Chapter 1

Chapter One – They Can’t Sell Me

The engine screamed under me and I loved it. It was a kind of feeling you didn’t think of loving, you just feel it, the way you feel your own heartbeat when it’s going too fast.

Pine trees went black and blurry on both sides. Headlight cutting a tunnel through nothing. I leaned into the curve and my knee dropped low, close enough to the guardrail that a wrong inch would’ve ended things right there, and the bike did what it always does, it answered me. Like it knew me better than most people bothered to.

Cold air got into the gap in my jacket collar. Bit at my throat. My fingers had gone numb on the throttle a while back, twenty minutes maybe, and I hadn’t slowed down once.

Tank told me not to run this road alone. So did half the garage. My father too, and pretty much every senior member who’d caught wind of the run. Border road, they kept saying. Too close to Iron Fang. Take an escort, Aurora. Wait till morning.

I loaded the parts myself. Left before sunset anyway.

Nobody escorts me. I’ve spent my whole life proving I don’t need a leash and I wasn’t going to start over a stretch of bad asphalt.

The higher I drove, the smaller the road felt. Pine trees crowded in until it almost felt like they were leaning over me. I drove past the first memorial without thinking much about it. A little cross sat against the rocks, with old plastic flowers tied to it. Time had washed the color right out of them. There was a name on it. I stopped reading that name years ago because I already know it by heart. A mile past, a motorcycle frame sat half-eaten by brush, burned out, rusted down to nothing some skirmish from before I was even born. Bullet holes in the road sign at the fork. Paint long gone off the metal.

This stretch belongs to nobody. Not Black Moon. Not Iron Fang. Just thirty years of dead men and a treaty line you can’t actually see on the ground.

I felt him before I heard the engine.

Hard to explain that feeling. Not fear, not exactly. More like the air changing pressure, some shift in the dark that your skin picks up before your brain does. Checked my mirror out of habit, not worry, and there it was. Single headlight, maybe a quarter mile back. Matching my speed almost exact.

Could have been nothing. Could’ve been someone sent to babysit me against orders.

I didn’t buy that for one second.

Opened the throttle.

Engine pitch climbed into something close to a shriek and the trees turned into one long black wall. Hit the next curve harder than I should’ve, back wheel skating over loose gravel for half a heartbeat, heart up in my throat before I caught it. Behind me the headlight didn’t fall back. Gap closed if anything.

Whoever it was, they could ride. That should’ve scared me more than it did.

Instead something hot lit up in my chest. Uncomfortably close to excitement, if I’m honest about it.

I cut hard right onto the fork trail the one most people don’t even know is there. Packed dirt and loose stone instead of road, branches whipping close enough to feel the air move off them. If they knew this trail too, they weren’t some wanderer who’d lost their way.

The headlight followed.

Gravel sprayed off my back tire fishtailing round a bend. Terrible second where I thought I’d lose the whole bike. Didn’t, though dropped my weight low, opened the throttle coming out of the turn, and heard the other engine do the same thing half a second behind. Like an echo that wouldn’t quit.

Narrow bridge came up fast. Wood slats rattling under the tires, black drop on either side. Crossed it at a speed that would’ve put Tank in an early grave watching, and on the far side I cut hard left off the trail into the trees. Killed my headlight the second I cleared the path.

Silence. Just my engine ticking as it cooled and my own breath, loud in my ears.

The other rider slowed on the bridge. Heard the engine drop in pitch. Uncertain now. Hunting.

I gripped the bars and waited till his shape came clear against the dark trees. Helmet turned slightly, like he was scenting the air for me instead of looking with his eyes.

Gunned it out of the treeline and hit him from the side.

We went down together, metal and limbs, both bikes skidding off into the brush. I was up before the pain in my shoulder even made itself known. He rolled up fast too. Too fast. More controlled than a person should be able to move after a hit like that, and he came at me before I’d found my feet properly.

