THE ALPHA BIKER 'S HEARTBEAT

Chapter 3 — Frequent Flyer

He walked in holding his forearm like it was actually bothering him, and I clocked the lie in about ten seconds flat.

To be fair to him, it was a good lie on paper — a shallow cut along the outside of his forearm, fresh enough to still be sluggishly bleeding, positioned exactly where a man might catch himself on something sharp while working on a bike. Except.

Except the angle was wrong. A defensive cut, or an accident cut, comes at you — you flinch, your arm turns, the blade catches you at a slant. This was a clean, deliberate horizontal line, the kind you get from someone drawing an edge across their own skin on purpose and stopping exactly where they meant to stop. And except his face, when he sat down on my exam table for the second night in a row, didn't have a single flicker of the tight-jawed discomfort I'd have expected from a man who'd supposedly just sliced his own arm open.

He looked, if anything, relieved to be here.

"Forearm," he said, holding it out like an offering.

"Uh huh." I pulled on gloves and took his arm without much ceremony, turning it toward the light, and I felt it again — that same jump, faint, right under my fingers where his pulse lived, the second my hand made contact with his skin. His breath caught, just slightly, just enough that I heard it.

"How'd this happen," I said, mostly to see what he'd come up with.

"Wire fence. Working on the bikes out back."

"Which bike."

A beat. "The blue one."

"I don't have a blue one in this garage." I didn't look up from cleaning the wound, but I let my voice do the thing it does when I'm calling a patient's bluff — flat, unbothered, patient the way you're patient with a kid who thinks you didn't notice the broken lamp behind the couch. "Try again."

Silence. I glanced up. He was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite name — not embarrassment, not defensiveness, something closer to reluctant respect, like I'd passed some kind of test he hadn't told me I was taking.

"It's a clean cut," I went on, taping gauze over what genuinely didn't need more than four stitches and honestly could've survived on a butterfly bandage. "Horizontal, even depth, no hesitation marks, no jagged edges from catching on something. That's not a fence. That's a knife, and it's not the first time you've handled one."

"You always this thorough with everyone who walks in?"

"I'm thorough with everyone who lies to me while bleeding on my table." I finished the tape and sat back, pulling my gloves off with a snap, and looked at him directly for the first time since he'd walked in. "You didn't need to be here. This cut's nothing. You could've butterflied it yourself in under a minute."

He didn't deny it. That was the thing about him I was starting to catalog, the way you catalog a symptom before you've got a diagnosis to hang it on — he didn't lie twice about the same thing once he'd been caught. He just looked at me, steady, unbothered by being caught out, like honesty cost him nothing now that the first layer of pretense was gone.

"I needed a reason," he said.

"A reason for what?"

"To come back."

I should've had a smart answer for that. I usually do — three years of dealing with grown men who bleed on my table and then try to flirt through the pain has given me a whole arsenal of deflections, most of them involving a scalpel joke. But something about the flatness of how he said it, no charm in it at all, just fact, laid bare like a chart result, took the wind clean out of whatever I'd been about to say.

"That's insane," I said instead, which was at least honest.

"Probably."

"You cut your own arm open."

"Barely." He flexed his fingers, testing the bandage, unbothered. "Didn't feel it, if that helps."

"It does not help, that is the opposite of helping, that's the part that should worry you—"

The garage door groaned open behind us, and I heard Tito Bo's boots on the concrete before I saw him, keys jingling, already talking about the guy from the parts shop who still owed him forty bucks — and then he stopped talking. Completely. Mid-sentence, mid-step, like someone had hit pause on him.

I turned. My uncle was standing three feet inside the garage, keys still in one raised hand, staring at Kade with an expression I had genuinely never seen on his face before in my entire life. Tito Bo, who once calmly reset his own dislocated shoulder against a doorframe while telling me a joke about a nun and a mechanic. Tito Bo, who does not, as a rule, look afraid of anything with a pulse.

He went pale. Actual color-draining, blood-leaving-the-face pale, the keys lowering slowly to his side like he'd forgotten he was holding them.

"Bo," Kade said, with a small nod, entirely at ease, like he hadn't just walked a grown man's confidence right out from under him with nothing more than his own presence in the doorway.

"You're here," my uncle said, and his voice had a strange, careful weight to it, the tone you'd use on a bomb, or a bear, or something that might, if you said the wrong word, decide to stop being calm. "Again."

"Forearm needed looking at."

Tito Bo's eyes flicked to me, then to the bandage on Kade's arm, then back to me, and something passed over his face that I couldn't read — not quite fear for himself, something closer to fear on my behalf, protective and grim and entirely new.

"Mila," he said slowly, still not moving from the doorway, still not taking his eyes off Kade for more than a half-second at a time, "come here a minute."

"I'm kind of in the middle of—"

"Now, mija."

I have known my uncle for twenty-three years. I have watched him talk down armed men, stitch his own wounds without so much as wincing, calmly negotiate a debt collection with a guy holding a tire iron. He has never once, in my whole life, used that voice with me — low, urgent, careful, like he was trying not to spook something in the room.

I looked back at Kade. He was watching the two of us with an expression that wasn't quite guilt and wasn't quite amusement, something in between, like a man watching a storm he'd known was coming finally arrive.

"You should probably go with him," he said quietly. "I'll be here."

"You'll be here," I repeated, already peeling my gloves off, "because you don't actually have anywhere else you need to be, or because you're not planning to let me walk away from this conversation without answers?"

Something that was almost a smile touched the corner of his mouth. "Both."

I followed my uncle to the back office, and the second the door shut behind us, before I could even open my mouth to ask what the hell was going on, he grabbed both my shoulders and said, dead serious, in a voice I'd never heard him use before:

"Do you have any idea who you just stitched up?"