CUFFED TO THE ENEMY

The Man Who Should Have Left Her

Chapter 2

Kane Ryder heard the collision before he saw it—not metal on metal, just the wrong kind of quiet that fell over a stretch of road when something had gone bad and finished going bad already.

He'd been riding back from the garage at the edge of Wraith's land, helmet off, one hand loose on the throttle, letting the last of the daylight burn orange across the tree line the way he did most evenings when the clubhouse got too loud to think in. He almost didn't stop. Almost told himself it wasn't his business, whatever it was, out here past the last streetlight where the county stopped pretending to maintain the road.

Then he saw the cruiser.

He pulled off hard enough that gravel sprayed against his boot, engine cut, already moving before his brain caught up to what his eyes had found: a police unit parked crooked at the shoulder, driver's door hanging open, and a shape on the ground beside it that didn't move when he called out.

"Hey."

He crouched.

A female, of small build, dark hair fanned out across the dirt, blood at her hairline going tacky in the dying light. His hand found her throat on instinct—pulse there, steady, thank God—and that was when he saw the name stitched above her badge.

BENNETT.

Kane went very still.

There were a hundred cops in this city, and he'd made it his business, over the last three years, to know most of their names—which ones could be reasoned with, which ones would shoot first, which ones took envelopes, and which ones would arrest you for offering. He'd never once run across a Bennett on shift. He'd only ever known the name from a file he kept locked in the bottom drawer of his desk at the clubhouse, next to his father's old ring, a file eight years thick with a dead detective's name on the tab and every dead end the department had ever manufactured to keep from looking too hard at what actually happened to him.

Daniel Bennett didn't have a son.

He had a daughter.

"Christ," Kane muttered, and for one long second, he crouched there in the gravel doing the math. Every instinct he owned was screaming at him not to do. Leave her. Radio it in anonymously, ride off, let the department find their own rookie before something worse than a concussion finds her first.

That was a smart move.

That was the only move that didn't risk dragging the club into a story about a cop found on Wraith's land that would write itself into a headline by morning, regardless of the truth.

He picked her up instead.

She weighed nothing, which bothered him more than it should have—like her whole personality had been built to make up for a body that hadn't caught up to it yet. He got her onto the bike seat in front of him, one arm locked across her ribs, and gunned it back toward the clubhouse instead of the hospital, because a hospital meant paperwork, meant questions about where exactly Officer Bennett had been found, and Kane Ryder had learned a long time ago that the truth rarely survived first contact with a report filed by someone who already had their conclusion picked out.

She came around on a couch that smelled like leather and g*n oil, in a room with exposed brick and a neon sign buzzing faintly somewhere behind her skull that made every thought feel three seconds delayed.

"Don't sit up too fast."

A voice—low, unhurried, the kind of calm that came from a man used to being the steadiest thing in a room full of chaos.

"You've got a concussion and a real bad attitude about being told what to do, I'm guessing, so I figured I'd say it before you tried anyway."

Nora sat up too fast.

The room tilted, and a hand—broad, warm, careful in a way that didn't match the size of it—caught her shoulder before she pitched sideways off the couch. She blinked the world back into focus and found herself looking at a man crouched at the edge of the coffee table, forearms resting on his knees, watching her with an attention that felt like being pinned.

He was big in the way that made rooms feel smaller, dark hair, a jaw that looked like it had been carved specifically to make bad decisions feel reasonable, a scar through one eyebrow that told its own story if you knew how to read it. His cut hung open over a plain black shirt, patches she didn't need explained to understand exactly whose clubhouse she was sitting in.

Every instinct from four years of training screamed at her to reach for a weapon that wasn't on her hip anymore.

"Where's my g*n?"

"Safe. Same place your radio and your cruiser are—which is to say, not here, because I wasn't about to drag a marked police unit onto Wraith's property and give every rookie in this city's department a reason to raid the place by morning."

He said it evenly, like he was explaining something obvious to someone smart enough to already know it.

"You were unconscious on the shoulder of Route 9 with a head wound and an open driver's door on your cruiser, and nobody was coming for you. I called it in anonymously from a burner an hour ago so your people would find the car. You're welcome."

Nora's head throbbed in time with her pulse. She made herself focus past it, the way the academy had drilled into her—assess, don't panic, catalog the room, the exits, the man.

"You're Kane Ryder."

Something shifted behind his eyes, brief and unreadable.

"You know who I am."

"Everybody in that building knows who you are."

She pressed two fingers to the gash at her hairline and hissed.

"President of the Iron Wraiths. My captain has a file on you an inch thick."

"I'd bet money on your department is thicker."

A ghost of something that wasn't quite a smile.

"You're Bennett."

It wasn't a question, and that was what made her go cold under the pain.

"How do you know my name?"

He didn't answer right away.

He stood instead, unfolding to a height that made her very aware of the couch she was sitting on and the door she wasn't near, and crossed to a locked cabinet against the far wall. He opened it with a key from his own pocket and pulled out a folder—thick, worn, soft at the corners, the way paper got when it had been opened and closed a hundred times by someone who couldn't put it down.

He set it on the table between them like it might go off.

"Because I've had a file on your father's murder longer than you've had a badge," Kane said. "And I know for a fact my club didn't do it, whatever your department's been telling you for eight years."

The door behind him banged open before Nora could answer.

A broad-shouldered man with a gray-streaked beard and a cut heavier with patches than Kane's filled the doorway, stopping dead the second he registered the badge on the couch.

"Tell me that's not a cop bleeding on our furniture."

"Preacher."

Kane didn't turn around.

"Not now."

"Not now?"

The preacher's voice climbed, disbelief, and something sharper underneath it.

"Kane, you brought a cop to the clubhouse. Off the Route. On our land. You know what happens if this goes sideways—if she wakes up and decides we're the ones who put her in that ditch—"

"She's Daniel Bennett's daughter."

That landed like a dropped glass.

Preacher's jaw worked, eyes flicking from Kane to Nora and back, and for a second the easy authority went out of him entirely, replaced by something almost like grief.

"You're sure."

"Look at her. Look at the file."

Kane's voice stayed level, but there was an edge under it now, the sound of a man daring his oldest friend to argue with him.

"I wasn't leaving her out there for whoever put her there to finish the job."

Preacher looked at Nora for a long moment—really looked, the kind of assessment she recognized because she did it to other people for a living—and whatever he found seemed to cost him something.

"Your father was a good man," he said finally, gruff, like the words had been sitting behind his teeth for eight years waiting for someone to ask for them. "Whatever they told you happened to him. It wasn't us."

"That's what everyone in this room keeps saying."

Nora's voice came out steadier than she felt.

"Nobody's said what actually happened."

Preacher didn't answer that.

He looked at Kane instead, some silent argument passing between them that Nora couldn't read, and then he stepped back out and pulled the door shut hard enough to rattle the frame.

Nora sat with the folder unopened in front of her, her father's name typed on the tab, and looked up at the man who'd carried her off a county road instead of leaving her for whoever had put her there.

"Prove it," she said.

Kane held her gaze, steady, unreadable, dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with the g*n she couldn't find.

"That's exactly what I intend to do. The question is whether you're willing to hear it from a man your whole department's told you to shoot on sight."