BLACKTOP MOON

CHAPTER 3:WOLF EYES

I did not sleep. I catalogued.

By morning I had a mental map of every exit, every camera blind spot, and every member's face, filed the way Danny taught me back when we used to scope out engine yards for parts we could not afford, sitting in a borrowed car with a thermos of bad coffee, him pointing out which fences had dogs and which had cameras and which had nothing but a padlock and a prayer. Old habits. Good habits, apparently, for infiltrating a criminal motorcycle club that might have murdered my brother.

The garage ran loud and easy in the daylight, radios and cursing and somebody's dog asleep on a stack of tires, almost normal enough that I forgot to be afraid. Almost. I fell into the rhythm of it faster than I expected, handed a wrench, handed a job, treated like a pair of hands first and a mystery second, which suited me fine because it gave me cover to keep looking without looking like I was looking.

I felt him before I saw him. That is the honest, humiliating truth of it. Some animal part of me clocked Ronan Kade's attention landing on my back like a hand, and I turned to find him across the garage watching me with an intensity that had nothing casual left in it, like I was a part he was trying to identify by sound alone, head tilted just slightly, the way you listen for an engine knock you cannot quite place.

What, I said, because subtlety has never been my strongest tool.

He crossed the garage slow, the way men do when they want you to notice they are not hurrying, boots unhurried on concrete, other members parting around him without seeming to notice they were doing it, the way water moves around a rock. Up close, in daylight, his eyes were doing that thing again, gold bleeding warm at the edges, and it occurred to me that I had never actually seen that color on a living person before Danny stopped answering his phone, before the calls went to voicemail and then stopped going anywhere at all.

You're not who you say you are, Ashford, he said, low enough that only I caught it, close enough that I could smell leather and something underneath it, woodsmoke maybe, or something wilder than that.

My stomach dropped straight through the concrete floor. Excuse me?

Ashford isn't a family name around here. But Calloway is. He tilted his head, reading me like weather, patient the way a man is patient when he already knows how the storm ends. And you flinch at it exactly the way somebody flinches at a name that isn't supposed to be theirs to hide behind.

I could have argued. I am an excellent liar, better than most people I have ever met, better than I am proud of. But something about the way he said it, careful instead of accusing, like he was giving me a chance to land somewhere safe before he pushed, made the lie stick in my throat, useless, refusing to come out no matter how hard I reached for it.

You going to turn me in, I asked instead, going for defiant and landing somewhere closer to scared.

Depends what you're actually here for, he said.

I opened my mouth to give him another lie, a good one, one I had already built and rehearsed and was fully prepared to deploy, and what came out instead was the truth cracking through like ice giving way under weight it was never built to hold.

I'm here because somebody in this club knows what happened to my brother, and I am not leaving until I find out who.

For one long second neither of us moved. The garage kept going around us, an engine turning over somewhere, someone laughing at a joke I did not catch, and inside that little bubble of stillness between us something shifted behind his face, not anger, something closer to recognition, like a door he had been guarding his whole life just had somebody knock from the other side.

Come with me, he said. Now. Before Otis gets curious about why the new girl's crying in broad daylight.

I had not realized I was crying. My hand came up to my face on its own, found it wet, and I hated that, hated the visible proof of a control I usually managed to keep. He did not touch me, did not perform comfort, just turned and walked and trusted that I would follow, which somehow felt more dangerous than if he had grabbed my wrist and dragged me along.

We ended up in a back room I had not mapped yet, small, cluttered with parts catalogs and an ashtray nobody used anymore, and he shut the door, and turned around, and the thing about his eyes finally, finally made a terrible kind of sense, because they were not brown anymore. They were full amber, wolf bright, glowing faintly in the dim room like something out of Danny's old drunken campfire stories that I had never once believed, stories he used to tell with a strange edge underneath the joke, an edge I had always assumed was just the whiskey talking.

I'm going to tell you something that's going to get me killed if it's the wrong call, Ronan said. And I need you to not scream.