OWNED BY THE BIKER KING

Chapter 8

That night, after the heavy, suffocating conversation in the living room ground to an end, Luca quietly stood up from the leather couch. He paused, adjusting the French cuffs of his black shirt with meticulous precision.

“I have an early board meeting tomorrow,” he muttered calmly, his voice flat and professional. “Don’t cause any more trouble tonight.”

Ryder didn’t bother to respond. He remained completely motionless in the dim perimeter of the living room, his expression unreadable beneath the low golden glow of the chandelier.

Without another word, Luca turned and headed upstairs, his leather shoes making no sound against the grand staircase. The massive mansion slowly fell back into its default state of freezing silence.

A few minutes later, Luca reached the double doors of his master suite, his hand stretching toward the handle before he abruptly stopped.

His tablet.

He had left it on the mahogany coffee table downstairs, alongside the confidential files he had been reviewing. Letting out a quiet, irritated sigh at his rare carelessness, Luca turned back toward the sweeping staircase.

But the moment his polished shoes reached the top landing—he froze.

Downstairs, the heavy silence had been broken. Ryder was no longer alone.

Elena was standing near the edge of the living room, looking small and fragile in Ryder's oversized sweater. Ryder sat across from her, his entire posture leaning forward, listening with an intensity Luca had never seen before as the girl spoke in a broken whisper.

Luca retreated half a step back into the structural shadows of the upper hallway. A rare instinct told him not to interrupt. Instead, he remained silent in the darkness, his sharp eyes mapping out the scene below.

“My parents warned me about him,” Elena’s weak, trembling voice drifted up through the open floor plan. “But I was blind. I chose him over my own family... and I lost everything.”

Luca’s stoic expression slowly shifted. From this angle, the dim lighting caught the sharp contours of Elena’s face, casting away the damp hair that had masked her features earlier. A strange, icy jolt hit Luca’s chest. There was something hauntingly, deeply familiar about the curve of her jaw and the shape of her tear-stained eyes.

She looked like someone he used to know. Someone from a lifetime ago that he couldn’t quite place.

His analytical eyes studied her with predatory focus, while below, Ryder continued to listen in absolute silence.

Then, Luca noticed something even more unsettling.

Ryder.

It was the way his younger brother was looking at her. The way his broad shoulders had dropped their usual defensive posture. The way his notoriously cold, lethal face had softened into something tender—almost desperate—around this stray girl.

Luca’s brows knitted together in the dark hallway.

Rare. Beyond rare.

For years, ever since the tragedy that shattered their family, Ryder had never allowed a single soul to get close to him. He had built fortress-like walls around his heart, preferring the violent chaos of the streets to human attachment. Yet somehow... in the span of a few hours, this fragile civilian girl had slipped past every single defense Ryder possessed.

“Who exactly are you?” Luca murmured quietly to himself, his voice nothing more than a phantom breath in the corridor.

The longer he stared at Elena’s face, the tighter the grip in his chest became. He couldn’t shake the impossible feeling that she wasn’t a stranger. She was someone they had known before. Someone profoundly important. Someone who used to belong to them.

But that was statistically impossible... right?

Downstairs, Elena’s quiet sobs slowly faded as Ryder stood up, closed the distance between them, and gently pulled her into his massive arms.

Luca’s piercing eyes widened slightly in the shadows.

Unbelievable. The ruthless Ryder Kane was holding a crying girl like she was the most fragile glass in the world.

Without a word, Luca stepped away from the edge of the staircase. He no longer cared about the tablet or the confidential corporate documents downstairs. And he certainly wasn't going to shatter whatever miraculous moment was happening between them.

A faint, uncharacteristic smirk touched Luca’s lips before disappearing back behind his cold mask.

Turning on his heel, Luca walked back down the long hallway toward his private quarters, leaving Ryder and Elena alone in the heavy silence below.

Once inside his bedroom, Luca didn’t sleep. Instead, he walked over to the antique wooden desk in the corner. His long fingers paused for a fraction of a second before opening a hidden, locked drawer at the very bottom.

He reached inside, bypassing a luxury watch and a sleek handgun, and pulled out an old, slightly faded photograph that had been buried for years.

Luca held the photo up against the warm light of his desk lamp. In the picture, two young boys stood side by side, their arms slung protectively around a little girl with bright, laughing eyes. They were all soaked to the bone, laughing beneath a heavy summer downpour.

Luca’s eyes slowly darkened into obsidian, his breath catching painfully in his throat.

Because the little girl in that faded photograph... had the exact same eyes as the girl crying downstairs.

To Be Continued