CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS BIKER KING

Chapter 5 — First Blood

Alaric

I don't know how long I stood there with my fingers on a stranger's chin before I remembered I was running a recruitment, not auditioning for whatever this was.

Something in my chest sat up and took notice before I did — the part of me that wasn't entirely me, the one I'd started calling Rook back when I was young enough to think giving him a name might keep him separate from the rest of me. It never worked. He'd been the same animal under my skin since the day I first shifted, just louder sometimes than others, and right now he was loud enough that I heard him as clearly as I'd have heard another man standing in the room.

*[Mine.]*

*He's a prospect,* I told him. *A stranger.*

*[Doesn't smell like a stranger.]*

*He's nineteen.*

*[Didn't ask his age. Asked if he's mine.]*

I let go of the boy's chin like it had cost me something. It had.

"Reaper's kid." I said it again, mostly to remind myself why my hand had been there in the first place. "You've got his stillness too. Or you're a very good liar."

"Maybe I'm both." Flat. Careful. Giving me exactly as much as he'd decided to hand over and not one word more.

Something about that — the sheer nerve of it — made my chest do that thing again. Twelve years dormant, and suddenly wide awake over a nineteen-year-old with a bad haircut and worse manners.

*[Not a stranger,]* Rook said again, quieter this time, almost thoughtful. *[You know this one.]*

*I don't know him at all.*

*[Wasn't talking about you.]*

I didn't have a good answer for that, which was, in itself, an answer I didn't like.

"Inside." Loud now, to the whole line, because I needed all seven of them to stop watching whatever had just crossed my face. "Trials start now." My eyes cut back to him before I could stop them. "Finch. You're up first."

Bellamy muttered something that sounded suspiciously like *of course he is.* I decided I liked her instincts even if I didn't love her mouth.

---

I squared off across from him in the ring myself, which wasn't my usual job. I told myself I wanted a closer look. That lie didn't survive the first exchange.

He came in low and fast, favoring his left the way a smaller fighter does when he already knows he can't win a straight trade of power. I let one hit land — a solid crack across my ribs, more than any prospect had managed on me in two years — before I swept his legs and put him flat on his back in the dirt. The whole yard went quiet around us for exactly as long as it took him to land, that particular hush a crowd gives a fight when it stops being a formality and starts being something worth actually watching.

I came down to pin him, forearm across his chest, and every plan I had for the morning evaporated at once.

His pulse slammed under my arm. Not the ragged panic of someone who'd just lost a fight — something sharper, and the smell of him this close hit me like a hand closing around a rib I'd thought permanently broken twelve years ago. His eyes were wide, dark, furious, and something about the softness at the corner of his mouth even mid-snarl made every rational thought I owned go quiet at once.

*[I know,]* Rook said, insistent now, impossible to ignore. *[I know, and you won't listen.]*

*Not now.*

*[When, then. He's under your hands right now and you're still arguing with me instead of him.]*

*Not. Now.*

Rook went quiet, but not gone — the particular silence of an animal that's decided to let a point sit instead of pushing it, confident it'll win eventually anyway.

"Get off." Low, a crack running through his voice that didn't match the rest of him.

"You lost." I made myself sound bored. I did not feel bored. "Lesson one. Bigger man wins the ground fight. Learn it fast, or learn it hard."

I let him up. He got to his feet too quickly, one hand pressed briefly to his own ribs — pain, or something else, some instinct in me insisted, like he was checking that something was still exactly where he'd left it.

I filed that away with everything else about him I didn't have a drawer for yet.

"Again." Easier than examining why my own hands weren't quite steady. We went two more rounds — him losing both, getting smarter each time, reading my weight before I shifted it. Silas's instincts, dressed in a stranger's body. Under every exchange, that same low pull that made absolutely no sense.

By the third round, I'd stopped pretending this was about testing him for the club.

I had a fist in his collar, about to call the round, when the fabric shifted wrong under my knuckles — loose, gapped, one clean inch of skin at his throat that had no business looking the way it did on a boy who'd just spent a morning taking hits like a man twice his size.

I went still.

Rook went stiller than I did. *[There. Told you.]*

*Told me what.*

*[That he wasn't what you keep telling yourself he is.]*

Something was wound tight underneath that collar. Careful. Deliberate. Nothing an injury explained, and nothing any prospect I'd ever trained had ever needed. My thumb brushed the edge of it before I'd decided to let it, some old instinct demanding confirmation my eyes had already given me.

Across the yard, Bear's head came up sharp, catching something in the air that made him take one step toward us without being told to — the particular alertness of a man who'd spent twelve years learning to trust his own nose before his own eyes.

"What," I said slowly, my whole body going still in a way that had nothing left to do with discipline, "is that."

The yard had gone quiet around us again, that same particular hush, except this time it wasn't admiration keeping everyone silent. It was the specific stillness of people who sensed, before they understood why, that something in this recruitment had just stopped being routine.

*[Say something,]* Rook pressed, low and urgent now, all his earlier amusement gone. *[He's not answering. Look at his face. He's deciding whether to run.]*

*He won't get far if he does.*

*[Wasn't suggesting he would. Just telling you what I'm reading off him right now, since you're too busy staring to notice it yourself.]*

The boy hadn't moved. His jaw was locked, eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder rather than on my face, the particular stillness of someone doing frantic math behind a carefully blank expression. I'd seen that look before, on men who'd just realized a lie they'd been carrying for days had finally run out of road.

Bear crossed the last few yards between us, slower than his usual pace, giving the boy every chance to explain himself before either of us forced the issue.

"King." Bear's voice carried a warning underneath the calm. "Might want to finish this somewhere with fewer witnesses."

He wasn't wrong. Six other prospects stood frozen along the fence line, every one of them watching with the particular hunger of people who'd just stumbled onto something that might matter to their own standing in this club later. Whatever this boy was hiding, it wasn't going to stay hidden if I forced the answer out of him here, in front of an audience already primed to gossip about anything that made the President go still mid-fight.

*[Let him go,]* Rook said, surprising me. *[Not because it doesn't matter. Because it matters too much to handle badly in front of six strangers who'll talk.]*

I released my grip on his collar, slow, deliberate, watching every flicker of relief and fresh terror cross his face in the half second before he managed to smooth it back into something unreadable.

"Perimeter duty," I said instead, loud enough for the yard to hear, giving the moment a shape that looked like discipline instead of whatever it actually was. "The rest of you, inside. Trials continue tomorrow."

The boy didn't move right away, and for one strange, suspended moment, I thought he might actually say something — offer up whatever truth had just gone taut under my knuckles, right there in front of everyone, like a man deciding the fastest way through a fire was straight into the middle of it.

Then he didn't. He just nodded once, jaw tight, and walked toward the fence line without looking back, and I stood there in the settling dust of a fight I'd started to prove nothing at all, understanding with total, uncomfortable clarity that whatever I'd just found under that collar, I wasn't going to let it go until I understood exactly what it meant.