Ride Me Into Ruin: Iron Reapers MC

LEXIE The engine sputtered twice and then just, stopped, no warning, no slow fade, nothing. One second I was eating up miles of empty highway and the next I was coasting on silence, steering the bike onto the gravel shoulder with my heart already climbing up my throat. *Because of course it would die right here, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. The universe really has a sick sense of humor.* I sat there with my hands still on the handlebars and stared out at the dark like it owed me an explanation. It didn't. There were no streetlights out here, no passing cars, no signs of anything living except the pine trees crowding both sides of the road and whatever was moving in them that I was going to keep telling myself was just the wind. I climbed off and crouched beside the engine the way people do when they want to look like they know what they're doing, which I didn't, not really. I could ride a bike. I couldn't fix one, not on the shoulder of a road that didn't seem to exist on any map, with a duffel bag that held everything I owned. I stood up, looked in both directions, and got nothing back but more dark, the air smelled like rain coming. I pulled my jacket tighter and reached for the phone, already running through the short list of options I had, none of them good, when I heard a rumble, low and distant at first. *Please let that be a tow truck. Or a very lost pizza delivery guy. Anyone but trouble.* Headlights came around the bend, not one pair but many, sweeping across the tree line and washing over me before I could think about whether stepping back into the shadows was smarter. They came in formation, tight and deliberate, and the sound of all those engines together was something you felt in your back teeth. They slowed, every single one of them and stopped, the engines dropped to an idle and nobody moved, and I stood there in the wash of all those headlights feeling very small and very visible and very aware that running was not an option because there was nowhere to run to. Then the rider at the front swung off his bike, and he walked toward me with the kind of easy, unhurried confidence that told me he'd never once in his life felt the need to rush, that the world had always waited for him and he expected it to keep doing so. He was tall, broad across the shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with the leather cut he was wearing, and his arms were covered in ink from his wrists up and probably further than that. His jaw was sharp, his eyes were darker than the road behind him, and the patch on the left side of his chest caught the headlight glow just long enough for me to read it. PRESIDENT And below that, in the same bold letters... Iron Reapers MC. *Well, s**t. This just went from bad to “welcome to the rest of your life” territory.* He stopped a few feet away and looked at me, then at the dead bike, then back at me, and his expression didn't change once through any of it. "Lost, sweetheart?" His voice was low and unhurried, like the question itself had nowhere to be. I pulled my spine straight and looked him dead in the eye because showing fear to a man like this was the worst thing you could do. "I'm fine, just a mechanical issue. I've already got someone coming." *Yeah, because my imaginary roadside assistance is totally on the way.* He looked at the bike again, slow and deliberate, and then back at me, and the silence he let sit there said everything his mouth didn't. "I'm serious," I said, which was a mistake because nobody says *I'm serious* unless they're lying. "It's midnight," he said, "on a road that doesn't go anywhere most people have business going." "I like the scenic route." *And by scenic, I mean “anywhere but where I came from.”* Something shifted at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile but close enough that I caught it before it disappeared. "What's your name?" I didn't hesitate because hesitating would have been worse. "Sara. Sara Elkins." He looked at me for a moment that went on just a beat too long, the kind of look that made me want to check my own face for cracks. "Sara," he said, turning the name over like he was testing the weight of it. "That's me." *And if you believe that one, I’ve got a bridge to sell you too.* He nodded once, slowly, and then said something quiet to the rider nearest him without breaking eye contact with me, which was unsettling in a way I couldn't quite name. The rider stepped back with his phone and I kept my face neutral and my breathing even and reminded myself that I had survived worse than this in the last four days. "You're not waiting on anyone," he said, turning back to me, and it wasn't an accusation, just a statement of fact. "And that bike isn't starting tonight." "You don't know that." "I do," he said simply. I wanted to argue but the honest truth was he was right and we both knew it and burning energy on a lie I couldn't hold up wasn't something I could afford right now. I looked past him at the line of bikes and the men on them, some watching me with mild curiosity and most not watching me at all, and I tried to get a read on what I'd stumbled into and whether I could talk my way back out of it. "There's a town twelve minutes up the road," he said. "Harlow. You can get a room for the night and deal with the bike in the morning when it's not pitch black and cold." "I have money," I said, because I needed him to understand I wasn't helpless, I wasn't asking for anything, I wasn't going to owe anyone. "For a tow, for a room, for all of it." "I didn't say you didn't." His voice was even, unbothered, like my resistance was something he'd already accounted for. "I said there's a town up the road." The wind came off the tree line and hit me straight through the jacket and I was so tired, so deeply bone-tired, that for a second I just let myself feel it. Four days of barely sleeping, barely eating, watching every mirror and every shadow and every face in every gas station. My body was running on fear and caffeine and the desperate, white-knuckled need to put as much distance between me and him as I possibly could. One night, I told myself, get the bike fixed and get moving again. "Fine," I said. He nodded, no satisfaction in it, no *told you so,* just a simple acknowledgment, and turned back toward his bike like it was already done. "Hey." I don't know what made me say it. He looked back over his shoulder. "I didn't get your name." He held my eyes for just a second. "Chaos." *Of course it was. Because why would a man who looks like trouble have a normal name like Bob?* Then he threw his leg over the bike and the engine came to life under him like it had just been waiting for permission. A younger rider appeared at my side with an easy grin that felt out of place among all that leather and quiet menace. "I've got your bike," he said, nodding toward a massive, silent man who'd already shifted forward on his seat. "You ride with Brick" I looked at Brick. Brick looked at the road like I was already irrelevant, somehow that made me trust him more than the grin did. I climbed on and the formation came back together and we moved through the dark, all those engines running in sync, the trees falling away on either side as the highway opened up. I kept my eyes on Chaos at the front, that steady, unbothered silhouette cutting through the night, and I told myself I was making the smart call, that this was temporary, that I would be back on the road by tomorrow afternoon and gone before anyone knew my real name.