The Biker's Hidden Heiress

Chapter Five — Things That Don't Have Names Yet

I do not look out that window again.

That is what I decide the moment I turn away from Kael Draven and his folded arms and his eyes that seem to know things they have no business knowing.

I decide I am not going to look.

I last about forty minutes.

The second time I glance out he is gone. The motorcycle is gone. The wall where he was leaning is just a wall again, empty and ordinary, like he was never there at all.

I do not know why that bothers me more than his presence did.

I finish the lunch shift, help Dolly clean up, and earn enough cash to cover three days in Margaret's room with a little left over. Dolly folds it into my hand at the end of the shift the way mothers hand children lunch money and tells me to come back at five for the dinner shift if I want it.

I want it.

I walk back to Margaret's in the late afternoon light and I sit on the edge of my bed and I do what I have been avoiding all day.

I call Marcus.

Not because I want him back. I want to be very clear about that, at least to myself. I call him because I left a city where I had an apartment and a job and a life and I need to know what I am dealing with practically. Whether my name is still on the lease. Whether my things are safe.

He answers on the second ring.

"Sera." His voice is careful. Rehearsed. He has been preparing for this call.

"I am not coming back," I say. I keep my voice even. "I just need to know about the apartment."

A pause. "Where are you?"

"That is not relevant."

"Sera, I was worried—"

"Marcus." I say his name the way you say a word when you need someone to understand you are not going to repeat yourself. "The apartment."

He tells me what I need to know. The lease is in his name. My things are untouched. I can come get them whenever I am ready. He sounds sorry. He sounds genuinely, completely sorry and it does not move me at all which tells me something important about how I actually felt about him underneath all the plans and the routines and the comfortable life we had built together.

I tell him I will arrange for my things to be collected and I end the call.

Then I sit with the phone in my hand and I wait to feel something devastating.

It does not come.

What comes instead is something quieter. A kind of sad relief. Like putting down a bag you have been carrying so long you stopped noticing how heavy it was.

I set the phone on the bed beside me.

Outside my window the sun is going down over Raven Creek and turning everything gold and ordinary and I think about what Cole said before he left the diner.

Stay inside after dark tonight.

I think about the way he said it. Not dramatic. Not trying to frighten me. Just a plain, practical warning from someone who knows this place better than I do.

I think about what kind of town needs that kind of warning.

I go back for the dinner shift.

The diner is busier in the evening than it was at lunch. Different crowd. Louder. A group of men at the large table in the back who work at what Dolly tells me is a timber yard two miles outside of town. A young couple near the window who are clearly on a first date and handling it with varying levels of success. An older woman eating alone with a book propped against the salt shaker.

I move between tables and I keep my hands busy and I am doing fine.

Then the door opens and three men walk in.

Not Black Reapers. I can tell that immediately, though I cannot explain how I know. Something about the way they carry themselves is different. Less settled. Like men who do not belong to a place but are looking it over carefully to decide if they can take something from it.

They take a table near the door.

I give them a moment and then I walk over with menus.

The one closest to me looks up and I feel it. That particular feeling of being looked at too carefully. Not the way Kael looked at me, which was unsettling in its own way. This is different. This is the feeling of being assessed. Measured.

"What can I get you?" I ask.

"Coffee," the one nearest to me says. His voice is flat. His eyes move over my face in a way that makes me want to take a step back. "Three cups."

I write it down.

"You new here?" he asks.

"Just started today," I say, keeping my voice light.

"Where did you come from?"

I look up from my notepad. The question is too direct for a stranger making small talk. Too deliberate.

"The kitchen," I say pleasantly. "I will get your coffee."

I turn and walk back to the counter.

Dolly is watching from the kitchen doorway. Her easy smile is gone. She looks at the three men and then she looks at me and she says nothing but she moves to where the telephone sits on the wall and she picks it up.

She makes a call that lasts about ten seconds.

I pour three coffees and bring them to the table and I do not make eye contact with any of the three men and I do not answer any more questions.

Twelve minutes later the door opens.

Cole comes in first.

Then two men I have not seen before, both in Black Reapers jackets, both built like they have never once lost an argument.

Then Kael.

He does not look at me.

He looks at the three men by the door.

The three men look back at him.

Something passes between them that has nothing to do with words. A whole conversation conducted entirely in stillness. The kind of conversation that has history and weight and consequences behind it.

The man who asked me questions puts both hands flat on the table and stands slowly.

"Draven," he says.

"Marsh," Kael says. Just the name. Nothing else.

Marsh looks at his two companions. Then he pulls money from his pocket and sets it on the table beside the untouched coffees.

"We were just leaving," he says.

"Yes," Kael says. "You were."

They leave.

The door swings shut behind them and the diner goes back to its normal noise slowly, like a record starting up again after someone lifted the needle.

Kael finally looks at me.

I look back at him.

There are a hundred questions sitting in my chest right now, pushing against my ribs, demanding answers. Who were those men. Why did they ask about me. What is happening in this town and what does any of it have to do with a silver ring and a secret my mother took halfway to her grave.

But the diner is full of people and Dolly is watching from the kitchen doorway and this is not the moment.

Kael holds my gaze for just a second longer than necessary.

Then he turns and walks back out with Cole and the two others and the door closes quietly behind him.

I stand at the counter with a coffee pot in my hand.

The older woman with the book looks up at me over her reading glasses.

"You get used to it," she says mildly, and turns a page.

I look at her.

"Does it happen often?" I ask.

She considers this. "Often enough," she says. "But tonight was different."

"Different how?"

She looks at me over her glasses with the patient expression of someone who has lived long enough to recognize things other people cannot see yet.

"Kael Draven came himself," she says simply. "He does not usually do that."

She goes back to her book.

I go back to work.

But I carry those words with me for the rest of the shift like something I do not yet know what to do with.

Kael Draven came himself.

He does not usually do that.