Welcome to Iron Fang.
He said it again.
“Get off the motorcycle.”
Same flat voice as before. My hand stayed on the throttle. Ten riders around me, engines idling low. Not one of them shifted in the saddle.
Nobody reached for a weapon. Nobody said a word. My pulse wasn’t listening to any of that.
I opened the throttle anyway.
The bike lurched, gravel spitting off the back tire. For half a second I thought I had it, a gap on my left, two bikes apart, wide enough if I hit it right.
Didn’t make it.
They closed before I got there. No scrambling. Two riders slid together and sealed the gap, a third came up behind me, and just like that I was boxed in on every side. No shouting between them. No signal I could see. One second there was an opening, next second there wasn’t.
I killed the throttle before I put myself into somebody’s front wheel.
This wasn’t a trap. Traps are messy. This was drilled. Practiced. Run a hundred times on some other rider who thought they’d found a way out.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
I pulled the knife out from under my jacket. Held it low, where they’d all see it. A couple of the younger ones tensed up, hands drifting toward their belts.
Ryker didn’t.
He got off his bike. Started walking toward me. Slow. Both hands empty at his sides. No weapon. No order to his men. Just him, walking, the blade in my hand doing nothing to slow him down.
“Stay back,” I said.
He kept coming.
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
He stopped a few feet off. Close enough I caught the scar along his jaw in the grey light. Close enough to smell leather, cold air, something under both I didn’t have a word for.
“If I wanted you dead,” he said, “you would not have made it off that mountain.”
I believed him. Hated that I believed him.
“Who are you,” I said. Not really a question anymore. “How do you know my name. Why were you on that road. Why”
“My name is Ryker Kane.”
The rest of my sentence just stopped.
I’d heard that name spat like a curse my whole life. Carved into gravestones. Burned into the crosses lining the border road. My father had said it last night in a voice ten years older than the one he’d had that morning.
The man I was supposed to marry.
The man whose hand had been around my wrist twelve hours ago on a dark trail, and neither of us had said one word about what happened when it did.
Something went cold in my chest. Then hot. My body picked the only response it had left.
I went at him.
Don’t remember deciding to. Knife first, aimed for his ribs, all my weight behind it, the way Tank drilled into me a decade ago in that garage. Ryker caught my wrist before the blade got close, twisted, and the knife hit gravel somewhere behind us both.
I threw a fist at his jaw instead. He turned his shoulder, let it slide past, redirected the force so I stumbled forward and hit nothing. That made me angrier than getting hit would have.
I went low for his legs, same move I’d used on the mountain, and this time he caught both wrists at once. Pinned them between us. Every bit of fight drained out of my arms the second his skin touched mine.
The world went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with sound. Something reared up in my chest high, thin, scared, a noise I recognized without ever hearing it before. My wolf. Whimpering. Something under that, low, distant, answered it. Not a voice. Not a growl either, not exactly. Something in between that came from nowhere I could point to.
Ryker’s hands went rigid.
He let go first.
Neither of us said anything about it. Standing there breathing harder than the fight should have caused. Same as the mountain road. Neither of us mentioned that either.
“You’re leaving with us,” he said.
“I would rather die.”
He looked at me a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes and disappeared before I could name it.
“Good,” he said.
“Good?”
“I would never marry someone who surrendered that easily.”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
He turned to one of his men. “Load her bike. Careful with it.”
I figured they’d toss it in a truck bed like scrap. Instead two riders wheeled it onto a flatbed, checked the straps twice, one of them running a hand along the tank like it mattered to him personally.
“Why bother,” I said.
He glanced at the bike, then at me. “It’s yours.”
Walked off before I could ask what that meant.
They put me on the back of his bike for the ride in. No rope. No chains. Just two feet of space between his spine and mine and nowhere left for me to go. I gripped the edge of the seat the whole way and kept my hands off him, jaw locked against the cold and everything else I wasn’t going to think about.
The road climbed higher than I’d ever gone on Iron Fang land. Trees thinned out. Air went sharp, carrying woodsmoke and oil and something wilder under both.
Then the gates came into view.
I’d pictured a yard. Some bikes. A clubhouse with a bar and a handful of wolves who’d look at me like livestock walking through the gate.
That is not what rose out of the mountainside.
Steel gates three stories high. Watchtowers cut straight into the rock. Behind the gates, workshops in neat rows, garages full of bikes gleaming under work lights, training grounds where a dozen wolves stopped mid-drill just to watch us roll past. Hundreds of them. All turning at once. Nobody cheered. Nobody jeered. Just watched, the way you’d watch a storm front you couldn’t do anything about.
The gates started opening. Hinges groaning under weight that had nothing to do with wood.
Something heavy settled into my chest.
We rode through. Engines bouncing off rock on both sides. Rows of wolves watching us pass, faces giving away nothing.
The gates shut behind us.
The sound rolled down through the whole valley, a deep metal boom I felt in my back teeth. Something in me understood it before the rest of me caught up.
I wasn’t a guest.
Ryker stopped the bike in the middle of the yard, cut the engine, swung off without looking back at me. I sat there a second too long, staring at the walls, at all those eyes still fixed on me, at the gate shut tight behind us with no way back through it that I could see.
He started walking toward the biggest building without waiting to see if I’d follow.
Then, quiet, not turning his head
“Welcome to Iron Fang.”
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