THE ALPHA'S LAST RIDE

CHAPTER 2: REDLINE

I didn't open the door.

I stood behind it with my hand on the deadbolt and my heart doing something violent and stupid in my chest, watching him through the narrow reinforced glass panel like he might not be real if I just refused to blink. Like staring hard enough would make him dissolve back into whatever nightmare he'd crawled out of.

He didn't dissolve. He knocked instead. Not aggressive — almost polite, which was somehow worse, because polite meant patient, and patient meant he wasn't going anywhere.

"I know you're in there," he said. His voice was low, rough at the edges in a way that made the hair on my arms rise all over again. "The lights are on. I can hear you breathing."

That last part made my skin crawl properly.

"We're closed," I called through the door, which was possibly the single most useless sentence I had ever spoken to a man who, by every reasonable measure, should currently be a corpse under six feet of dirt somewhere.

"I'm not here about your hours." A pause, long enough that I could hear him shift his weight on the pavement outside. "I'm here about the bike."

Of course he was. Of course he was here about the bike, the same bike whose engine had just shown me his own death in high definition. My hand tightened on the deadbolt.

I should have called the police right then. I should have grabbed my phone, dialed, said something calm and reasonable like there's a man outside my garage at four in the morning and I think I'm losing my mind. Instead I found myself sliding the deadbolt back with fingers that weren't entirely steady, some reckless, curious, self-destructive part of me needing to see his face up close, needing proof one way or another that I hadn't imagined the entire thing out of stress and bad coffee.

I hadn't imagined it.

Up close he was younger than the vision had made him feel — early thirties, maybe, though something in his eyes felt decades older than that. He had a small, pale scar cutting through one eyebrow, the kind that came from an old fight rather than a recent one. A fading bruise sat along his jaw, yellow-green at the edges, days old rather than hours.

Not six years old. Days.

That detail lodged itself somewhere in my chest and refused to leave.

"You brought that bike in," I said, because it was easier than saying anything true, easier than saying I watched you die on it twelve hours ago and you have the audacity to be standing on my doorstep looking like that.

"I know who brought it in." His eyes moved past me, into the shop, landing on the wrecked motorcycle sitting under the shop lights like it physically hurt him to look at it. Something flickered across his face — grief, maybe, or something closer to guilt. "I need it gone before sunrise. Whatever the tow company paid you, I'll triple it again."

"That's a lot of money for a bike that's already dead."

His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "It's not the bike I'm worried about," he said.

I crossed my arms, partly to look tougher than I felt, partly because my hands hadn't fully stopped shaking since the vision and I didn't want him to see it. "Funny. Because when I touched that engine tonight, I watched a man die on it. Watched him get run off the road on Route 9 by a car that wasn't trying to pass him. Watched him get thrown into a guardrail hard enough to stop his heart." I made myself hold his gaze even though every instinct told me to look away. "Watched a black mark spread up his arm afterward, like it was eating him alive from the inside."

I expected him to laugh at me. To call me crazy, or worse, to just turn around and walk back to his bike like I hadn't said anything worth responding to.

Instead, every last drop of color left his face.

"What did you say?" His voice had dropped to something dangerously quiet, controlled in a way that scared me more than shouting would have.

"You heard me."

"Say it again." It wasn't a request.

"A black mark," I said slowly, watching him like he might come apart right there on my doorstep. "Under the skin. Spreading from his wrist toward his heart. Like it had somewhere specific it was trying to get to."

He was very still. Too still, the kind of stillness that isn't calm at all — it's a held breath dressed up as composure, a man doing everything in his power not to react the way his body wanted to react.

"You shouldn't have seen that," he said finally, almost to himself.

"Yeah, well, I did." I stepped back, put the workbench between us without fully deciding to move, some animal part of my brain wanting distance and a heavy piece of furniture to hide behind. "So maybe you tell me why the guy I watched die on that bike is standing in my garage right now, breathing, bruised, and asking me to hide the evidence."

His jaw worked like he was chewing on an answer he didn't want to give. For one dangerous second I thought he'd actually tell me the truth.

Instead he said, "Where's the bike now?"

"Where I left it. Why does that matter?"

"Because if you saw what you're describing," he said, already moving past me toward the bay with a purpose that made my stomach drop, "we don't have until sunrise anymore. We might not have until sunup at all."

I opened my mouth to demand an explanation — a real one, not another half answer wrapped in urgency — but headlights swept across the front windows before I could get the words out. Not his bike. Two more engines, then a third, cutting through the pre-dawn dark with the kind of purpose that had nothing to do with a friendly visit.

Whatever careful calm he'd been holding onto disappeared entirely, replaced by something sharper, more dangerous.

"Get away from the door," he said, and this time his voice had an edge to it that made my whole body listen without asking permission first. "Now, Vera. Move."

I froze for half a second on the fact that I hadn't told him my name.