MATED TO THE BIKER WOLF

Chapter Four — Kaden

He came in Tuesday with a bike that didn't need fixing, and she clocked it in about four seconds flat.

"Your chain's fine," Wren said, not even bothering to crouch down and check it, just crossing her arms and watching him wheel it into the bay like she already knew exactly how this was going to go. "I adjusted it myself Thursday. It's not going anywhere."

"Front brake's soft."

"Your front brake is not soft. I test-rode this thing around the block before I handed it back to you." She tilted her head, and something in her expression sharpened, amused and unimpressed in equal measure, a combination he wasn't used to receiving from anyone, let alone a human half his size standing in a garage that smelled like her instead of fear. "You want to tell me what you're actually here for, or should I guess?"

This was the part of the assignment nobody had prepared him for. Not the watching — he was good at watching, had been trained on it since before he could grow a beard, could clock a room's exits and threats and lies in the time it took most people to say hello. It was that she made watching feel like being watched right back, every single time, like she was running her own quiet inventory of him while he ran his of her.

"Maybe I like the company," he said, testing the words, curious what she'd do with them.

"You don't strike me as a man who likes much of anything." She said it without heat, just an observation, the kind of thing that should have rolled off him and didn't. "You barely talk. You stand like you're waiting for something to go wrong. And you've been in my garage four times this week for a bike that keeps developing problems nobody but you can hear."

"Maybe I'm just careful."

"Maybe you're checking up on me." She said it flat, direct, no fishing in it, just laying the possibility on the workbench between them like a tool she wasn't afraid to use. "I found blueprints in my invoice drawer that I didn't put there. Somebody's been in this shop who isn't a customer. And you keep showing up with bikes that don't need me."

He kept his face still, the old discipline holding even as something under his ribs went sharp and cold. Blueprints. Silas hadn't mentioned blueprints. Which meant either his brother didn't know someone had left them, or somebody in the pack had gone around Silas's order entirely — and either possibility was worse than the last.

"I don't know anything about blueprints," he said, and it was true, which made it easier to say than most of what he'd have to lie to her about eventually.

"I didn't say you did." Her eyes stayed on his face, reading him the way she'd read the too-fast healing of his ribs the first night — careful, unflinching, refusing to look away from something that didn't make sense just because looking away would be easier. "I said somebody's watching this place. And you're the only new thing in it."

He should have deflected. He'd deflected harder men than her, walked whole interrogations back to nothing with nothing but patience and a well-placed silence. Instead he found himself saying something closer to true than he'd planned.

"Your club's business is good for us," he said, choosing each word like it was a stone he was setting into a wall that had to hold weight. "Ironclad likes working with people who don't ask questions they can't afford the answer to. You didn't ask, that first night. That's worth something to men who value discretion."

"That's not an answer. That's a very polite way of not answering."

"It's the only one you're getting today."

Something flickered across her face — frustration, maybe, or the particular kind of respect people gave each other when neither of them was willing to blink first. She didn't push further. She just turned back to the workbench, picked up a wrench she didn't need, and set it back down like the conversation was over on her terms, not his.

"Chain's fine. Brake's fine. Bike's fine." She said it like a door closing. "You want an excuse to hang around my garage, you're going to have to come up with a better one than parts that don't need replacing."

"Noted."

He should have left. He didn't, not for another twenty minutes, standing at the edge of the bay while she worked on someone else's carburetor and didn't ask him to leave either, the two of them existing in a silence that had no business being as comfortable as it was.

Reyna was waiting outside the clubhouse when he got back, leaning against her own bike with the particular patience of a sister who had decided a conversation was happening whether or not her brother wanted it to.

"You're spending a lot of time at that garage for a man who didn't want the job."

"It's the assignment."

"It's Tuesday, and you were there Thursday, and Sunday, and I'm guessing you'll find a reason to be there again by Friday." Reyna's eyes, gold-brown and sharp, studied him with an expression too knowing for his comfort. "Silas thinks you're working her for information. I don't think that's what's happening at all."

"Then what do you think is happening?"

"I think you found somebody who isn't scared of you, and you don't know what to do with that, because it's been eighteen years since anybody wasn't." She said it gently, which was worse than if she'd said it cruel, because gentle from Reyna meant she'd been thinking about this a while, turning it over, watching him closer than he'd realized. "You've spent your whole life making sure nobody gets close enough to want something from you they could lose. And this woman's not scared enough to keep the distance you need."

"Don't."

"I'm not trying to hurt you, Kade." Her voice softened further, and for a second she looked younger than her twenty-four years, looked like the girl who used to climb into his bed during thunderstorms when they were kids and their mother was still — he cut the thought off before it could finish, the way he always did, a door slammed on a room he didn't let himself walk into anymore. "I just don't want to watch you build another wall and call it duty."

He didn't answer that. He got on his bike instead, and Reyna let him go without pushing further, because that was the deal between them, the only one that had ever worked — she said the true thing once, and then she let him carry it in silence, because pushing harder than that had never once made him talk faster.

He took the long way home again. Habit, now, three nights running — the river road, the wind, the quiet. He was two turns from his own place when he caught it: a bike parked across the street from the garage, engine cooling, rider motionless in the dark in a way that wasn't casual, wasn't a man waiting for a friend. He knew that stillness. He'd trained men to hold it.

The colors on the cut caught the streetlight as the rider shifted, just enough.

Cross Riders. Vane's people.

Watching Wren's garage from the shadows, the same way Kaden had been ordered to watch it from the light.

He sat on his bike at the corner a long moment, engine idling low, and felt something settle in his chest that had nothing to do with orders and everything to do with the memory of a woman's steady hands wrapping a wound that shouldn't have needed wrapping at all.

Silas wanted to know if Vane was circling. He had his answer.

He just wasn't sure yet which side of this he was protecting her for.