CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS BIKER KING

Chapter 18 — Patient

Marlowe

Two senior patched members had a running bet going about whether a stripped bolt on Duke's old cruiser could actually be salvaged, and I made the mistake of overhearing it while I still had a torque wrench in my hand and something to prove.

"Twenty bucks says it's junk," the bigger one said, arms crossed, watching the bolt like it had personally offended him.

"Twenty bucks says the new kid fixes it in under ten minutes," the other one said, and I realized with a jolt they were talking about me before either of them noticed I was standing right there.

"You want to make that bet official?" I asked, and both of them turned, startled, then grinning, the particular delighted grin of men who liked nothing better than a reason to lose money in an entertaining way.

Nine minutes and forty seconds later, the bolt came free clean, and the whole corner of the garage erupted into the kind of noisy, good-natured chaos that had become, without my quite noticing when, an entirely normal part of my days here.

I didn't see King walk in. I only noticed him once the noise had already reached him, standing in the doorway with an expression that had absolutely no business being that soft over something as small as a stripped bolt.

"Told you," one of the senior members crowed, already collecting his winnings. "Kid's got hands like Reaper used to."

The whole garage went very slightly quieter at that — not silent, not dramatic, just a small collective pause, the kind that happens when somebody says a dead legend's name out loud in a room that's grown fond of his kid without fully realizing it.

King didn't say anything. He didn't have to. I caught the look on his face before he smoothed it back into something more careful — open, unguarded, entirely too much pride for a President who was supposed to keep some professional distance from his prospects — and understood, with a small drop of dread underneath the warmth, exactly how visible that look had just been to every single person in that garage.

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He found me alone an hour later, once the crowd had thinned out and most of the den had drifted toward dinner, and didn't bother pretending he'd come in for anything but the reason he'd actually come in for.

"You're good at this," he said, watching me clean the last of the grease off my hands. "Better than good."

"I had a good teacher."

"Wrench, or me?"

"Do you want the honest answer or the flattering one?"

Something that wasn't quite a laugh moved through him, low and warm, and he crossed the garage to where I stood, close enough that the space between us had stopped feeling like professional distance sometime in the last several weeks and started feeling like something else entirely.

He picked up the wrench I'd just set down, turned it over once, and held it out to me — not quite handing it back, not quite keeping it, some strange suspended half-gesture that made me reach for it without thinking too hard about why.

His hand closed over mine before I fully had it. Neither of us pulled away.

"You made quite an impression back there," he said, quiet now, all the earlier warmth gone somewhere more serious. "Whole garage watching. Two senior members losing money on you and loving it. That's not nothing, Finch. People notice things like that."

"Is that a warning?"

"It's an observation." His thumb moved, slow, over my knuckles, and I felt my pulse do something complicated and unhelpful at the contact. "People are starting to wonder about you. Not just Kastellan. Half this den's got a theory by now about why their President keeps finding reasons to be in this garage."

"What's your theory?"

"Don't have one." His eyes stayed on mine, steady, unreadable in the particular way that meant he was choosing his words with more care than usual. "Just facts. And the fact is, every time you do something like what just happened out there, it gets a little harder to explain away."

I didn't have a good answer for that. I didn't have much of anything, honestly, with his hand still over mine and his voice gone low and careful and the whole garage quiet around us in the aftermath of a small, stupid bet about a stripped bolt that had somehow, without my noticing exactly when, become one more thread in a story that was getting harder every single day to keep from unraveling in front of the wrong pair of eyes.