THE ALPHA'S LAST RIDE

CHAPTER 8: DON'T TOUCH THE ENGINE

"You need to stop doing that," he said finally, voice low, controlled in the specific way that told me he was one wrong word away from losing that control entirely.

"Doing what — telling you the truth?"

"Touching things that aren't yours to touch." He was on his feet now, pacing the narrow space between my workbench and the bay door, moving the way caged animals move when the cage has gotten smaller than they remember. "Every single time you put your hands on something connected to this, you're not just watching a memory, Vera. You're reaching into it. Whatever's on the other end of that connection is starting to reach back."

"So what, I'm just supposed to sit here and not use the one thing that might actually help figure out what's happening to you?"

"Yes." He stopped pacing, turned to face me fully, and for the first time I saw real fear underneath the Alpha composure, not fear for himself but something worse, something aimed entirely at me. "Because the last person who could do what you do disappeared the same week your mother did, and I have spent six years assuming that was a coincidence."

The garage went very quiet.

"You knew her," I said slowly. "You actually knew my mother. Not secondhand, not a stranger with a business card. You."

"I knew of her." He raked a hand through his hair, and for once the gesture looked less like control slipping and more like a man deciding, mid-motion, to stop pretending he had any left. "There was a woman who used to work with my father's generation of the club, before my time, who could see the same things you're describing. Death marks. Stolen time. She vanished before I was old enough to remember her face, but I remember the name people used when they thought I wasn't listening."

"What name."

"Ferrum," he said. "They called her one of the Ferrum. I always assumed it was a title. A rank. I never once considered it might be a bloodline until you put your hand on my wrist a minute ago and described something no living person besides me has ever felt."

I thought about the box of my mother's things still sitting untouched in the back of my closet, sealed since I was nineteen and couldn't bear to look through it. I thought about the fact that I had never, not once in twenty-five years, asked anyone a single detailed question about how she'd actually died, because some quiet, protective part of me had always been terrified of the answer.

"There's a box," I said. "At my apartment. Things of hers I never went through. If I touch something that was actually hers—"

"No." The word came out fast, hard, immediate. "Not yet. Not until I understand what's reaching back through you, because if it's the same thing that's counting down my mark, I am not going to be the reason you end up like her."

"You don't get to make that decision for me."

"I'm not making it for you." He crossed the space between us, close enough now that I had to tilt my head back to hold his gaze, close enough that I could see exactly how tired he actually was underneath all that careful control. "I'm asking you. One time. Give me until tonight to figure out how dangerous this actually is before you go digging through anything else that belonged to her. That's all I'm asking."

I wanted to argue. Some stubborn, self-sufficient part of me wanted to remind him that nobody got to tell me what to do in my own garage, with my own hands, about my own mother. But underneath the anger was something quieter, something that recognized real fear when it was standing three feet away from me refusing to blink.

"Tonight," I said. "And then I open that box whether you like it or not."

Something that might have been relief moved through his shoulders.

"Tonight," he agreed.

Neither of us noticed the shape parked across the street until the engine finally turned over — low, patient, unhurried — and pulled away into traffic like it had gotten exactly the information it came for.

We sat with that for a while, the kind of silence that isn't uncomfortable so much as necessary, both of us needing a minute to let the weight of it settle before either of us tried to move again.

"I need that box," I said finally. "Tonight, if you're willing. Not tomorrow. I've spent twenty-five years not asking questions about her, and I don't think I can survive another night of pretending that's still an option."

"I know." He didn't argue this time, didn't retreat into the careful, protective deflection he'd used on me all day. "I just need you to understand something first. Whatever's in that box, whatever it tells you — it's not going to be simple. Grief rarely comes with clean answers. I learned that the hard way, and I'd rather you go in prepared than blindsided."

"I appreciate the warning. I'm still going."

"I know that too." Something in his expression softened, wry and resigned at once. "You're stubborn. I noticed that about you almost immediately."

"You say that like it's a flaw."

"I say that like it's the reason I trust you," he corrected. "Stubborn people don't lie to themselves as easily as everyone else does. It's inconvenient, but it's rare, and rare things tend to be worth keeping around."

I didn't have a response for that, so I busied myself instead with locking up the register, giving my hands something to do while my chest did something complicated and unfamiliar in response to the compliment.

"You don't trust easily," I said, watching him study the shop with that same careful, cataloguing gaze.

"Trust gets people killed in my line of work," Jax said. "Suspicion keeps them alive a little longer. I've buried enough friends to know which one I prefer."

"That's a grim way to live."

"It's an honest one." He shrugged, though the gesture didn't quite reach his eyes. "Ronan and I buried a lot of people together before either of us hit thirty. You learn to read a room fast when the alternative is learning the hard way."

He turned to leave, then paused at the door, glancing back at me with an expression that had softened somewhat from the wary suspicion he'd walked in with.

"For what it's worth," he said, "Ronan doesn't smile much. Hasn't in years, not the real kind. I caught him doing it twice in the last five minutes, talking about you. Make of that whatever you want."

"I don't know what to make of it."

"Neither do I," Jax admitted, something almost rueful in it. "But I've learned to pay attention when something changes a man who's spent six years refusing to change for anyone."

The bell jangled behind him as he left, and I stood alone in the sudden quiet of my own garage, turning his words over and over like a part I couldn't quite identify the function of yet.

I locked up early after Jax left, some instinct telling me the day wasn't finished handing out surprises yet, and busied myself instead with the kind of mindless inventory work that usually settled my nerves — counting bolts, sorting sockets, anything with a clear right answer after a day that had offered nothing but ambiguous ones.

My phone buzzed twice during the process. Both times, unknown numbers, no messages left. I stared at the screen longer than the situation probably warranted, half expecting Elias Crow's unpleasant, patient voice to come through the line, half expecting something worse.

Neither call came back a third time. I told myself that was a good sign and didn't entirely believe it.

I gave up on the inventory eventually and sat on the stool Ronan had used that morning, staring at the wrecked motorcycle's empty space in the bay where it used to sit, trying to piece together everything I'd learned in less than forty-eight hours against everything I'd assumed for twenty-five years.

My mother, a woman I remembered mostly through the smell of engine grease and three off-key songs, had apparently been part of something old enough to have its own name whispered in a biker compound decades before I was born. A dead man who wasn't dead had walked into my garage and turned my entire understanding of the world sideways within the space of one night. And somewhere out there, someone had sent me flowers with a threat folded neatly inside them, patient enough to wait, confident enough not to hide.

I didn't have answers. I had a drawer with a card in it, a name I didn't recognize, and a growing, uneasy certainty that whatever came next wasn't going to wait for me to catch up.