THE ALPHA'S LAST RIDE

CHAPTER 4: IRON REIGN

He wouldn't tell me anything else that night.

He'd loaded the wrecked motorcycle onto a trailer I hadn't even heard him bring, working with a kind of efficient, silent urgency that told me this wasn't his first time cleaning up a mess before sunrise. He refused to answer a single one of my questions — not about the mark, not about Crow, not about how a dead man had somehow ended up with a pulse and a scraped knuckle and an opinion about my garage's security — and left with a warning that felt more like a threat wearing polite clothing.

"Don't touch anything else that comes through this shop without gloves," he'd said, swinging back onto his bike, engine already turning over beneath him. "And don't tell anyone what you saw tonight. Not the police. Not a friend. Not your priest, if you've got one."

Then he was gone, taillights swallowed whole by the dark, and I stood alone in my garage at five in the morning with my hands still trembling and absolutely no intention of doing a single thing he'd told me to do.

I did the exact opposite. I made coffee I didn't taste, sat down at my ancient laptop, and started digging.

Iron Reign Riders turned out to be exactly the kind of club that didn't maintain a f*******: page or a website or anything resembling a public footprint, which told me almost as much as if they had one. What little I managed to find online lived in old local news archives — a decade-old bar brawl mentioned in three sentences, vague references to "organized activity" spanning three counties that never quite specified what that activity was, and one grainy photograph from six years back showing a line of black motorcycles parked outside the county courthouse, chrome gleaming, faces mostly unreadable in the low resolution.

One face in that photo stopped me cold.

Younger. No scar through the eyebrow yet, skin unlined in a way that made him look almost gentle. But it was unmistakably him. Ronan Kade, according to the caption beneath, twenty-five years old, already standing at the front of the group with the kind of posture that suggested leadership was something he'd been born into rather than earned through years of proving himself.

The article beneath the photo was about a shooting. A rival dispute that had turned violent outside a warehouse on the edge of town, three dead including — my stomach turned reading it, actually turned, a physical lurch I felt in my throat — Ronan Kade, aged twenty-five, pronounced dead at the scene by responding paramedics.

Six years ago. The date sat there in small, unremarkable print like it wasn't rewriting everything I thought I understood about the last twelve hours of my life.

I sat back from the laptop like the screen itself had burned me.

Dead. On paper, in a public record, with a specific date and what I assumed was a coroner's actual signature somewhere in a file cabinet. And yet he'd stood in my garage four hours ago breathing, bleeding a little from a scraped knuckle, talking to me like a man with decades of ordinary life still ahead of him.

I should have been more afraid than I was. Instead something colder and more stubborn had taken root in my chest — the same thing that made me take apart engines other mechanics had already written off as unfixable, the same thing that had gotten me banned from two garages before I opened my own. I didn't like mysteries sitting unsolved on my bench. I never had.

I was still staring at the article, at that impossibly young, impossibly certain face, when my phone buzzed against the desk. Unknown number, no area code I recognized.

I answered before I could think better of it. "Hello?"

Silence at first. Then breathing, slow and deliberate. Then a voice — not Ronan's, not Crow's, something softer, almost gentle, almost kind in a way that made it worse.

"You have your mother's eyes," the voice said. "I'd forgotten how much that used to unsettle people who knew her."

The line went dead before I could ask who this was, before I could ask how anyone on earth knew anything about my mother, who had died when I was six years old and left behind exactly nothing worth mentioning — no photographs I'd ever found, no surviving family that had ever come looking for me, just a name on a birth certificate and a hole in my life I'd stopped trying to fill somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, when I'd finally accepted that no one was coming to explain her to me.

My hands were shaking again by the time I managed to set the phone down on the workbench.

Someone out there knew who I was. Knew about my mother, knew enough to reference her specifically, deliberately, like a key turning in a lock I hadn't known existed. Knew, maybe, exactly why touching a dead man's motorcycle had shown me things no ordinary person should ever be able to see.

I thought about Ronan's warning. Don't tell anyone what you saw.

Too late for that particular piece of advice. Whoever had just called me already knew more than I did.

The garage bell rang an hour before I was due to open, and for one wild, hopeful second I thought it might be him again, coming back with the answers he'd refused to give me the night before.

It wasn't.

It was worse. Three black SUVs eased into my lot in perfect formation, doors opening in unison like they'd rehearsed it, and the man who stepped out of the lead vehicle wore a suit too expensive for this town and a smile too practiced, too rehearsed, to ever be trusted.

"Vera Knox," he said, drawing the name out like he was tasting something rare. "We need to talk about your mother."