THE ALPHA'S LAST RIDE

CHAPTER 9: THE BIKER WHO KNOWS

Ronan left just after noon with a promise to come back before dark and an expression that told me he expected to spend every hour between now and then trying to figure out how much danger he'd just put me in. I spent most of that time exactly where I always spent it — under a hood, hands buried in an engine that couldn't ask me questions I didn't have answers to — until the bell over the door jangled for the second time that day.

This visitor didn't bother with flowers.

He was younger than Ronan, broad through the shoulders in a way that suggested he'd spent more time in a gym than on a bike, though the leather cut he wore said otherwise — Iron Reign patches, worn soft at the edges the way fabric gets when someone's worn it every day for years.

"You're the mechanic," he said, not quite a question.

"Depends who's asking."

"Jax." He didn't offer a hand, just leaned against my doorframe with the kind of easy, watchful stillness that told me he'd sized up every exit in the building before he'd said a single word. "Ronan's Beta. Which means when my Alpha starts acting like a man who's lost his mind over some human mechanic he met two days ago, it becomes my problem to figure out why."

"Nice to meet you too."

His mouth twitched, almost a smile, gone before it could fully land. "He tell you what happens to humans who get too close to Iron Reign business?"

"He's told me a lot of things in careful little pieces," I said, wiping grease off my hands with a rag I didn't actually need. "Mostly things that scared the hell out of me and then refused to finish explaining."

"Sounds like Ronan." Jax pushed off the doorframe, wandered further into the shop, eyes cataloguing everything the way mine did when I walked into someone else's garage — assessing, judging, deciding how much respect the place had earned. "Six years I've watched that man carry something he won't let anyone help him carry. Six years of watching him get quieter every single one of them. And then two days ago he shows up smelling like a stranger's garage and looking more alive than I've seen him since before he supposedly died, and I'm supposed to believe that's a coincidence?"

"I don't know what you're supposed to believe."

"I believe," Jax said, stopping directly across the workbench from me, "that whatever you are, you matter to him more than he's willing to admit, and that scares me a lot more than any Ledger enforcer ever has. Because Ronan doesn't let people matter. Hasn't in six years. And people who matter to my Alpha have a way of ending up dead."

The threat wasn't subtle, but it wasn't entirely hostile either — underneath the warning was something that sounded almost like worry, protective in a way I recognized because it mirrored exactly how Ronan himself had looked all morning.

"You care about him," I said.

"He's the closest thing I've got to a brother." Jax's jaw tightened. "Which is why I need to know exactly what you are before I let this go any further. Because if you're Ledger, or working for them, or even just careless with something you don't understand yet—"

"I'm not Ledger."

"Then what are you?"

The question hung there, more honest than anything either of us had said all afternoon, and I found myself grateful, briefly, that he'd asked it plainly instead of dressing it up in the careful half-truths everyone else around me seemed so fluent in.

I opened my mouth to answer and realized, for the first time since this entire nightmare had started, that I genuinely didn't have an answer that made sense. Not human, not exactly, not anymore — not after what I'd felt reaching back at me through Ronan's skin that morning.

"I don't know yet," I admitted. "But I think I'm about to find out, whether I want to or not."

Something in Jax's expression shifted, wary respect replacing outright suspicion, though not by much.

"Then you'd better find out fast," he said. "Because the Ledger doesn't wait around for people to catch up to what they already are. And from where I'm standing, they already know more about you than you know about yourself."

I locked the front of the shop with hands that had finally stopped shaking, mostly, and turned to find Ronan watching the street with the particular stillness of a man listening for something the rest of us couldn't hear.

"What," I said.

"Nothing yet." He didn't relax. "Just being careful."

The masked man closest to the door lunged first, and Jax met him halfway, the two of them colliding with a force that rattled the shelving behind them, tools clattering to the concrete in a bright, chaotic percussion.

"Vera, exits!" Jax barked between blows, and I realized with a jolt that he meant for me to actually use one, not stand frozen in the doorway watching a fight I had no business witnessing.

I didn't move. Some stubborn, self-destructive part of me refused to leave him outnumbered while I hid, tire iron already raised before I'd fully decided to raise it.

The second attacker came at me from the side, faster than I expected, and I swung wide on pure adrenaline, catching only air before stumbling back against the workbench hard enough to knock the wind half out of me. He grabbed for my wrist, fingers closing tight enough to bruise, and for one long, terrifying second I understood exactly how outmatched I actually was in a fight that had nothing to do with fists and everything to do with things I still didn't fully understand.

Then Jax was there, wrenching the man backward with a strength that sent him crashing into the shelving hard enough to splinter wood, and the moment of pure animal panic finally broke enough for me to remember I still had a tire iron in my other hand.

I used it.

The silence after they fled rang loud in my ears, adrenaline still screaming through my system with nowhere left to go. I set the tire iron down with hands that wouldn't stop shaking and looked at the mess of my own garage — shelving splintered, tools scattered across the concrete, a crack now spidering through the front window in a shape that felt uncomfortably similar to the marks we'd both been discussing all day.

"You could've run," Jax said, pressing a rag Ronan had left behind against the cut above his eye. "Most people would have run."

"I'm not most people."

"No," he agreed, something like respect finally settling into his expression where wariness had lived all afternoon. "I'm starting to understand that."

Jax swept the shop for anything else the attackers might have left behind while I finally let myself sit, legs suddenly unwilling to hold me up any longer now that the immediate danger had passed. He found nothing but a single spent zip tie and a boot print in the gravel outside, but the careful, methodical way he searched told me this wasn't his first time cleaning up after violence like this.

"You've done this before," I said. "This exact thing. Not tonight specifically. This — aftermath."

"More times than I'd like to count." He crouched to examine the boot print more closely, jaw tight. "Comes with the patch. You learn to read a scene fast, because the difference between reading it right and reading it wrong is usually somebody's life."