Ride Or Die: The Prez's Claim

Chapter 2: Mine

Knox was on his feet before the first engine cut out.

He didn't hurry. That was what scared me. Everyone else in the shop was moving, boots on concrete, a locker slamming, someone swearing low and fast, but Knox walked to the office door like a man going to answer a knock.

"Stay here," he said.

"I'm not your employee."

"No." He looked back at me. "You're worse. You're a stranger who just read something she shouldn't have."

Then he was gone, and I was alone with a closed ledger and a pulse I could feel in my teeth.

I lasted about ten seconds.

The office window looked out on the lot, and the glass was so grimy I had to wipe a circle with my sleeve. Twelve bikes fanned across the gravel, chrome and black, riders still in the saddle. Their vests were different from the Saints'. Where the Saints wore gold, these men wore a hard, dirty red, and across every back, a vulture with its wings spread wide.

The Iron Vultures.

Even I knew that name. Eli had mentioned it once, on the phone, two months before he disappeared. *Don't google them, Mar. Just trust me.*

I had googled them, of course. I wished I hadn't.

The man at the front of the pack cut his engine last. Tall, lean, a scar bisecting one eyebrow, and a smile that looked like it had been practiced in a mirror. He swung off his bike like he owned the ground under it.

"Ghost!" he called, loud and warm, the way you greet a friend at a funeral. "You've been hiding."

"Cade." Knox stood in the middle of the lot with his hands loose at his sides. Behind him, the Saints had gathered in a wall, thirty men, maybe more, and not one of them was speaking. "You're on the wrong side of the line."

"Line moves." Cade shrugged. "I heard you got a visitor."

My breath stopped.

*I heard you got a visitor.*

I had walked in three hours ago. No one knew I was coming except Mr. Pratt's office and the man in front of me. And yet twelve men had ridden here on the exact afternoon a stranger showed up with a laptop bag.

Somebody had told them.

"No visitors," Knox said evenly. "Just the mechanic."

"The mechanic." Cade tilted his head at the office window, and he looked straight at me through the smear on the glass. His smile widened. "Pretty mechanic."

Every hair on my arms stood up.

I should have stepped back from the window. I know that now. But I stood there frozen, like a deer in headlights, and Cade lifted two fingers in a lazy little wave.

"Here's what I'm thinking," he said, almost kindly. "You've got something that belongs to the numbers. We'd like a look at her. Ten minutes. She comes with us, she answers a few questions, she goes home. Nobody gets hurt."

"No."

"I'm being polite."

"So am I."

The silence stretched. The gravel shifted under somebody's boot. Around the edge of the lot a big man in a Saints vest, I'd heard someone call him Rook, moved half a step closer to Knox, like a man ready to grab an arm. His face was open and worried. He was the only one in the lot who looked scared, and I found that oddly comforting.

Cade sighed like a disappointed teacher. "Then let's make it simple. Is she yours?"

"Excuse me?"

"Under club law, an unclaimed woman on club property is fair game for questions. You know the rule, Ghost. *Your* rule. If she's not yours, she's up for talking to. If she is..." He spread his hands. "Well. That's a different conversation."

I felt the words land somewhere in my chest before I understood them.

Knox didn't turn around.

He didn't look at the window. He didn't look at me. He stood with his back straight and his hands loose, and for one long, awful second I thought he was going to say *no*. I thought he would let them walk in and take me and I would be another Quinn who disappeared.

Then he said, quietly, in a voice that carried across the whole lot:

"She's mine."

Nobody moved.

"Say it again," Cade said.

"She's mine." Knox turned, finally, and looked at the window. At me. Those pale eyes, steady, unreadable. "Marlowe belongs to the Prez of the Hollow Saints. Anyone who touches her answers to me. Anyone who *questions* her answers to me. Anyone who *looks* at her wrong..." His voice dropped, soft as a blade sliding out of a sheath. "Ask Reaper what happened to the last man who did."

A ripple went through the lot. One of the Vultures glanced at another. Somebody muttered.

Cade's smile flickered. Only for a second. Then it slid back into place.

"Well," he said, "congratulations."

He swung a leg over his bike and the engine roared to life. The Vultures followed, one by one, the noise filling the air like thunder in a small room. Cade lingered at the edge of the lot and looked at me one last time.

"Enjoy her while it lasts," he called. "Ghost never keeps anything."

Then they were gone, and the dust settled, and my knees finally remembered how to buckle.

The office door opened.

Knox stepped inside and closed it behind him. His face was the same as ever. Calm. Empty. But his hand, I noticed, the one on the doorknob, wasn't quite steady.

"What did you just do?" My voice cracked. "I'm not yours. I'm not *anyone's*."

"No," he said. "You're not."

"Then why..."

"Because in about an hour, every man in this state is going to know you're inside my walls." He finally let go of the doorknob. "And every man in this state is going to wonder why."

"That's not an answer."

"Here's the answer." He stepped closer, and for the first time I saw it, under the calm, under the ice. He looked *tired*. He looked like a man who had just made a terrible bet with someone else's life.

"Somebody in my club told them you were here," Knox said quietly. "And now you're going to live in my house until I find out who."