Filthy and Dirty with the Bikers

2

Zoe

I spent the entire next day trying to fix a problem that didn't have a fix.

I started at the bank, sitting across from a loan officer named Greg who kept glancing at the soot still under my fingernails like it might be contagious. I explained the situation. Family business, three generations, temporary setback. Greg nodded along politely and then told me, in the gentlest voice possible, that no bank in the state would lend money against a garage that no longer existed.

"If you had the land," he said, "we could maybe talk. But without a structure, without inventory, without."

"Without anything," I finished for him. "Yeah. I get it."

I tried two more banks after that, and got the same answer with different wording. I called an old family friend who used to buy and flip properties, hoping maybe he'd front me something against future earnings. He laughed before he realized I was serious, then apologized and told me he couldn't justify the risk.

By early afternoon I'd made a list of everyone I could think of who might have money and a reason to trust me, and I'd crossed every single name off it.

I sat in my truck outside the third bank, gripping the steering wheel, and let myself have exactly two minutes of feeling sorry for myself. Then I made myself stop, because feeling sorry for myself wasn't going to rebuild anything.

My father spent thirty years in that garage. He proposed to my mother in that garage, badly, with grease on his hands and a wrench in his back pocket, according to the story he told a hundred times. He taught me to change my first oil filter before I was tall enough to see over the hood. That place wasn't just a business. It was the only inheritance that actually meant anything, and I was not going to be the Carter who let it disappear.

I didn't care that I had no plan. I didn't care that I had exactly one toolbox and a mountain of debt to my name. I was keeping it. I just had to figure out how.

I drove back to the garage around four, mostly because I didn't know where else to go. The wreckage looked worse in daylight, somehow. Less dramatic than the fire itself, but more permanent. I stood in what used to be the bay door, staring at the collapsed roofline, when I heard it.

Engines. Not one. Three.

The sound rolled in low and heavy, a deep growl that vibrated up through the ground before the bikes even came into view. I turned toward the driveway just as three motorcycles rounded the corner, riding in a tight formation like they'd done it a thousand times before.

They pulled to a stop in a neat, deliberate line, and for a second nobody moved. The engines cut out one by one, and the sudden silence felt louder than the noise had.

My stomach dropped. I didn't need an introduction to know who they were.

The first one swung off his bike like it cost him no effort at all. Tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in dark denim and a leather cut with a patch that read PRESIDENT stitched under a stylized crown. His hair was dark, cropped short, and his eyes were the kind of pale gray that made you feel like you were being calculated rather than looked at.

"Zoe Carter," he said. Not a question. "Ryder King."

The second one didn't bother dismounting slow. He swung his leg over in one sharp motion, tattoos climbing both forearms, a permanent restlessness in the way he moved, like his body didn't know how to be still. He looked at the wreckage of the garage, then at me, and something suspicious flickered across his face immediately.

"Jax," he said, short and clipped, arms crossing over his chest.

The third one hung back a beat longer than the others. Quieter. He had dark curling hair pushed back from his face and hands that looked like they'd spent a lifetime around engines, scarred knuckles, grease permanently worked into the creases. When he looked at the garage, it wasn't with suspicion. It was something closer to grief.

"Mason," he said, giving me a small nod.

I crossed my arms to hide the fact that my hands were shaking. "I know who you are. I know why you're here. I don't have the money, and I'm not going to pretend I do."

I braced myself. I'd heard the stories about this club. I expected threats. I expected Jax to get in my face, maybe Ryder to make some cold, quiet promise about what happens to people who don't pay their debts.

Instead, Ryder walked past me into the garage like he owned it.

"Do you mind?" he asked, already three steps in, not actually waiting for permission.

"Would it matter if I did?"

The corner of his mouth twitched, almost a smile, gone before I could be sure I'd seen it. "Not particularly. But I like to ask."

I followed him inside, furious and helpless in equal measure, and watched as he moved through the wreckage with a kind of slow, methodical attention. He crouched by the collapsed shelving. He studied the scorch pattern on the walls the same way the fire chief had.

Mason didn't wait for permission either. He crossed straight to what was left of the parts room, stepping carefully over debris, and started sorting through the ruined shelves with careful hands. I watched him pause, frown, then check again.

"Something wrong?" I asked.

"The Ohlins suspension kit," he said, not looking up. "Your father special-ordered it about six weeks ago. I remember because we get parts from the same distributor sometimes. It's not here."

"Maybe it burned."

"Everything else in that section is warped or melted, but I can see the outlines. Boxes, shapes in the ash." He finally looked up at me, dark eyes steady. "That kit isn't warped. It isn't melted. It's gone."

Jax hadn't moved from where he was standing near the entrance, arms still crossed, watching me instead of the wreckage. I could feel his eyes on me the entire time, weighing something, deciding something.

"Convenient," he said finally, "that the one thing missing is the one thing worth actual money."

"I don't know what you're implying."

"I'm not implying anything." His voice was flat, almost bored, but his eyes weren't. "Yet."

Ryder straightened up from where he'd been crouched near the back wall and turned to face me fully, the last of the daylight catching the sharp lines of his jaw. Whatever he'd been looking at, whatever conclusion he'd drawn, he kept it locked behind that unreadable expression of his.

"Your father owed us a great deal of money, Miss Carter," he said. "Money we intend to collect."

I lifted my chin, refusing to let my voice shake even though everything else in me was shaking. "Then collect it. I don't have it. Take the land, take whatever's left, I don't care anymore."

Ryder studied me for a long moment, long enough that I felt it in my spine.

"We're not here for the money," he said quietly. "Not yet."