BIKERS TEMPTATION

# BIKERS TEMPTATION ## Episode 1: The Girl Who Parked in Front of Him *By Melisa Warui* --- Vikram Rathore did not walk into Ashford Academy. He arrived. The black Ducati growled through the iron gates at 8:02 every morning, two minutes after the bell, because rules had never been written for a boy whose family name was carved above the library door. Students scattered. Some looked at their phones. Some looked at their shoes. Everyone knew what happened to people who stared too long. He killed the engine and pulled off his helmet. Seventeen years old, broad-shouldered and soft around the middle, with a round face that strangers mistook for gentle until they met his eyes. He had heard every nickname for his weight. Nobody said one aloud anymore. Danny Cole had, last spring, and spent a week in the hospital after a "fall" down the gym stairs. Vikram was the heir to Rathore Steel, the company that built half the city's skyline and held the mortgages on the rest. His father, Surendra, had given him one rule on his twelfth birthday: *People are either tools or obstacles. Learn which is which before they learn it about you.* He had learned it well. His roommate was a tool. His teachers were tools. The scholarship kids were obstacles, because they proved that talent could exist without money, and that thought itched. He was halfway across the courtyard when he heard the sound. It was not a Ducati. It was ragged and hungry, an engine tearing the morning in half. A single headlight swept the stone. A matte-grey motorcycle swerved between two pillars, skidded sideways in a perfect arc, and stopped six inches from his boots. Vikram did not flinch. He hated that his heart did. The rider flipped up her visor. Dark eyes. A scar cutting through her left eyebrow. A smile like a dare. "You're standing in my parking spot." The courtyard went silent. Nobody spoke to Vikram Rathore like that. "There are no assigned spots," he said coldly. "Then I assigned myself." She kicked down the stand and pulled off her helmet, loosing a storm of black hair. "Meera Kapoor. Transfer student. Don't bother with your name. I already know it." She walked past him, close enough that he caught the smell of engine oil and rain. For the first time in his life, Vikram Rathore forgot to say something cruel. --- By lunchtime, the whole campus was talking about her. "She rides with the Night Wolves," whispered Arjun, his roommate, sliding a tray onto the table with the nervous speed of a man who had learned not to linger. "Bikers from the old Kharkar flyover. They race on the ring road at midnight. Real money. Real crashes. Two guys died last year." "Bikers," Vikram said, tearing a bread roll in half. "Trash with engines." "She beat their leader in a street race her first week in the city. Raj Dhillon. He has never lost." Vikram's jaw tightened. Not at the story. At the fact that he had been listening so carefully. Across the cafeteria, Meera sat alone, eating an apple and reading a manual with a wrench-stained cover. Three boys from the football team had tried to join her. Each had stood up again within a minute, red-faced. "Stay away from her," Arjun added. "People say the Wolves don't forgive outsiders." "I'm not an outsider," Vikram said. "I own the ground this school stands on." He stood. He carried his tray across the room and dropped it on her table with a crash that turned every head. "You parked in front of me. That was a mistake. I'm giving you one chance to apologize." Meera did not look up. She turned a page. "Do you always talk like a villain in a bad movie," she said, "or is today special?" Someone snorted. A laugh died halfway out of someone else's throat. Heat climbed Vikram's neck. "You don't know who I am." "Oh, I know exactly who you are." Now she looked at him, and her eyes were steady and unafraid. "You're the boy who broke Danny Cole's arm and made his father sign a silence agreement. You're the boy who ruined three scholarships by having teachers write bad reports. You're the heir who thinks being cruel is the same as being strong." The cafeteria was a held breath. "And you," Vikram said softly, "are a girl who is about to learn how the world works." "Funny." She stood and left her tray where it was. "I was going to say the same to you." She walked out. Vikram stared at the empty chair and told himself the pounding in his chest was fury. It was not entirely fury. --- That evening, he sat alone in the penthouse suite at the top of Rathore Tower, the city glittering below like a spilled jewelry box. He ordered his driver to bring him a file. Ashford kept files on everyone, and Vikram's name opened every drawer. Meera Kapoor, seventeen. Scholarship transfer from a small mountain town. Father deceased. Mother ill, location withheld. Previous school records destroyed in a fire. *Convenient,* he thought. *Very convenient.* He read it twice. He did not know why it bothered him. People lost things all the time. People like her lost everything, and the world kept turning. His phone buzzed on the glass table. An unknown number. A photograph: Meera on her grey motorcycle at night, beneath a concrete flyover lit orange by sodium lamps. Below it, one line. **Want to know where she goes? Kharkar Flyover. Midnight. Come alone.** Vikram stared at it for a long minute. A sensible boy would have deleted it. A sensible boy would have called his father's security team and let them handle it. But sensible boys did not own the city, and something stubborn and hungry inside him wanted to see the girl who had looked at him as if he were nothing. He took the Ducati. --- The Kharkar flyover at midnight was a cathedral of noise. Forty motorcycles ringed the underpass, headlights blazing white against the concrete pillars. Riders in leather and chains. Music pulsed from a speaker strapped to a column, and the air tasted of petrol and rain and something electric. On an overturned barrel in the middle stood a tall man with a shaved head and a silver ring through his lip, shouting odds. "Fifty thousand! Ring road, two laps, no rules! Who's got the nerve?" Vikram killed his engine at the edge of the crowd. Heads turned. The man on the barrel stopped mid-sentence, and a slow grin spread across his face. "Look what rolled in. The prince himself." "Raj Dhillon," Vikram said. "He knows my name." Raj hopped down and circled the Ducati like a shark. "Rich boy. Rich bike. Tell me, little king, can you actually ride, or does Daddy pay someone to do it for you?" Laughter rolled through the crowd, ugly and delighted. Vikram felt his hands curl into fists. He had never been laughed at in his life. He did not know what to do with the feeling, so he did what he always did, and reached for cruelty. "I could buy this entire flyover," he said, "and tear it down by Friday." The laughter stopped. Raj stopped circling. His smile did not leave, but something behind it went flat and dangerous. "Careful, prince. You're a long way from your tower." "Hey." The voice was quiet, but it cut through everything. Meera stood at the edge of the circle in a black jacket, helmet tucked under one arm. "He's with me," she said. Vikram blinked. "I am not—" "He's my guest." Her eyes held Raj's. "Touch him and you answer to me." Raj studied her for a long moment. Then he spat on the concrete and walked away, and the noise of the underpass swelled up again like nothing had happened. Vikram kept his voice low and furious. "I did not need your help." "No," said Meera. "You needed a way out. I gave you one. You're welcome." "Why?" She did not answer right away. She looked at his face, searching, and her bravado slipped just a little. "Who told you to come here, Vikram?" His stomach dropped. "Someone sent me a message. An unknown number. How do you—" "Because I got one too." She held out her phone. The same unknown number. The same sort of photograph, only this one showed a younger Vikram in a borrowed hard hat, grinning beside his father at the edge of a mountain construction site. Beneath it, a single line: **Bring him to the flyover. Or the mountain town burns again.** The music thundered on. The Night Wolves laughed and revved their engines. But under the orange light, Meera Kapoor's face had gone pale as paper, and for the first time Vikram saw what she had been hiding behind the scar and the smile. She was afraid. "Somebody is playing us both, rich boy," she whispered. "And whoever it is knows things about you that even you don't." Vikram looked down at the photograph. At the date stamped in the corner, and at the faint ruin of a bridge behind his father's shoulder. He had never been to the mountains in his life. --- *To be continued in Episode 2: The Bridge*