MATED TO THE BIKER WOLF

Chapter Two — Kaden

The clubhouse smelled like motor oil and old smoke, and underneath that, the way it always did on church nights, it smelled like fear nobody in the room would ever admit to.

Kaden stood at the back of the room with his arms crossed and his ribs still knitting themselves shut under his shirt, and watched his brother take the head of the table like he'd been born sitting in it. In a way, he had. Silas Ashworth had worn the alpha's weight since he was twenty-two years old and their father's heart had finally quit mid-sentence at this same table, and eight years hadn't made the weight look any lighter on him.

"Say it again," Silas said. "Slower."

"She patched me up." Kaden kept his voice flat, the way he kept everything flat in this room, because flat didn't invite questions. "Didn't ask what I was. Didn't ask why the cut closed wrong on her table. Handed me gauze and told me my valve was walking out of the block."

A ripple of low laughter went around the table — Dutch, Marrow, a couple of the younger patches who thought a human woman calling out Ironclad's sergeant-at-arms on his own bike trouble was the funniest thing that had happened all month. Kaden didn't laugh. He watched Silas not laugh either, which mattered more.

"She's Ferris's mechanic," Silas said. "Marlowe's girl."

"She's Marlowe's only," Dutch put in, not unkindly. "Old Danny's been gone what, four years now, and she's kept that garage standing on spite and duct tape ever since."

Silas didn't answer that. His eyes stayed on Kaden, and Kaden felt the old, familiar drop in his stomach that meant his brother was about to ask him for something that wasn't going to be a request.

"Danny Marlowe kept our bikes running for twenty years and never once asked why they came back smelling like blood and full moons," Silas said. "He knew what we were. Question nobody in this room has ever answered is how much of that he told his daughter before he died."

"He didn't die," said a voice from the far end of the table — Reyna, arms folded, the only person in the room who ever said the quiet part out loud in front of their brother. "He was killed. Different word. You all keep swallowing the easy one."

Nobody argued with her. Nobody agreed either. That silence, Kaden had learned a long time ago, was how this pack handled anything that might cost them something to look at directly.

Silas let it sit a beat, then turned back to Kaden like his sister hadn't spoken at all. "I want to know what that girl knows. Whether Danny told her about us before Vane's people put him in a ditch off Route 9 and called it a blown tire. Whether she's sitting on something that gets used against this pack, against this territory, six months or six years from now when we're not braced for it."

"Then send someone who isn't already on her radar," Kaden said. "I bled on her floor two hours ago. She'll clock me across a parking lot."

"That's exactly why it's you." Silas leaned forward, forearms on the table, and for a second he didn't look like the alpha at all — he looked like the boy who used to talk Kaden down off the roof of the old grain silo when they were fifteen, the one person alive who'd earned the right to ask Kaden for things most people wouldn't dare. "She already knows your face. That garage is about to become the only shop in this county that can work on our bikes without asking questions it shouldn't. You start running our repairs through her. You're in that bay three, four times a week, easy, and nobody blinks, because that's just business."

"That's not surveillance. That's a leash with better manners."

"Call it what you want. I need eyes on her, close ones, and I need them to belong to somebody who won't spook if things get complicated." Silas held his gaze, steady, the alpha weight coming down now, unmistakable, pressing at the base of Kaden's skull the way it always did when his brother stopped asking as a brother and started ordering as pack. "Find out what she knows. Find out what Ferris told her, if anything. And find out if Vane's people are already circling that land, because if they are, we've got a problem bigger than one mechanic's memory."

The room waited. Kaden felt every set of eyes on him and hated, briefly and completely, exactly how visible he was in this club — how being the one everyone trusted to do the ugly work also meant being the one everyone watched do it.

"No," he said.

The word landed wrong in the room, too loud in the sudden quiet, and he watched Dutch and Marrow go carefully still, the way men went still around something they weren't sure was about to catch fire.

Silas's jaw tightened. "That an answer, or a request for me to ask nicer?"

"It's an answer." Kaden made himself hold his brother's eyes, made himself not think about a kitchen in a house that didn't exist anymore, a woman's hands teaching him to braid rope while she hummed something with no words, the way that same alpha weight — different alpha, same blood — had come down on their father's voice the night he'd made the call that got her killed. A human mate's a liability we can't carry. Cut it loose before it costs us more than her. Kaden had been twelve years old, close enough to hear every word through a door he wasn't supposed to be listening at, and he had understood, with the particular clarity children get about the worst thing that will ever happen to them, exactly what "cut it loose" was going to mean.

He'd been right.

"You want someone to get close to a human woman and use her," Kaden said, low, "find someone who hasn't already watched what this pack does with humans it decides it needs something from."

The silence after that was a different kind. Reyna's eyes flicked between the two of them, sharp, worried in a way she wasn't bothering to hide. Dutch studied the table. Silas's expression didn't change, but something behind it did — a flicker, there and gone, the closest thing to old grief his brother ever let show in this room.

"This isn't that," Silas said, quieter now. "I'm not asking you to hurt her. I'm asking you to find out if she's a threat before Vane decides she's an opportunity — because if he gets to her first, gets her trust, gets her talking, we lose control of what she does with whatever her father told her. I'd rather that control belong to us. To you." He paused. "I know what you think I'm asking you to become. I'm not our father, Kade. I'm not going to burn a human woman for our convenience. I need to know what she knows. That's the whole job."

"Jobs like that have a way of growing teeth."

"Then don't let it." Silas sat back, and the alpha weight eased off just enough that Kaden could breathe around it again. "You're the only one in this room I trust not to lose his head over her, one way or the other. That's not an insult. It's why it has to be you."

Kaden thought about pale eyes narrowing at him across a workbench, a rag twisted tight in steady hands, a voice that hadn't so much as flickered with fear looking at a wound that healed wrong in front of her. You never told me your name. He thought about how easy it would have been to keep walking and never look back, and how he hadn't.

"Fine," he said, and hated how much it cost him to say it, and hated more that some small, traitorous part of him didn't hate the assignment at all.

He didn't go back to the garage that night. He told himself it was strategy — give her a day to stew, come back tomorrow like he'd promised, let the club's business start flowing through her bay the way Silas wanted before he pushed for anything more. He told himself a lot of things, riding the long way back to his own place along the river road with the wind doing nothing to clear the smell of her out of his head — motor oil and something green, cut grass maybe, underneath the antiseptic she'd used on his ribs.

You never told me your name.

He'd told her anyway. That was the part that sat wrong the longest, longer than the assignment, longer than his brother's order or the old grief it had dragged up out of the dark. Eighteen years of never letting a human close enough to ask, and he'd handed a stranger his name in a doorway like it cost him nothing.

He knew exactly what it had cost him. He just hadn't decided yet whether he was going to let himself feel it.