard in my order — the order my hands learned before my brain did, wrenches descending left to right like a scale. My roll bag looks small unpacked into all that space. First time I've unpacked anything in four days.

I'm dialing in the bench vise when I realize the workshop has gone suspiciously quiet behind me, which in this place is the loudest possible sound.

I turn around.

Kai is standing on a chair above my bench with a cordless drill in one hand, something flat and metal in the other, and the expression of a man unveiling a monument. Noah's leaning in the doorway pretending he had nothing to do with whatever this is. Ryder is holding — I kid you not — a level. Quality control.

"What," I say, "are you doing above my bench."

"Ceremony," Kai says. "Hold your applause."

He steps aside.

Bolted to the wall over my pegboard — not taped, not hung on a nail, BOLTED, four screws, permanent as anything in this building — is a sign. Steel plate. Edges filed clean. Letters cut rough but deep, the way you cut when you mean it, then torched blue-black around the border so it looks like it rolled out of some custom shop.

QUEEN OF THE GARAGE.

"Noa did the metal," Kai says, hopping down. "I did the design, the vision, the soul—"

"You drew it on a napkin and spelled garage wrong," Noah says.

"—the SOUL, and Ryder checked it was straight, because we live with a tyrant. Anyway." He spreads his arms at it. "Every kingdom needs signage. It's basically law."

I look at the sign.

Here's the stupid thing. I've held it together through a stairwell, a gate, forty-seven missed calls, a gas-station bouquet, my mother's math, my sister's victory lap, and a club vote about my entire future. Dry-eyed through most of it, or close enough for government work.

A steel plate with four screws in it nearly takes me out.

Because Dylan bought me perfume I was allergic to for three birthdays running. Because my parents gave me Chloe's hand-me-down laptop with her stickers still on it. And three guys I've known properly for four days went into a forge and MADE me a thing — measured it, cut it, filed it, leveled it — for a corner of a workshop I haven't even earned yet.

"It's crooked," I say, because my voice needs somewhere to hide.

"It is NOT—" Kai spins to Ryder. "Tell her."

"Half a degree," Ryder says. "Intentional. Crowns sit tilted."

The laugh and the tears show up at the same time and I let the laugh win on points. Barely. Rule six exists for a reason; I understand the coffee thing now.

And from the doorway to the yard, where I didn't hear him arrive because the man walks like a rumor, Damon looks at the sign for a long moment. Then at my bench — tools in descending scale, clean grain, vise dialed.

"Queen," he says, unreadable. "Then act like it. Mule's front brake is dragging, Kai's chain sounds like a bag of nails, and there's a bike coming in tomorrow that'll test what you know."

"Whose bike?"

He's already walking away, coffee in hand, voice drifting back over his shoulder like an afterthought he planned all day:

"Mine."