THE ALPHA'S LAST RIDE

CHAPTER 7: THE DEATH MARK

It wasn't trouble. It was worse — it was a teenage boy in a delivery uniform holding a bouquet of carnations and looking deeply unbothered by the fact that two adults had just braced for violence over his arrival.

"Vera Knox?" he asked, checking a clipboard.

"That's me."

He handed over the flowers, along with a small card, and left without further ceremony, whistling something tuneless as the delivery van pulled away. Ronan watched the whole exchange with the specific, coiled tension of a man who didn't fully trust anything that walked through that door anymore, myself apparently included.

I turned the card over. No name. Just eight words, printed in careful, deliberate type.

I know what your mother could see too.

The tire iron nearly slipped out of my hand.

"Vera." Ronan's voice had gone sharp, urgent. "What does it say?"

I showed him, and I watched something in his expression shutter closed, fast and complete, the way a man's face does right before he decides to lie to you for your own good.

"Don't," I said before he could open his mouth. "Don't do the thing where you tell me it's nothing. I watched you die yesterday and I've had two strangers in twelve hours tell me they knew my mother. I am done being handled."

"I'm not handling you."

"You loaded a motorcycle onto a trailer at four in the morning without answering a single question and then disappeared until a man in an SUV showed up threatening me. That's handling, Ronan. That's exactly what handling looks like."

His jaw ticked, and for a second I thought he'd push back — Alpha posturing, the kind of dominance display I half expected from every biker stereotype I'd ever half-believed. Instead, something in his shoulders dropped, and he pulled his sleeve back up without me asking, holding his bare wrist out across the workbench between us like an offering.

"Touch it," he said. "You already saw the worst of it secondhand, through metal that wasn't even mine anymore. See it properly. See what it actually is before you decide how much more of this you're willing to carry."

My mouth went dry. "That's not — I don't just touch things and get to choose what I see. It doesn't work like a light switch."

"Then let's find out what it works like." His eyes didn't leave mine. "Because I'd rather you understand exactly what you're standing next to than keep guessing."

I don't know what made me reach across the bench. Curiosity, maybe, or the particular kind of reckless stubbornness that had gotten me fired from two garages before I opened my own. Whatever it was, my fingers closed around his wrist before either of us could think better of it, my thumb resting directly over the faint black lines threading beneath his skin.

The vision that hit me this time wasn't a memory. It was present tense, immediate, wrong in a way that made my knees buckle even sitting down — I felt time itself moving through him, patient and deliberate, counting down something vast and slow the way water erodes stone. I felt six years compressed into a single held breath. I felt, underneath all of it, a second heartbeat that didn't belong to a living thing at all, hungry and old and utterly indifferent to whether Ronan Kade lived or died, only interested in collecting what it was owed.

I yanked my hand back, gasping.

"There's something else in there," I said, my own pulse hammering. "Something that isn't you. Isn't your wolf. It's — it's waiting."

Ronan's face had gone the color of ash.

"Say that again."

"It's waiting, Ronan. Like it already knows how this ends." I stared at him, at the mark still faintly visible under his rolled sleeve, and felt the full, cold weight of what I'd just touched settle into my chest like a stone dropped into still water. "What have they been stealing from you? Because that thing I felt isn't counting down your time. It's collecting it."

He didn't answer. He didn't have to. The look on his face told me I'd just said something he'd spent six years too afraid to say out loud himself.

He tucked the flowers into an empty coffee can on my workbench, an oddly domestic gesture from a man who'd spent the last two days looking like violence personified, and for a second neither of us mentioned it, both pretending the small kindness hadn't happened at all.

"Talk to me about your mother," he said eventually, careful, like he was handling something fragile. "Not the ledger. Not the Ferrum. Just her. What do you actually remember?"

"Not much." The admission cost me more than I expected. "She used to hum while she cooked. Off-key, always the same three songs on rotation. I remember her hands more than her face, honestly — grease under the nails, same as mine, like she fixed things too before she disappeared out of my life entirely."

"Maybe she did," Ronan said quietly. "Maybe that's not a coincidence."

I hadn't considered that. Hadn't let myself consider much of anything about her beyond the careful, curated grief I'd built for myself over two decades, a manageable sadness instead of the much larger, messier thing currently threatening to swallow me whole.

"So maybe she did," I echoed, turning the thought over slowly, feeling its edges for the first time instead of flinching away from it. "Maybe that's why I ended up doing exactly what she did, without ever knowing why I gravitated toward engines instead of anything else. Maybe it was never really a coincidence at all."

"Instinct runs deeper than memory sometimes," Ronan said. "I've seen it in pack pups who lose a parent too young to consciously remember them, and still end up walking, talking, even laughing in ways nobody taught them. Blood keeps its own record, whether we're paying attention or not."

I looked down at my own hands, grease permanently worked into the creases of my knuckles the same way I imagined hers had been, and felt something shift quietly in my chest — not quite peace, not yet, but the first loosening of a grief I'd spent twenty-five years keeping carefully, deliberately small.