MATED TO THE BIKER WOLF

Chapter Three — Wren

By Thursday, Wren had stopped being surprised every time a black-and-chrome bike rolled into her bay, and started being surprised by how much that bothered her.

It should have felt like a win. Three Ironclad bikes in one week was more steady money than she'd seen since spring, enough to cover the part of Gus's paycheck she'd been quietly shorting herself to make and still leave something for the electric bill that had a red stripe across the top of it now. She should have been grateful. Instead she found herself watching the door every time the bell over it rang, cataloguing which rider it was and how long he stayed and whether his eyes did the thing — the lingering, cataloguing thing, like he was reading her shop instead of waiting on it.

"You're doing the face again," Birdie said, not looking up from the flash sheet she was inking at the counter, seventeen years old and somehow the only person in the building who never seemed rattled by anything.

"What face."

"The one where you're pretending you're not watching the door." Birdie capped a marker, examined a half-finished wolf sketch with the critical eye of a kid who took her art more seriously than she took most things, including her own safety, which was a whole separate worry Wren kept in a box she didn't open during business hours. "They tip good, at least. That guy yesterday left forty on a chain adjustment that took you twenty minutes."

"That guy yesterday also stood in the doorway for ten minutes after the chain was done, not talking, just standing there."

"Maybe he's shy."

"He is many things. Shy is not one of them." Wren wiped her hands and glanced toward the back office, where Gus had gone quiet over the parts invoices twenty minutes ago in a way that had nothing to do with arithmetic. He'd been doing that all week — going still whenever the word Ironclad came up, like it was a name he was bracing to hear attached to bad news. She'd chalked it up to nerves about the money at first. She was starting to think it was something else.

She found him with a pen he wasn't using, staring at a stack of invoices he wasn't reading.

"Gus."

He startled, which he never did — Gus Ferris had spent thirty years around men who dropped wrenches on their own feet and pipe bombs of language when they did, and nothing rattled him, not usually.

"You keeping track of these?" She nodded at the invoices, all Ironclad, all paid in cash that smelled faintly of leather and gasoline. "Because it's a lot of business, all of a sudden, from a club that used to send one bike a month if we were lucky."

"They're good customers." His voice was careful, the particular careful he used when he was choosing words like they were live wires. "Pay on time. Don't haggle."

"Since when did you learn to lie so bad?" She said it light, teasing, the way she'd have said it to her father, and watched Gus flinch at the comparison like she'd slapped him. That wasn't nothing. She filed it away next to everything else that had felt like not nothing this week.

"Your dad ran their bikes for twenty years, you know." Gus set the pen down, finally, and looked at her with an expression she couldn't place — grief, maybe, old and worn smooth like a stone in a pocket. "Never asked questions. Never had a reason to."

"And now?"

"Now his daughter's the one they're bringing their bikes to." Gus stood, slower than he used to, joints complaining audibly in the quiet. "I'm going to grab the parts order from the truck."

It wasn't an answer. It was the shape of a man walking away from a conversation before it could ask him anything he'd have to lie about, and Wren let him go because pushing Gus when he got like this never worked — she'd learned that the hard way, in the first bad months after her father died, when grief had made both of them brittle enough to shatter on contact.

She went back to the invoice drawer instead, meaning to file the week's paperwork, and found the drawer already half-open in a way she hadn't left it.

The blueprints were underneath the invoices, folded in thirds, old enough that the creases had gone soft and pale. She almost mistook them for her father's original garage plans — she had a set just like them somewhere, filed away with the deed — until she unfolded them and realized the survey lines didn't match the shop as it stood now. This wasn't a blueprint of the garage her father had built.

It was a survey of the land underneath it. Property boundaries, elevation marks, a hand-drawn notation near the back of the lot in handwriting she didn't recognize — not her father's careful block print, not Gus's looping cursive. Someone else's hand, someone who'd cared enough about the exact contours of her half-acre to walk it and mark it, years before she was born, judging by the paper's age.

She hadn't put these in the drawer. She was certain of that the way she was certain of very few things this week — she'd have remembered old survey documents, would have asked her father about them years ago if she'd ever seen them before.

Someone had left them here. Recently. In a drawer she opened every single day, which meant whoever it was hadn't been hiding the documents from her at all.

They'd been showing her something.

She stood there a long moment with the old paper going soft under her fingers, listening to Birdie's marker scratch against the flash sheet up front, to Gus's truck door slam out in the lot, to the ordinary sounds of an ordinary Thursday that didn't feel ordinary at all anymore, and thought about the man with the too-fast healing wound and the too-still eyes, and the second man in her doorway who'd wanted to know who else had been there.

Who else was here.

Not what happened. Not are you hurt. Who else.

She refolded the survey along its old creases, careful not to tear paper that had already survived longer than she had, and slid it into the bottom of her own bag instead of back in the drawer.

If somebody wanted her to find this, she wasn't going to let them see that she had.