001

Rae’s POV

“Rae Voss. For the final time. Did you murder the Alpha’s son or did you not?”

The question was like a kick to my ribs.

I was on my knees in the middle of the main garage of the compound. My wrists were zip-tied behind my back with silver-laced cable. It was burning all the way through to my bone. Motor oil had been absorbed by my jeans. The buzzing and flickering of the fluorescent lights above cast a sickly yellow sheen over everything.

Before they dragged me in here, my Luna patch was torn off my jacket.

My chin went up.

“I would never do that,” I said. “I did not.”

The garage exploded.

Bikermans were like hoardings, possibly thirty or more, along the wall between motorbikes and tool cabinets. Some wore their vests stiff with rage. Those who weren’t with their arms crossed looked empty. Several people could not even make eye contact with me as I looked at every face.

I had prepared a meal for these guys. Sewn up their injuries. Supported the bike riding at a time when no one returned home clean.

All that didn’t matter.

They had already voted, that I’m guilty.

I repeated myself again. "I didn't do it," I repeated until my voice was hoarse and echoed against the rafters. I said it while everything was silent and when it was noisy. I kept repeating myself, saying the same thing over and over again.

But no one budged.

The Iron Hollow MC had that thing. Truth was only noise once the gavel went down.

I looked past the Sergeant-at-Arms, the Road Captain, and the line of patched members, who had called me sister three weeks ago.

I saw him in the back.

Colt Voss sat on his blacked-out Harley like a man done with the verdict. His haircut was perfect, with lights shining on it, arms crossed, his jaw was locked so tightly that the muscle in his cheek twitched.

My husband.

Our bond fell silent instantly. Similar to static when the signal is dead.

I searched his face for some flicker of light, it was a place I used to live in, looking in the corners for something familiar but there was nothing.

It was merely grief hammered into rage and left to set.

Five years alongside this man on the field. I adhered to rules, did scrapes, made sacrifices for the club in a way that’s never made it into minutes. I had encased away the woman I used to be The solitary runner who had no one to answer to. I learned the rules to soften my edges. I wore his name on my back.

He sat there like a stranger.

“Colt.” I kept my voice steady. “You know me and what I’m capable of doing, you know that I will never murder a child.”

Someone at the back chuckled.

“Know you, you ask?” A sound echoed across the garage. “That seems to be the trouble, darling. We do know you and what you are capable of.”

The plastic zip ties restricted my fingers.

“Before she came here, she first ran with the Reapers.”

“I heard she took out three of their enforcers herself.”

“People used to refer to her as the Ghost.”

Each one land d clean and deliberate, the way old wounds are pressed to check if they still hurt. There are stains that never fade.

Just for one second I closed my eyes.

I had been that girl. In the years before I became Luna of Iron Hollow, I’d ridden difficult roads, in a world that did not tolerate hesitation, and where mercy was not an option. I have done things that make me stay up at night.

However, I abandoned this lifestyle on a roadside outside of Tulsa and never turned back again.

On the day I took the Luna patch from Colt, I chose differently.

But they never forgot what I had been before.

“She is quiet and It’s a bit weird,” someone stated. “Feeling guilty already?”

A short, broken sound escaped my mouth. Hardly a chuckle.

“You’ve evidently never trusted me,” I said. “You put up with me because I was useful… because I was the one who kept the club alive when half of you were distant bleeding out unable to sign.”

The Treasurer, a man I had previously helped out of two counties, directed his gaze at the floor.

Suddenly, someone moved near the front.

I sensed her presence even before seeing her.

Dessa.

My younger sister emerged from between two bikes, arms hugging her body, dressed all in black as if she had planned my funeral. Her eyes were puffy. A frenetic energy coursed through her.

Those hands used to reach for me, in each dark room.

I took care of her after our parents died on a run that went wrong. She was shielded and well-fed from all dangerous creatures lurking around.

She was now looking at me as if I were one of them.

I spoke quietly to her, “Dessa, how did you get here?”

She looked up. “Stop lying, Rae.”

