THE DEVIL’S MOTORCYCLE CLUB BRIDE

The War My Father Started

“You can stop pretending you don’t want to be here.”

Nora spun around so fast she nearly lost her footing on the gravel. “Excuse me?”

Ryder didn’t answer right away. He was leaning against the side of a black pickup, arms crossed, watching her as though he already knew how this would end, like he already knew how bad it was going to get and had decided not to warn her.

They were parked behind the club’s compound, a low building tucked at the end of a dead end road, motorcycles lined up outside like sentries. The party noise was long gone. Out here there was nothing but crickets and the distant hum of a highway and the sound of her heart beating too fast, which had not slowed down once since she’d walked out of her parents’ ballroom.

“I didn’t come here because I wanted to.” Her voice shook more than she wanted it to. “You didn’t exactly give me a choice.”

“I gave you a choice.” Ryder pushed off the truck and started walking toward her without rushing, the same way he’d crossed that ballroom like the whole world would simply wait for him. “You could have screamed. You could have called for security, you even could have let Julian drag you back to your perfect little life.” He stopped a foot away from her, close enough that she had to tilt her head up to hold his eyes. “You didn’t.”

“Because I was in shock.”

“Were you.” It wasn’t a question.

Nora crossed her arms, partly to keep from shaking, from doing something stupid like reaching for him. Which was insane, which made no sense, considering he had just torn her entire life apart in front of two hundred people. “You can’t just kidnap someone and then act like they wanted it.”

“I’m not acting like anything.” His expression changed, the anger cooling for a second into something quieter, for a moment he looked like the boy she used to know. “I just know you, Nora. I know what it looks like when you’re scared. And I know what it looks like when you’re lying to yourself about being scared.”

“You don’t know me anymore.” The words came out sharper than she meant. “You left. Ten years, Ryder. You don’t get to walk back in and act like you still know anything about who I am.”

“Then tell me.” He took another step closer. Nora hated that her heart reacted before she could stop it, as if ten years had not been enough to erase what he once meant to her.

She didn’t say anything.

“That’s what I thought.”

“This doesn’t change anything.” She forced herself to hold his gaze, even though everything in her wanted to look away. “You kidnapped me, you humiliated me in front of my entire family. You’re using me to destroy Julian’s career because of some debt I don’t even understand, and none of that is forgiven just because some part of me still…” She stopped herself.

“Still what.”

“Nothing.”

“Say it.”

“No, I won’t.”

The silence between them grew tense, the kind of silence that felt like standing too close to a fire. Ryder’s eyes dropped to her mouth for half a second, so quick she almost thought she imagined it, and a strange warmth spread through her in a way that had nothing to do with fear.

“You should go inside,” he said finally, voice rougher than before. “It’s cold.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“You already did.” A faint smile touched his lips, but it disappeared almost immediately.

She wanted to hate him for that. She wanted to hate the low pull of his voice, the way he still smelled like leather and rain, the way her whole body seemed to remember exactly how to stand close to him even after everything he’d put her through tonight. Instead she felt something more dangerous than hate rising beneath the anger, something she’d spent ten years telling herself had died the night he disappeared.

“Why now.” She hated how small her voice sounded. “If my father did something so terrible, why wait ten years? Why not come for me the moment it happened?”

Ryder’s expression hardened. For a second she thought he wasn’t going to answer at all.

“Because I didn’t know,” he said finally. “Not until three days ago.”

“Know what?”

“That he lied to me.” His voice had gone quiet, dangerous in a different way now, the anger underneath it aimed somewhere far past her. “He told me you didn’t want me, that you were ashamed of where I came from. That you begged him to make sure I never came near you again.”

A sharp ache spread through her chest. “I never said that.”

“I know that now.”

“Then why does that matter?” Her voice broke, and she hated that she felt that way, hated how quickly ten years of carefully built walls were coming down in front of a man who had every reason to want her destroyed. “If you already know I never wanted you gone, why does any of this still need to happen? Why do you still need your revenge?”

Ryder was quiet for a long moment, close enough now that she could feel the heat coming off him in the cold night air.

“Because your father didn’t just lie to me, Nora.” His voice had dropped low, and there was grief in it now. “He didn’t just tell me you didn’t want me.”

“Then what.”

“He’s the reason the war happened.” Ryder’s hands curled into fists at his sides, like he was holding something back by force. “He’s the reason my father is dead.”

The words ‘dead’ terrifiies her because she was wondering if her father could actually do that. “What?”

“Ten years ago, your father made a deal with a rival club to protect his own political career. He fed them everything. Our territory, our secrets, the names of men who trusted him because he’d been sitting at our table for years pretending to be something he wasn’t.” Ryder’s voice cracked on the last word, just barely, just enough for her to hear ten years of grief buried under all that anger. “My father died in that war because your father decided his future mattered more than our lives.”

Nora’s whole body went cold. “That’s not… he wouldn’t…”

“He would.” Ryder’s eyes were dark, unreadable, and for the first time since he’d walked into that ballroom she saw something underneath the anger that looked almost like pain. “He did.”

“I didn’t know.” Her voice was barely a whisper now. “Ryder… I swear to you, I never knew any of this.”

“I believe you.” His hand came up, slow, careful, and brushed a strand of hair back from her face with a gentleness that didn’t match anything else about tonight. “That’s the problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I came here to use you.” His thumb traced along her jaw, and she should have pulled away, she knew she should have pulled away; but she didn’t. “To hurt him through you, to make him watch everything he built collapse the same way he made me watch everything I had collapse.” His voice dropped even lower. “And now I’m standing here and all I want is…”

He stopped himself.

“All you want is what?” she whispered.

For a moment neither of them moved. His hand was still against her jaw, his eyes locked on hers, and the space between them had shrunk to almost nothing, close enough that she could feel his breath against her lips, close enough that ten years of grief and anger and everything neither of them had said out loud seemed to hang in the air between them like something about to catch fire.

Then, from somewhere behind them, a door slammed open.

“Prez.” One of the club members came jogging across the gravel, phone in hand, face pale in the porch light. “You need to see this.”

Ryder stepped back so fast it was like something had physically pulled him away from her, the warmth of his hand gone from her jaw in an instant. “What.”

“It’s Senator Hayes.” The man held out the phone, hands shaking slightly. “He just went live on every news channel in the city.”

“Saying what?”

The man’s eyes flicked to Nora, then back to Ryder, and whatever was on his face made a cold knot tightened in her stomach.

“He’s telling everyone you kidnapped her,” he said. “And that if you don’t bring her back by morning, he’s got proof that’s going to bury the entire Devil’s Reign club. All of it, every member and every name.”

Ryder froze.

“What kind of proof.”

The man swallowed hard before he answered, and when he did, his voice dropped low enough that Nora had to lean in to hear it.

“The kind that gets everyone in this club sent away for the rest of their lives,” he said. “Including you.”