THE ALPHA'S LAST RIDE

CHAPTER 6: SIX YEARS DEAD

"Every single day."

The words hung between us in the cold morning air, and I watched Ronan Kade — a man I had personally watched die less than twenty-four hours ago — roll his sleeve back down over a mark that was actively, patiently killing him.

"Then explain it," I said. "All of it. Because I've had exactly one night's sleep in the last two days, a stranger just told me my dead mother had a reputation, and you're currently the only person willing to stand in front of me instead of running away."

Ronan's jaw worked. For a second I thought he'd give me the same wall of silence he'd given me the night before, loading his broken motorcycle onto a trailer and vanishing without another word. Instead he walked past me into the garage, dropped onto the low stool by my workbench like his legs had simply stopped being willing to hold him up, and looked, for the first time since I'd met him, less like an Alpha and more like a man.

"Six years ago I was twenty-five and stupid enough to think I could out-ride anyone on this stretch of coast," he said. "There was a woman. Doesn't matter who. She wasn't what she said she was, and by the time I figured that out, I was already bleeding out on Route 9 with a car reversing over what was left of my bike."

"I saw that part," I said quietly. "I watched it happen."

"Then you saw more than my own club did." His eyes flicked up to mine, something rawer in them than the careful control from before. "They found the wreck the next morning. No body. Everyone assumed the wolves got to me first — animals do that, out past the tree line, and nobody thinks twice about a missing biker in wolf country. My Beta held a service. Buried an empty casket next to men who actually died protecting this territory. And I woke up nine days later in a motel room two hundred miles from here with this—" he tapped his wrist, "—already spreading, and absolutely no memory of how I got there."

I sat down slowly across from him, the workbench between us doing exactly what it had done last night — giving me something solid to hold onto while the ground kept tilting.

"Your own pack thinks you're dead."

"My own pack thinks I disappeared and came back six months later with a story about recovering from an attack. They don't know the rest. Jax doesn't know the rest, and Jax has been at my side since we were fifteen." Something flickered across his face, guilt dressed up as exhaustion. "There's a version of this where I tell you it doesn't matter who knows. It matters. It matters because the people hunting me are the same people who'll hunt anyone who finds out, and I have gotten extremely good, over six years, at making sure that circle stays small."

"And now it includes me."

"Now it includes you," he agreed, and for once there was no apology in it, just a flat, terrible acknowledgment of fact. "Because you didn't just see how I died, Vera. You saw what happened after. Nobody sees that. Not Jax, not my own sister, not the doctor who's kept me alive this long on borrowed theories and worse guesses. You put your hand on a piece of scrap metal and watched something that isn't supposed to be observable by anyone who isn't already dying themselves."

I thought about the flash of ink spreading under his skin, the specific, hungry patience of it, and my stomach turned over slow and cold.

"What is it," I said. "The mark. What's it actually doing to you?"

"Counting," he said simply. "That's the only word anyone's ever given me for it. It counts down whatever time I have left, and when it finishes counting, whatever's kept my wolf tethered to this body stops working, and I go back to being exactly what that guardrail should have made me six years ago."

"How much time."

"I don't know." His voice had gone rough. "That's the part that keeps me up nights that don't end in you watching me nearly get run off by an old man in an expensive coat. Nobody's ever come back the way I did. Nobody's ever had this exact mark, on this exact schedule, and lived long enough to compare notes. I'm the only data point. Which means I have absolutely no idea if I've got six years left or six weeks."

The silence that followed wasn't comfortable, but it wasn't hostile either — something closer to two people standing at the edge of the same cliff, deciding independently whether to look down.

"Why me," I said finally. "Out of everyone who could've been standing in this garage last night, why does it matter that it was specifically me who saw it?"

Ronan studied me for a long moment, weighing something behind those gray eyes that had gone almost silver in the morning light.

"Because the man in the SUV this morning didn't come here for my mark," he said. "He came here for yours. And I don't think either one of us is going to like finding out what that means."

Before I could ask him to explain that — really explain it, not another half-answer dressed up as protection — the bell over my shop door jangled, and both of us went still at the sound of boots crossing wet pavement outside.

"Expecting anyone?" Ronan asked, already rising, already angling his body toward the door the same way he had the night before.

"At seven in the morning? No." I grabbed the tire iron from beside the register, more out of habit than any real belief it would help against whatever kept showing up on my doorstep lately. "Why. Should I be?"

His answer came a half second before the door opened, quiet and grim.

"Because in my experience, trouble doesn't usually wait for an invitation."

I didn't know what to do with my hands, so I picked up a wrench I didn't need and set it back down twice before giving up entirely. Somewhere behind me, the coffee maker I never bothered to clean gurgled through its last cycle, filling the silence with something almost domestic, absurdly normal against the backdrop of everything he'd just told me.

"Why haven't you told anyone else," I asked. "Your sister. Jax. People who've known you your whole life."

"Because the version of me they'd have to start protecting isn't the version they need leading this club." He said it simply, without self-pity, like he'd rehearsed the logic of it a hundred times in the dark. "An Alpha who's dying on a schedule he can't predict doesn't get to keep making decisions for forty people who trust him to still be standing next year. The second they know, I stop being useful to them. I become something they manage instead of someone they follow."

"That sounds like a lonely way to live."

"It's the only way I know how." His mouth twitched, not quite a smile, closer to the ghost of one. "You're the first person in six years I've told without being cornered into it first."

"Lucky me."

"Lucky you," he agreed, and this time the almost-smile made it further, enough that I caught myself studying the shape of it a beat too long before looking away.

He stood, rolling his shoulders like a man shaking off something heavier than tension, and crossed to the bay door to check the street outside — an old habit already, I realized, something he probably did automatically in every room he entered, cataloguing exits the way I catalogued engine trouble.

"What happens now," I asked.

"Now I figure out how much danger I put you in by letting Crow see your face," he said. "And you go back to acting like an ordinary mechanic having an ordinary Tuesday, at least until I know it's safe to do anything else."

"I don't think ordinary's on the table anymore."

"No," he admitted, glancing back at me. "I don't think it is."

He read the card again, twice, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less threatening on a second pass.

"You should let me keep this," he said.

"Absolutely not." I plucked it out of his hand before he could pocket it, tucking it instead into the drawer where I kept invoices and spare keys, somewhere I'd see it every single day whether I wanted to or not. "If someone's sending me messages about my dead mother, I want to be the one holding the evidence, not you."

"That's not about trust."

"It's a little about trust."

He exhaled something close to a laugh, short and surprised, and for a moment the careful tension around his eyes eased just slightly. "Fine. Your evidence. Your drawer."