Ride Or Die: The Prez's Claim

Chapter 5: Wear My Jacket

The jacket was black leather, too big in the shoulders, and it smelled like woodsmoke and something I refused to call *him*.

"Put it on," Knox said.

We were standing in his garage, the morning after the deal. He held it out with one hand, like a man handing over a weapon he wasn't sure I should have.

"It says property of something on the back, doesn't it?"

"It says *Hollow Saints, Prez*." He turned it around. On the back, in gold thread, a cracked halo above the words. "There's a small patch on the sleeve. Only one of these exists. Everyone in the club will know whose it is."

"So I'm a walking billboard."

"You're a walking warning."

I slid my arms in. The leather was still warm from his hands. It swallowed me whole, and when I looked up, Knox was staring at me with an expression I couldn't read. It was there and gone, like a match struck in wind.

"What?"

"Nothing." He cleared his throat, and for a second he looked almost embarrassed. "It suits you."

"It's enormous."

"It suits you," he said again, and turned to his bike.

---

I had never been on a motorcycle.

I told him this in the driveway, and he only handed me a helmet. "Hold on to me. Don't lean against the turn. Trust the bike."

"Trust the bike."

"And me."

That, I noticed, was not part of the deal.

I climbed on behind him and put my arms around his waist because there was nowhere else to put them. He was solid, warm, and so still I could feel his breathing through the leather. Then he twisted the throttle and the world dropped away.

I screamed. He laughed.

I had not expected that. It was short, rough, like a door opening in a house that had been shut for years. But it was real, and the sound of it went through me in a way the engine didn't.

We rode for forty minutes. Fields. Old stone walls. A river that flashed silver through the trees. By the time we reached the clubhouse, my hands had stopped shaking and my face hurt from the wind, and I realized, with real alarm, that for the first time in two years I had not thought about Eli for almost an hour.

---

The Hollow Saints threw a party every Friday. This was Friday.

The clubhouse was a converted warehouse with a bar along one wall, pool tables, a stage no one had used in a decade, and about eighty people packed inside. Music pounded. The air smelled like beer and cigarettes and burnt sugar from someone's grill.

The second Knox walked in with me at his side, the noise dropped.

Not completely. But it thinned, the way a room does when a storm rolls in. Heads turned. Then conversations resumed, low and speculative. I could feel every eye on the jacket.

"Breathe," Knox murmured against my ear.

"I am breathing."

"You're holding your breath."

I let it out. His hand slid to the small of my back, light, deliberate. A performance. Then I felt his fingers spread against my spine, warm through the leather, and understood that nobody in the room could tell the difference.

That was the problem.

"Prez!" A huge man with a shaved head and a Saints vest pushed through the crowd, grinning. "Is this her? The mechanic?"

"Tank," Knox said. "This is Marlowe."

Tank looked me up and down, and his grin widened. "Well, damn. No wonder you hid her."

"Watch it."

"I'm just saying, sweetheart..." Tank swung an arm around my shoulders as if we'd known each other for years. "You ever want a real ride..."

I never saw Knox move.

One second Tank's arm was around me. The next, his wrist was in Knox's fist, and Tank's face had gone the color of old paper.

"She's mine," Knox said. His voice was quiet. Every conversation within twenty feet died. "Not yours. Not anyone's. She *answers* to me, and *you* answer to me. Tell me we're clear."

Tank swallowed. "Clear, Prez."

"Say it to her."

"Sorry, ma'am."

Knox let go. Tank rubbed his wrist and backed into the crowd. And the whole room seemed to exhale together, as though someone had cut a wire.

I turned to Knox. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at his own hand, flexing the fingers slowly, as if he'd surprised himself.

"That wasn't necessary," I said.

"Yes, it was."

"You didn't have to..."

"Yes." He finally met my eyes, and the paleness was gone. They were dark now, dark and furious, and under the fury something raw that made my stomach turn over. "It was."

Then, before I could answer, he did something that wasn't in the deal.

He leaned down and kissed me.

It wasn't gentle. It was hard and brief and public, his hand at my jaw, the whole room watching. The kind of kiss meant to say *mine* to eighty people at once. But I felt the tremor in his fingers, and I felt the way he stopped for one half-second, like a man stepping off a cliff.

Then he pulled back. And in the noise and the lights, only I could see the shock in his face.

"For the room," he said hoarsely.

"For the room," I whispered.

Neither of us moved.

---

I lasted another hour.

I smiled at people. I let Knox's hand rest on my back. I said *hello* and *nice to meet you* to men whose names I forgot at once. Then I told him I needed the bathroom, and he nodded without looking at me, and I fled down the hall.

I stood at the sink with cold water on my wrists, staring at a woman I barely recognized in a stranger's jacket, and told myself it was for the room.

*It was for the room.*

I reached into the jacket pocket for a tissue.

My fingers closed on paper.

Not a tissue. A folded square, thin and creased, that hadn't been there when I put the jacket on.

My hands weren't steady as I opened it. Five words in block capitals, and beneath them, sketched in pen, a tiny sword through a *Q*.

*OLD MILL. MIDNIGHT. ALONE.*

I looked up. In the mirror, the bathroom door was closed. Nobody behind me. Nobody in the hall.

But someone had put this in my pocket in the last hour, in a room full of eighty people. Someone close enough to touch me.

And from the other side of the door, I heard Knox's voice calling my name.