THE ALPHA'S LAST RIDE

CHAPTER 5: THE ALPHA IN MY GARAGE

I didn't let him in.

"I don't know you," I said, planting myself in the doorway even as every single instinct I owned screamed at me to slam the door and run for the back exit instead. "And I definitely don't talk to strangers about family I never got the chance to have."

The man's smile didn't waver even slightly. He was maybe fifty, silver-haired, handsome in the specific, polished way that came from money rather than anything natural — the kind of face that had never once had to worry about how it was perceived. "My name is Dr. Mara — forgive me, force of habit, old title. I work with people who knew your mother very well. People who would very much like to keep you safe, Miss Knox, given everything that's started happening around you in the last twenty-four hours."

"Nothing's happening around me."

"A man died on a motorcycle in your garage last night," he said, conversational, almost pleasant, like we were discussing weather instead of resurrection. "Except he didn't, did he. Because he walked in afterward, alive and breathing, and you saw him standing there with your own two eyes." His gaze held mine, unblinking, patient in a way that felt predatory. "I know exactly what you are, Vera. I knew your mother. I'd like very much to help you understand your inheritance before someone considerably less patient than me finds you first."

Every hair on my arms rose at once.

Behind him, one of the SUV doors opened, and I braced myself for another enforcer, another version of Elias Crow with his unsettling smile and his casual, terrible knowledge of things I didn't understand.

Instead, a motorcycle rounded the corner of the block at full speed, engine snarling loud enough to rattle the front window, and skidded to a stop directly between me and the man standing on my doorstep.

Ronan.

He was off the bike before it had even fully stopped moving, positioning his whole body between me and the stranger with the same wall-like stillness I'd seen the night before, except this time there was nothing controlled about his face at all. This time he looked genuinely, dangerously furious.

"Get off her property," he said, voice low and hard.

The silver-haired man's smile finally cracked, just slightly, revealing something colder and far less polished underneath. "Ronan Kade. I'd heard you were still walking around somehow. How's the countdown treating you these days?"

Ronan's entire body went rigid, every muscle in his jaw and shoulders tightening at once.

"That's not your business," he said.

"Everything about stolen time is my business, Ronan. Every last second of it." The man's gaze slid past him, unbothered, and settled back on me with an intensity that made my skin crawl worse than anything Crow had done. "We'll speak again, Vera. Soon. Before the people who actually want you dead find you first — and believe me, there are more of them than you'd like to imagine."

He turned without waiting for a response, unhurried, climbed back into his SUV like the entire conversation had cost him nothing, and the three black vehicles pulled smoothly out of my lot, leaving me standing on my own doorstep with my heart hammering against my ribs and a hundred new, considerably worse questions than I'd woken up with.

"Countdown," I repeated slowly, staring at Ronan. "What countdown?"

He didn't answer right away. He was breathing hard, jaw tight, looking at me like he was doing frantic, silent math behind his eyes, weighing exactly how much truth he could afford to give me.

"You need protection," he said instead, deflecting in a way that only made me more certain something significant was being withheld. "Real protection. Not a deadbolt and whatever you keep hidden under that front counter."

"I don't even know what I need protecting from," I said. "You keep telling me I'm in danger and refusing to say why. That's not protection, Ronan. That's just fear with extra steps."

Something in his expression shifted at the sound of his own name in my mouth.

"From every single person who just realized what your blood might be worth," he said finally, voice dropping, urgent now in a way that scared me more than his earlier silence had. "Vera, listen to me carefully, because I'm only going to say this once. Six years ago, I died. My wolf wouldn't accept it — wouldn't let go, wouldn't cross whatever line it's supposed to cross when a body stops working. I've been living on borrowed time I don't fully understand myself ever since that night, and last night you looked at my motorcycle and saw the exact moment it happened. Down to the mark on my skin that I've hidden from absolutely everyone I know, including the people closest to me."

"So what does that make me?" I asked, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.

He looked at me for a long, weighted moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes like he was deciding how much honesty I could actually survive.

"Dangerous," he said finally. "To them. And possibly, eventually, to yourself."

Behind him, the morning sun caught the edge of his jacket sleeve, riding up just enough as he shifted his weight to reveal a sliver of skin at his wrist — and there it was. Faint. Almost invisible unless you already knew exactly what to look for.

A black mark, precisely like the one I had watched spread up his arm the night I'd witnessed him die.

Still there. Still spreading, slow and patient, like it had all the time in the world.

"You're still dying," I whispered.

Ronan didn't deny it. He didn't even try.

"Every single day," he said quietly, pulling his sleeve back down like the admission cost him something physical. "And I have absolutely no idea how much time I have left before it finishes exactly what that guardrail started six years ago."