Savage Saints Mc : Claimed By Four Monsters

Chapter 4

Isolde

I didn't sleep. I lay on the narrow bed in Kael's room, staring at the ceiling while the clubhouse settled around me, listening to the sounds of men cleaning up after violence like it was just another chore. Boots on concrete. Low voices. Something heavy being dragged across the floor outside. I didn't want to think about what that was.

Kael had not come back to the room. By the time a pale grey light crept under the door, I had counted every crack in the ceiling and made peace with exactly nothing. The door opened at seven.

Not Kael. Zephyr, holding two mugs, leaning against the frame with that easy smile like the night before had been a party that got slightly out of hand.

"Coffee," he said. "I made it strong because you look like you need last rites."

"Thank you." I took the mug. It was good coffee. That surprised me.

He sat on the end of the bed without being invited, which also didn't surprise me. "How are you holding up, Mara?" He said the fake name with a small deliberate lift, letting me know he knew it was fake and had decided to be kind about it.

"I've had better weeks," I said.

"For what it's worth, Riot doesn't usually move that fast for anyone." He wrapped both hands around his mug. "What he did last night, pulling you clear like that. That's not nothing coming from him."

"I noticed."

"He'd hate me telling you that." He grinned. "Which is exactly why I did."

Heavy footsteps in the hall. Riot appeared in the doorway, looked at Zephyr sitting on the bed, and the easy atmosphere in the room contracted immediately.

"You're in here why?" Riot said.

"Delivering coffee. Being charming. The usual."

"Get out."

Zephyr raised both eyebrows at me with an expression that said see what I deal with and unfolded himself from the bed without hurry. He was almost through the door when Riot stepped aside just barely enough, making him turn sideways to pass. A small dominance move. Zephyr ignored it perfectly.

Riot set a plate of toast on the nightstand and looked at me with his arms crossed.

"Eat," he said.

"Good morning to you too."

Something moved in his jaw. "Kael wants everyone in the main hall in twenty minutes."

He left without waiting for a response. I ate the toast.

The main hall was a long room with mismatched furniture, a bar along one wall that looked permanently open, and the kind of lighting that suggested no one here kept regular hours. The four of them were already arranged when I walked in. Kael standing. The other three seated, which told me something about how these men understood hierarchy without needing to discuss it.

Kael looked at me once when I entered, then addressed the room.

"She stays," he said. "Under club protection until I decide otherwise. She's not a guest and she's not a prisoner. She follows the house rules. Nobody touches her. Nobody speaks about her outside these walls. That's the end of it."

Zephyr looked pleased. Riot looked at the floor. Soren looked at me.

"Any questions?" Kael asked.

Nobody had any. He left the room. The day moved strangely after that. I was given a room that wasn't Kael's, a change of clothes that fit reasonably well, and no instructions beyond staying inside. Which meant I had time. And time, right then, was either a gift or a trap depending on what I did with it.

Zephyr found reasons to be wherever I was. He appeared in the kitchen while I was making tea and spent forty minutes telling me stories about club runs that were so clearly exaggerated I caught myself laughing twice and that really surprised me, It felt wrong given everything, which made me pull back, which made him notice, which made him tone it down without making a thing of it. He was smarter than the grin suggested.

Riot's version of attention was different. He didn't talk. He just appeared. Doorways. Hallways. The courtyard when I stepped outside for five minutes of air. He never came close. He just positioned himself where he could see me, arms crossed, jaw set, watching like I was something that might bolt or break and he hadn't decided which was more likely.

Soren was the most unsettling.

He never sought me out directly. Instead, circumstances kept rearranging themselves. The chair nearest mine at the table happened to be the one he chose. The file he needed to look at happened to require sitting in the same room as me for an extended period of silence that was somehow not uncomfortable. He had a way of being present without demanding anything, and I found myself talking to him more than I intended, small things at first, just filling the quiet, and realising too late that he had learned more about me in an hour than Zephyr had with an entire morning of deliberate charm.

I saw Kael notice all of it.

He came through the main hall in the early afternoon and stopped in the doorway for a moment, looking at the three of them arranged around me with the particular stillness of a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to. His eyes moved to Riot, then Zephyr, then Soren. Then to me. Then he turned and walked away.

Ten minutes later, raised voices came from somewhere down the hall. Kael's low and controlled. Riot's tighter than usual. I couldn't make out words but the shape of it was clear.

I used the distraction. Kael's office was the second door on the left. Unlocked, which surprised me, though maybe it shouldn't have. Men like him probably didn't expect anyone in their own house to be stupid enough to try something.

I slipped inside.

The desk was organised in a way that looked like chaos but wasn't. I moved carefully, not disturbing the order, pulling open the lower drawer where the files were thickest. Names I didn't recognise. Financial records. Photographs. Surveillance shots taken from a distance.

Then I found a folder with a name I knew.

Voss.

Not a thin folder. A thick one, worn at the edges, the kind built up over a long time. Inside were photographs of Dorian. Of Marcus. Of their father, Aldric Voss, silver-haired and sharp-eyed at various events. Wire transfer records. A timeline stretching back three years.

Three years.

Kael had been watching this family for three years.

My hands went still on the papers. This wasn't opportunism. This wasn't about the reward money on my head. Whatever Kael Draven wanted with the Voss family, he had been building toward it long before I fell off a motorcycle into his life.

I heard his voice in the hall, close, I pushed the drawer shut and was back through the door and four steps down the corridor before he turned the corner. He looked at me with those unreadable eyes and I looked back at him and neither of us said anything.

I kept walking.

Behind me, I heard him stop. Then his voice, low, clearly meant for whoever was beside him.

"If she finds out why I truly need her," he said, "she'll run."

What the heck is he talking about? Me…?