Ride or Die: The Alpha's Reckless Queen

The night my garage burned down, I put on my dead father's leather jacket, kicked my bike into gear, and rode straight into the arms of the man whose pack lit the match. I didn't know that last part yet. That's the thing about the worst nights of your life — you never get a warning label. You just get the smoke. I smelled it before I saw it, three blocks out, that thick chemical-sweet stink of burning rubber and old motor oil, and some animal part of my brain already knew whose it was before the rest of me caught up. By the time I turned onto Route 9, the sky over Calloway's Garage & Custom was the wrong color. Orange where it should've been black. Alive where it should've been still. I left my bike running in the middle of the road. I don't even remember getting off it. "Ma'am, you need to stay back—" I ducked under the arm of a volunteer firefighter half my size and got close enough to feel the heat on my face before someone finally hauled me back by the collar of my jacket — my dad's jacket, cracked leather gone soft with age, the one I'd worn every day since the funeral because some stupid, superstitious part of me thought it still smelled like him. It didn't smell like anything now except smoke. Twenty-two years. My father built that garage with his own hands before I was born, taught himself to strip an engine before he taught himself to shave, and I watched it fold into itself like a paper lantern, orange sparks pouring off the roofline into a sky with no stars in it. "Anybody in there?" someone shouted. "No," I said, and my voice came out flat and strange, like it belonged to someone standing very far away from me. "No, it's just — it's just me now." That's when I saw the bike. It peeled off from the treeline on the far side of the lot, no headlight, engine barely above idle like whoever was riding it had practiced leaving quietly. But fire doesn't leave much to chance, and neither does a decent set of eyes, and I'd spent my whole life around bikes well enough to read one at a glance the way other women read faces. Black frame. Custom pipes. And on the rider's back, catching one bright wash of firelight before the dark swallowed him whole — a patch. A reaper's skull, wreathed in thorns. I knew that patch. Everyone in this county knew that patch. You saw it on a jacket in a gas station parking lot and you found a reason to be somewhere else, fast, no questions, because the Reapers weren't the kind of club you asked questions of and lived comfortably afterward. My father had ridden with men who wore that skull once. A long time ago, before I was old enough to understand what any of it meant. I only knew it the way you know the outline of an old scar — there, healed over, never explained. I stood there with my father's garage crumbling into ash forty feet away and watched that bike disappear down the tree line, and something in my chest went very cold and very clear, the kind of clear you only get when you've stopped being afraid and started being something worse. I got back on my bike. "Rae—" That was Nadia's voice, breaking through the crowd that had gathered on the shoulder in bathrobes and pajama pants, everyone's phone up and recording like this was a concert and not the end of everything my father had built. "Rae, where are you going, you can't just—" I was already going. I'd never once in my life ridden past the county line after dark without a plan, without backup, without at least telling somebody where I was headed in case I didn't come back. I did all three that night. I left my best friend standing in the road with her hand still half-raised like she could stop me by will alone, and I opened the throttle until the fire behind me was just a smear of orange in my mirrors, and I pointed the front wheel toward the one place in this whole state you weren't supposed to go looking for trouble. Reapers territory. It took eleven minutes. I know because I watched the clock the whole way, some ridiculous need to measure exactly how long it takes a person to ride straight into the worst decision of her life. Eleven minutes of backroads and moonlight and my hands so tight on the grips they ached, eleven minutes of rehearsing a hundred different sentences that all started with you did this and none of which I'd manage to say once I actually got there. The gate came up out of the dark like something built to be seen from a distance and feared up close — iron, chained, flanked by a low stone wall that had clearly been there since before anyone currently breathing on this land had been born. There were bikes lined up inside the fence, more bikes than I'd ever seen in one place outside a rally, chrome catching the one security light mounted over the gate like a row of teeth. I didn't slow down as much as I should have. I braked hard enough that my back tire fishtailed in the gravel, and I came to a stop with the front wheel practically kissing the chain-link, engine still growling under me, chest heaving like I'd run the distance instead of ridden it. For a second, nothing happened. No dogs. No shouting. No men pouring out of the dark with guns, which some tired, sensible part of my brain had genuinely expected. Then he stepped out of the shadow of the gatehouse like the shadow itself had decided to become a person. I didn't know his name yet. I only knew that he moved like nothing on this earth had ever managed to surprise him, and that even in the dark I could feel the exact moment his attention landed on me — a physical weight, like a hand pressed flat against my sternum. "You're a long way from home," he said. His voice was low and even and it did something to the base of my spine I didn't have time to examine. "My home just burned down," I said. "So I figured I'd come find whoever did it." He tilted his head. Even that small movement felt deliberate, like he was choosing exactly how much of himself to let me see. "And what makes you think that's us." It wasn't a question. It was an invitation to lie to myself, and some tired, furious, grief-stunned part of me refused to take it. "Because I watched one of your patches ride away from the fire," I said. "So either you tell me why, or you're about to have a much bigger problem parked outside your gate than one pissed-off mechanic." Something shifted in his face. Not fear — I'd bet money this man hadn't felt fear since before he could walk — but something adjacent to interest, sharp and unwelcome, like he hadn't expected the night to hand him anything worth paying attention to and here I was anyway. "Say that name again," he said quietly. "Whose fire." "Calloway," I said. "Grady Calloway. My father. Ring a bell?" And I watched him go still in a way that had nothing to do with calm. He said my father's name back to me like it was a debt finally coming due at his own front door, like he'd been waiting years for someone to walk up and hand him this exact bill, and for the first time since I'd smelled smoke on the wind three blocks from home, I understood that I hadn't ridden into an answer. I'd ridden into a war I didn't know I'd already inherited. Behind him, the men lined up near the gatehouse hadn't moved, but something about the way they weren't moving had changed — a stillness with weight to it, the kind you learn to notice growing up in garages full of men who communicate more with their shoulders than their mouths. One of them, older, gray at the temples, had gone rigid at the sound of my father's name the same way Ronan had, like the word itself carried a current. "You knew him," I said again, because he hadn't actually answered, not really, and I'd learned a long time ago that silence dressed up as composure is still an answer if you're paying attention. "Not just knew of him. You knew him." Ronan didn't confirm it. He didn't deny it either. He just held my eyes for one more beat, long enough that I felt the weight of it settle somewhere under my ribs, uninvited and unwelcome and entirely too warm for a man I had every reason to hate. "Go home," he said finally. "It's late. You've had a hell of a night." "That's not an answer." "No," he agreed. "It isn't." I should have pushed. Every part of me that had ridden eleven minutes through the dark on nothing but grief and fury wanted to plant my feet in that gravel and refuse to leave until somebody gave me something solid enough to hold onto. But I was suddenly, bone-deep aware of how tired I was, how the adrenaline that had carried me this far was already draining out of me and leaving something hollow and shaking in its place, and some old, stubborn instinct — my father's instinct, if I was honest, the one that said don't negotiate from a position of exhaustion — told me this wasn't the night to get my answers. "This isn't over," I said. "I didn't think it would be," Ronan said, and for just a second, something almost like tiredness crossed his own face, like he'd been waiting on this conversation for a lot longer than one burning building's worth of time.