RIDE OR RUIN

THE NAME ON THE PHONE

Jaxon's office sat at the back of the clubhouse, a cramped room lined with filing cabinets and a wall of framed photographs, decades of Black Reapers presidents staring down from mismatched frames. Lena stood just inside the door, arms crossed tight over her chest, while Colt laid a cracked phone on the desk like it might bite him.

"Found it in the gutter after I clipped his back tire," Colt said. "Guy went down hard. Took off on foot before I could grab him."

Jaxon picked up the phone, thumb swiping across the shattered screen. "Passcode?"

"Didn't need one. Screen was already unlocked when it hit the ground."

Jaxon scrolled in silence for a long moment, his face unreadable, and Lena watched the muscle in his jaw tighten with every second that passed.

"Jaxon." She stepped closer despite herself. "What does it say?"

He turned the phone toward her without a word. A single contact sat pinned at the top of the recent messages, a name she didn't recognize, followed by a string of texts in a language of half codes and street names she couldn't fully parse. But she didn't need to understand all of it. She understood the timestamps. Messages sent an hour before Ridge Street. Messages sent the moment Jaxon's bike had slowed in front of the bakery.

"Somebody watched us the whole time," she said.

"Somebody told them where to watch." Jaxon's voice had gone dangerously quiet, the kind of quiet that made Colt take a half step back toward the door. "This contact. Tag's just 'D.' Anybody recognize that?"

Colt shook his head slowly. "Could be anybody. Could be a burner nobody's ever heard used before."

"Or it could be somebody smart enough to use a name that means nothing to anybody but the man he's talking to." Jaxon set the phone down like it had grown too heavy to hold. "Get Rosa. I want every prospect and patched member who was on the property this morning in the common room in ten minutes."

"Jax, that's gonna cause a panic."

"Good. Panic makes people talk." He looked up, and for the first time since the clubhouse gates had slammed shut, Lena saw something in his eyes that scared her more than the gunfire had. Not fear. Fury, banked and controlled, the kind that came from a man who'd learned patience the hard way and was about to spend every ounce of it finding whoever had aimed a threat at his son.

Colt disappeared out the door, leaving them alone with the photographs and the weight of everything neither of them had said yet.

"You should sit down," Jaxon said finally, nodding toward the chair across from his desk. "You've been standing since Ridge Street."

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that. I don't believe you any more than Rosa did." He came around the desk, closer than she expected, close enough that she caught the same leather and gasoline smell from years ago, underneath it something warmer, something that used to undo her without effort. "Lena. I need you to tell me everything. Who knew you were coming into town today. Who knows where you've been living. Anybody."

"Nobody knew. I told you that already."

"Somebody knew enough to have a man with a gun watching Ridge Street before I even got there."

The accusation, gentle as it was, still landed like a slap. "Are you saying this is my fault?"

"I'm saying somebody's been watching longer than today, and I need to understand how far back that goes so I can protect him." His voice cracked slightly on the last word, and some of the fury drained out of it, replaced by something rawer. "I can't lose him twice, Lena. I didn't even get five years with him the first time."

The words hung between them, heavier than anything gunfire had thrown at the truck. Lena felt her carefully built anger wobble, just slightly, at the sight of a man twice her size and reputation looking like he might come apart at the mention of a son he'd known for less than an hour.

"I didn't take him from you to hurt you," she said quietly. "I took him because I was terrified. You have to understand what it looked like from where I was standing. One night with a man who ran a motorcycle club. A man half the county was scared of. I didn't know if you'd want a child or see him as a liability."

"A liability." Jaxon repeated the word like it tasted foul in his mouth. "You thought I'd see my own son as a liability."

"I didn't know what you'd see him as. I barely knew you."

"You knew enough to climb on the back of my bike."

"That's not the same thing and you know it."

Silence stretched between them, taut and painful, until a knock at the door broke it. Rosa leaned in, expression grim. "Common room's filling up. You'll want to see this before you address everybody."

"See what?"

"Camera caught something outside the fence line ten minutes ago. You need eyes on it now."

Jaxon's expression shifted instantly, business replacing raw emotion in the space of a heartbeat. He grabbed the cracked phone off the desk and strode past Rosa without another word, Lena hurrying to keep pace, her heart climbing back into her throat.

The security monitor in the main room showed grainy black and white footage looped on repeat, a figure standing just beyond the fence line, hood pulled low, motionless except for one hand raised toward the camera.

Holding up a photograph.

Rosa froze the frame, zooming in as far as the resolution allowed, and Lena's stomach dropped straight through the floor.

It was a picture of Noah. Taken from a distance, clearly recent, clearly taken without either of them knowing.

"That's not from today," Jaxon said, voice gone flat and cold. "Look at the jacket he's wearing. That's not what he had on this morning."

Lena's hands began to shake. "Then how long have they had eyes on him?"

Nobody answered, because the truth sat there on the screen for all of them to see, and it was worse than anything she'd let herself imagine on the drive over.

Somebody had been watching her son long before today ever began.