The Alpha's Runaway Mate

Chapter 2 — Running From a King

I rode through the night and into the next morning without stopping.

The rain came hard around three in the morning, sheeting sideways off the highway and soaking through my jacket in minutes. My hands were cold on the grips. My back ached from the hunched position, every muscle protesting the hours I'd put on the road already. And low in my belly, that new warmth pulsed steadily, quiet and persistent, like something reminding me it was there whether I was ready to deal with it or not.

I already knew what it meant. I'd known the moment it happened back in that room. I just couldn't afford to think about it yet. Thinking about it meant stopping, and stopping meant Ronan's people could close the distance.

I crossed pack boundaries one by one. Ironclaw territory gave way to neutral land, which thinned out into human territory, the kind of sprawl where wolves rarely ventured, where strip malls and gas stations sat under flat gray skies, and nobody knew what moved through the forests at night. I stopped twice. Once to eat something I stole from a vending machine in a rest stop bathroom, hands still shaking as I punched the buttons. Once to sit on the side of the road with my helmet off and breathe cold air until the shaking in my chest slowed to something manageable.

Days blurred into each other. I moved constantly, avoided eyes, stayed off main roads where cameras were mounted. I slept for a few hours at a time in the bike's shadow or pressed against a concrete wall somewhere dark and unobtrusive. My wolf was restless, always close to the surface, always turning her nose into the wind and cataloging what was behind us.

On the fourth day, she heard the rogue before I did.

He came out of the trees at the edge of a service road I was cutting through, and he wasn't subtle about it. A male, half-shifted and running on hunger and bad instinct, smelling of starvation and the particular desperation of a wolf too long without a pack. His eyes fixed on me with the flat focus of something that had already decided I was prey.

I was exhausted. I was nauseated from the pregnancy, which hit hardest in the late afternoon. I had a cramp in my left side that hadn't gone away in two days, and I hadn't slept more than three hours at a stretch.

I fought him anyway.

It was messy and close and ugly, with no grace to it and no room for any. He was bigger and I was faster, and I was running on something close to pure desperation mixed with a fury that hadn't found anywhere else to go. I used a rusted fence post pulled from the ground, the edge of the road, my elbow and my knee and my teeth. When it was finally over he was down and I was bleeding from a gash along my forearm, breathing in sharp pulls, kneeling on gravel with my vision tilting at the edges.

That was when the bikes rolled in.

Five of them, coming from the east, moving slowly and deliberately in a way that told me they'd seen everything and were making a choice about how to approach. Not law enforcement. Not pack hunters. Something else entirely. They wore dark leather, no visible colors until they were close enough for me to read the patch. A wolf's skull, stitched in silver thread. Below it, two words: NIGHTFALL RIDERS.

The lead bike stopped maybe ten feet away from where I was kneeling.

The man who climbed off it was tall and lean, with a jaw that looked like it had been broken at least once and had healed mean. He pulled his helmet off and looked at me with pale gray eyes that didn't do what human eyes were supposed to do when they landed on a bleeding woman crouched over an unconscious man on an empty back road.

He looked knowing. Like this was a scene he recognized.

"You're a long way from home," he said.

"I don't have a home." I straightened up slowly, keeping my injured arm close to my body.

He studied me for a moment. Then looked at the rogue on the ground. Then looked past me at the motorcycle parked twenty feet back, Ronan's motorcycle, which was not a subtle piece of machinery and which anyone who ran in these circles would know on sight.

"You know what that bike means to the people who'll be looking for it," he said. Not a question.

"That's my problem."

"Could be." He tilted his head slightly to one side. "Or you could let it become ours."

"You don't know me."

"I know what you are." The gray eyes stayed steady. "I know what you're hiding. And I know you're not going to make it another three days on your own in the shape you're in right now."

I didn't answer that. There wasn't a good answer.

He took my silence for the response it was.

"Here's how it works with us," he said, tone even, like he was reading from a list he'd recited before. "You ride in, you pull your weight, you keep your mouth shut about what doesn't concern you. You do that, we protect you. You leave when you want, nobody stops you. You betray us …" He let the silence finish the sentence.

"Jax." One of the riders behind him said the name low, a single word that carried a warning in it.

"She's in," Jax Calder said, still looking at me. "Aren't you."

I looked past him at the road ahead. Dark miles and empty sky and the kind of exhaustion that had gotten into my bones. I looked at the small pulse of warmth low in my belly that had no say in any of this and was counting on me anyway.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm in."

I didn't know, climbing back onto the motorcycle and slotting in behind their formation as they turned east, that I was riding into something they had already prepared for me. That Jax's gray eyes had held no surprise in them when they found my face. That somewhere behind me, in the territory I'd left burning, a tracker was already on his knees in front of a war council.

The man's voice was careful and low. "We found her scent. She's heading toward human biker territory."

Ronan stood at the head of the table. The silence in the room stretched for a long moment before he finally spoke. His voice came out flat and absolute, with no heat in it at all, which was somehow worse than anger.

"Then we burn it to the ground."