Biker’s Temptation

What She Was Carrying

Kane searched my room himself.

He didn’t ask anyone to do it for him, and he didn’t make it feel like a violation, which I had been braced for. He moved through the space the way he moved through every space, with a kind of deliberate economy, hands careful, eyes reading surfaces before touching them.

I stood in the doorway and watched.

He went through the bag first. Every pocket, every seam, every folded layer of clothing held up to the light coming through the window. Then the toiletry case. Then the shoes, fingers running along the inner soles with a thoroughness that told me he had found things in shoes before.

He found nothing.

He set the bag down and turned to the jacket hanging on the back of the chair. The one I had been wearing the night I walked into the Iron Saints’ bar. I had not thought about the jacket in days. It was just the jacket.

Kane turned it over in his hands once, then again. His thumb pressed along the collar seam and stopped.

I crossed the room before I had decided to move.

He held the jacket out, and I ran my own fingers along the same seam and felt it immediately. A small hard rectangle no bigger than a thumbnail, sewn flat between the outer shell and the lining. I would have had to know it was there to find it. I had worn that jacket for three weeks and never felt it once.

“Eleanor,” I said, and the name tasted like a swallowed stone.

“Or someone working under her,” Kane said.

I sat on the edge of the bed. The jacket was still in my hands, and I wasn’t sure when I had taken it from him. “She put it there before I left. That means she planned for the possibility that Donovan would fail before I ever got on the bus.”

“She planned for every possibility,” Kane said. “That’s what makes her dangerous.”

He sat down beside me, not close enough to the crowd, close enough that the warmth of him was a real thing I was aware of. I had been aware of Kane Voss since the first night in a way that was inconvenient and persistent and showed no signs of stopping.

“You’re not going to tell me it’s going to be okay,” I said.

“No.”

“Good. I don’t think I could stand it right now.”

He was quiet for a moment. “What I will tell you is that you are not carrying this alone anymore. Whatever is on that drive, whatever Mercer thinks he’s owed, you came through our gate and that makes you Iron Saints business. We don’t leave our business unfinished.”

It was not a romantic declaration. It was not meant to be. But something in the plainness of it reached places in my chest that softer words wouldn’t have touched.

“Kane,” I said. “How many people have you lost to the Hale network?”

He didn’t answer immediately. “Enough.”

“Is that why Asher’s here?”

“Asher’s here because I asked him to be. The rest is his story to tell.”

I nodded and didn’t push. There were things in this compound that had been waiting years to come undone and I was not going to be the one to yank at the threads.

Ryker appeared in the doorway holding a small pair of tweezers and a shallow tray. Kane placed the second drive carefully into the tray without touching it with his fingers.

“I’ll have Jasper image it,” Ryker said. “Offline machine. Nothing connected.”

“And Griff,” Kane said.

“Already asked him to come in.”

“Don’t tell him why.”

Ryker left and the quiet he left behind was a different kind of quiet than before, the kind that had a shape and a weight and a direction it was moving in.

I looked at the jacket in my hands. Three weeks I had worn it without knowing. Three weeks Eleanor Hale had known exactly where I was and what I was carrying and had let me walk anyway, let Donovan play his part in her plan, let me think I was running when the whole time I was being guided.

The anger came slowly at first and then all at once.

“She used me as a mule twice,” I said. “The drive I knew about was bait. The one I didn’t was the thing she actually wanted moved.”

“Which means,” Kane said, “that Mercer doesn’t work for Eleanor.”

I looked at him.

“He wants the second drive and Eleanor doesn’t want him to have it,” he said. “She put it in your jacket and sent you here because she knew the Iron Saints would keep Mercer’s people out long enough for her to make her next move.”

The room tilted slightly on its axis.

“She used your compound,” I said slowly. “She used your compound as a vault.”

Kane’s jaw was a hard line. “She won’t make that mistake twice.”

Outside in the hall I heard boots on concrete, voices low, the compound pulling itself into a different kind of readiness. The Iron Saints were moving.

And somewhere in the building, Griff was being called to a meeting he didn’t know the reason for yet.

I put the jacket down and stood up.

Whatever was coming next, I was not going to sit on the edge of a bed and wait for it to arrive.