THE ALPHA'S LAST RIDE

CHAPTER 3: THE MAN I WATCHED DIE

Three riders. All in black, no colors I recognized, no patches that matched the one stitched into the seat of the bike sitting behind us. None of them wearing what he was wearing.

He'd moved between me and the door before I'd even fully processed his warning, one hand braced flat against the frame, shoulders squared in a way that told me this wasn't the first time he'd stood like this — a wall between danger and someone he'd already decided, for reasons I didn't understand yet, to protect.

I hated how much that steadied me. I hated it and I clung to it anyway.

"Friends of yours?" I asked, mostly to keep my voice from shaking, mostly because silence felt worse than talking.

"No." He didn't look away from the window, eyes tracking the three bikes as they slowed, engines idling low and menacing in the empty lot. "Ledger."

"That means something to you and absolutely nothing to me."

"It should stay that way." He glanced back at me for half a second, and there was something almost like an apology buried in it, gone as fast as it appeared. "What's your name?"

"Why does it matter right now?"

"Because in about ten seconds those men are going to ask me who owns this garage, and I need to decide how much of a lie I'm willing to tell them on your behalf."

That shut me up fast. My name felt suddenly like the most dangerous thing I owned.

The lead rider swung off his bike without cutting the engine, boots hitting the pavement with the kind of unhurried menace that told me he had never once in his life had to run from anything, never had to hurry for anyone. He was older than the man beside me — silver threading generously through dark hair, a face carved from patience and something crueler than patience in equal measure, the kind of face that had learned a long time ago that fear works better than force.

"Ronan," the man said, drawing the name out like it was an insult he'd been saving. "You're a long way from Iron Reign territory tonight."

Ronan. So he finally had a name, one I turned over silently even as fear climbed higher in my throat.

"Crow." Ronan's voice had gone flat, professional, the voice of a man selecting every single word like it might detonate on the way out of his mouth. "This doesn't concern you."

"Everything that crawls off Route 9 concerns me." Crow's eyes slid past him, unhurried, deliberate, and landed on me with a weight I felt in my spine. "Who's the girl?"

"Nobody," Ronan said, a half second too fast.

Crow smiled, slow and unpleasant, and it was easily the most unsettling thing I'd witnessed in the last twelve hours, worse even than watching a man die through my own fingertips. "Funny. She doesn't look like nobody to me. She looks like somebody who was standing very close to that engine when we tracked its signal here." His gaze didn't leave my face. "I can practically smell it on her."

My stomach dropped somewhere near my boots.

"You're on my property," I said, apparently terror made me combative instead of quiet, some old defiant streak refusing to stay buried even now. "Both of you. I don't know what Ledger is, I don't know what Iron Reign is, and I definitely don't know why a dead man is currently standing in my garage giving me orders, but I'd like everyone to get off my lot before I call the police."

Crow's smile widened, delighted, like I'd confirmed something for him. "She doesn't know."

"She doesn't," Ronan said, low and urgent, stepping half an inch further in front of me. "Leave it that way, Crow."

"For now." Crow's gaze lingered on me a beat longer than comfortable, cataloguing, memorizing, filing me away somewhere I didn't like to imagine. "But blood tells, Ronan. You of all people should understand that better than most, given what your own blood's been up to lately."

Something in Ronan's expression cracked, just slightly, just enough for me to see it.

Crow turned, unhurried, swung back onto his bike without another word. The other two followed silently, engines snarling back to life, and the three of them pulled out of the lot as smoothly as they'd arrived, taillights shrinking into the dark like nothing had happened at all.

The moment they disappeared around the corner, the tension went out of Ronan's shoulders all at once, like a held breath finally released after too long, and he turned to face me with something in his expression that looked dangerously close to fear.

"You need to tell me exactly what you saw tonight," he said. "Every single detail, in order. Because if Elias Crow thinks you're more than nobody—"

"Then what?" I demanded, my own fear curdling fast into anger, because anger was easier to hold onto than terror. "What happens if he thinks I'm more than nobody?"

His eyes met mine, and for the first time since he'd walked through my door, I saw something underneath the careful control he wore like armor. Something raw and frightened, something that looked less like a dangerous stranger and more like a man who'd already lost people to whatever this was.

"Then you're already in more danger than you understand," he said quietly. "And I'm the only reason you're not in a car with him right now, on your way to somewhere neither of us wants you to end up."