CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS BIKER KING

Chapter 11 — Thermostat War

Marlowe

I found my boots nailed to the garage floor, which was, even by this den's standards, an impressively specific way to start a morning.

Not glued. Not hidden. Nailed, four neat little points of metal through the leather and straight into the boards beneath, like whoever did it had taken actual pride in the workmanship. I stood there for a solid ten seconds just admiring the sheer commitment before the annoyance caught up with the appreciation.

"Problem?" Reid, leaning in the doorway, not even pretending he wasn't the one who wanted an audience for this.

"Just admiring your craftsmanship." I crouched down, working the first nail loose with my fingers, refusing to give him the reaction he was fishing for. "Really. Four points of contact. Even spacing. You've got a future in construction if this whole biker thing doesn't work out."

"I didn't do that."

"Sure you didn't."

"I didn't." Something in his voice shifted, just slightly, enough that I actually looked up at him instead of at the ruined boots. "I've got better ways to mess with you than nailing your shoes to a floor like we're twelve."

That was somehow worse than if he'd just taken credit. I went back to working the second nail loose, saying nothing, filing that particular tone away with everything else about Reid Kastellan that made the hair on my arms stand up.

Under the fourth boot, once I finally freed it, a folded scrap of paper sat wedged into the sole. I almost missed it entirely, would have, if the corner hadn't caught the light wrong.

Reid's handwriting. Four words, no signature needed.

*Wondering what you're hiding.*

I read it twice, feeling my whole stomach drop somewhere south of my actual feet, and by the time I looked back up, Reid had already disappeared down the hall, leaving me alone with a note that wasn't a prank at all.

---

Nova found me twenty minutes later, still crouched by the boots, note crumpled tight in one fist.

"Okay, that face is not a boots-got-nailed-down face." She dropped down next to me, all business now, the humor gone out of her voice entirely. "That's a worse face. What happened?"

I showed her the note before I could talk myself out of it.

She read it twice too, the same way I had, and her expression did something complicated — worry first, then something harder underneath it, protective in a way that surprised me a little given how short a time we'd actually known each other.

"He's fishing," she said finally. "This is a fishing hook, not a confession. He doesn't know anything. He's just—" she waved a hand, searching for the word, "—poking things to see what jumps."

"What if something jumps?"

"Then we deal with it." Simple, certain, entirely unbothered by the fact that she had no idea what she was actually offering to help me deal with. "You're not doing this alone, Finch. Whatever this is."

I wanted, badly, to tell her right then. The words sat right at the back of my throat, four days' worth of pressure behind them, and I swallowed them back down anyway, because telling her meant trusting her with something that could get both of us thrown out of this den, or worse, and I didn't know her well enough yet to risk that. Not yet.

"Thanks," I said instead, and meant it, even if it wasn't the whole truth she deserved.

---

I found King in the garage that evening, and made the mistake of thinking I could hand him the note without it becoming a whole conversation.

He read it once. His face didn't change at all, which was somehow more frightening than if it had.

"Kastellan wrote this?"

"I don't have proof."

"Didn't ask for proof. Asked if he wrote it." He folded the note once, precise, and pocketed it like evidence instead of handing it back. "Recognize the handwriting from intake paperwork. It's his."

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing, yet." He said it like a promise instead of an answer, which didn't reassure me even slightly. "Watch him. Wait for him to actually do something instead of just poking. Man like that, patient like that — he'll overreach eventually. Everyone does."

"And if he doesn't overreach before he figures it out?"

King looked at me for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. "Then we'll deal with it before he gets the chance to use it." A pause, quieter. "I don't lose things I've decided to keep, Finch. Learn that about me now, save yourself the surprise later."

I didn't have an answer for that. I wasn't sure there was a safe one to give.

He turned back to his own work like the conversation was finished, and I stood there a moment longer, note-shaped dread sitting heavy in my chest, wondering exactly how much of that sentence had been about the club's secrets, and how much of it had been about something else entirely — something neither of us had said out loud yet, and both of us, apparently, were already keeping score on anyway.