Got a fist into his ribs. He took it like it barely mattered and grabbed for my jacket. I twisted free, drove an elbow toward his jaw, and he caught that one too redirected the force so I stumbled past him instead of connecting. This wasn’t some green prospect. He’d fought his whole life, you could feel it in how he moved.

“Who sent you?” I snapped, circling.

Nothing. Didn’t even breathe hard, best I could tell through the helmet.

I went low, tried to take his legs out from under him. He caught my wrist instead.

His hand closed around it and everything just stopped.

Not the fight. I mean something in my own chest seized up, some current running up my arm into my ribs, hot and cold together, hard enough my knees almost gave out. My wolf reared up inside me. Not with the fury I expected, something closer to recognition. Closer to fear, honestly, a kind I hadn’t felt once in twenty-five years of carrying her.

And for one impossible second I heard something.

Not a voice. Not words exactly. Something older than words. Some low pull from somewhere that wasn’t inside my own skull, and I felt it anyway, felt it exactly like a thought that wasn’t mine.

I yanked my arm back so hard I nearly went down.

He’d gone rigid too. Could see it even through the helmet the sudden stillness in his shoulders. Like he’d felt the same thing crawl through him and had no better idea what it was than I did.

Neither of us moved for a long moment. Heart slamming my ribs. The forest had gone quiet in a way that wasn’t natural, like even the insects were holding still.

Then, down the trail, headlights swept across the trees. Voices. Faint, calling something I couldn’t make out. More than one engine.

I think he heard it too because that broke the spell we had been in, he let go of my wrist immediately like it had burned him.

Thought for a second he’d just run, no words. Instead he stood there, helmet tilted my way, and I got the strangest feeling of being studied. Weighed. Like he was working out something about me that had nothing to do with the fight we’d just had.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

Voice low. Even. Controlled in a way that put a prickle straight up my spine. Not a threat exactly. Worse than a threat. Certain.

Then he swung back onto the bike, kicked it up, and was gone into the dark before I could get another word out. Before I could demand a name. Before I could do anything except stand there in the cold with my wrist still burning where his hand had been.

I watched the trail long after his engine faded out completely.

Nobody walks away from me. Nobody.

Still furious twenty minutes later, hauling the bike back onto the main road, running the fight over and over and coming up with nothing. No face. No familiar voice. Just that feeling. That impossible current. That whisper of something that wasn’t a voice at all.

Told myself it was adrenaline. Nerves talking after a fight that could’ve gone a different way.

Didn’t believe myself for a second. That scared me worse than the chase did.

By the time Black Moon’s gates came into view I’d almost talked myself into letting it go. Almost.

Then I saw the yard.

Every bike in the club parked outside, engines cold, rows of chrome catching the little moonlight coming through the clouds. Never happens this late. Senior members scattered in small clusters across the gravel and not one of them talking. That heavy, watchful kind of silence you only get right before somebody hands you bad news.

My stomach dropped before I’d even cut the engine.

My father stood at the top of the porch steps waiting.

I’ve seen Victor Blackwood stare down rival Alphas without blinking. Seen him stitch his own wounds after raids that should’ve killed him, no sound out of him at all. Never once in twenty-five years have I seen him look like this. Older. The lines in his face cut deeper than they’d been that same morning.

I swung off the bike, still buzzing on leftover adrenaline, still furious over the rider, still trying to shake off whatever that jolt in my wrist had been.

“You’re late,” my father said.

“Had some company on the road,” I said, sharper than I meant. “Didn’t know we were keeping a curfew now.”

He didn’t rise to it. Didn’t even blink. That told me more than anything my father always reacts.

I climbed the steps toward him. Silence in the yard pressed in tighter, every set of eyes on me now, every member watching like they already knew something I didn’t.

“What,” I said, slower this time. “What happened.”

He looked at me a long moment. Something cracked in his face, just slightly, just enough that I caught the fear underneath before he shut it back down.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, quiet, “you’re marrying Ryker Kane.”

I heard every word. Understood each one on its own, no problem.

Couldn’t make them mean a single thing put together.