Coming from her, the words hit different.

“You know what I am,” I said. “I do not cause kids any harm.”

"I know what you were," she said, her voice cracking slightly at the edges. “I also know you didn’t really stop.” She turned toward the room. “She had reason. The boy proved that Colt moved on. That she was not enough for him and the pack. Do you really think a woman like her accepts that?”

I felt my knees smack against the concrete.

“You’re lying…” I whispered.

"You hated him," she said, her voice getting hoarse. “The boy was living proof that while you were still taking his name, Colt found someone else. You weren't able to give him a child, Rae. You are well aware that you couldn’t. And when the baby showed up…”

"I wanted that child" The words escaped my lips. "I cleared out the back room. I bought the damn crib. I loved him like he was my own.”

Colt got off from his bike.

The silence of the garage was deafening when his machine suddenly turned off.

“You told yourself that,” he said, his voice low and controlled in that way that’s always been more frightening than shouting. “You are pretty good at lying.”

I moved my head. “You don’t believe that.”

“I believe what I know.” He walked toward me, boots slow and even on the concrete floor. “You couldn’t give this club an heir. You couldn’t give me one. And when my son arrived, you saw the end of your place here.”

“That is not…”

“I know what jealousy does to women like you.” He stopped in front of me. “I know what you’re capable of when something threatens what you think belongs to you.”

The hit came fast.

My head turned to the side, ears ringing, copper in my mouth. I jolt upwards as I catched the floor with my shoulder, hands zip-tied uselessly behind me. His hand finds my throat. He lifted me just high enough that the soles of my boots hit the dirt.

“How on earth did I bring a murder to the club?” The words that came out were fractured, like it cost him. How did I put my patch on a woman who would do this? You killed my child, Rae!”

I felt something inside my chest tear loose.

Like a bolt that had been the wrong size the whole time.

Last night he had pulled me close in the dark and said ‘you’re the only thing I’ve ever been sure of.’

But now…

I didn’t scream or beg for his mercy.

Instead, I started laughing… quiet, sharp and entirely done.

“Then hear me,” I said through the blood on my lips. “Because I will not say it again.”

I held his eyes without flinching.

“I free you, Colt Voss. Your name, your bond. All of it. You are nothing to me from this second on.”

The mate bond snapped.

It felt like a knife pulled clean out of the ribs… the bond breaking hurt worse than the bonding, but at least the blade was out.

Colt dropped me.

He stumbled back half a step, something crossing his face that I refused to read.

I hit the floor and stayed there for exactly as long as it took to remember how to breathe.

They put me in the storm cell beneath the back lot. Old cinder block walls, a single bare bulb, chains bolted into the floor that bit into my wrists when they locked them. Blood had dried along my jaw by then. My shoulder throbbed from the fall.

I sat in the dark and waited for the emptiness.

It didn’t come.

What came instead was rage. Clean and hot. Like finding something valuable in the wreckage.

“You always were too good for this club.”

The voice came from the far corner where the light didn’t reach.

I went still.

A figure moved out of the shadow… tall, leather-clad, with the kind of stillness that belongs to men who have never needed to announce themselves. His eyes caught the bare bulb’s light. Green and sharp. Amused in a way that had no business being in this room.

I knew him.

Everyone on this side of the Rockies knew him.

“Killian Cross,” I said flatly. “Alpha of the Northline Brotherhood.”

The most feared independent MC in five territories. The man who’d taken down the Deadwood Cartel from the inside without losing a single one of his own. His name got used to end arguments.

What the hell was he doing in Iron Hollow’s cell?

The corner of his mouth lifted. “You remember.”

“I remember every threat I’ve ever met.”

His gaze moved over me… not the way men usually looked at women in chains, but the way a mechanic looks at an engine left out in the rain. Calculating and allmost angry on my behalf.

“They forgot who you were before you tried to be someone’s good,” he said.

“And you rode all this way to remind me?”

“I rode all this way to offer you a choice.” He crouched down to my level, forearms resting on his knees, close enough that I could see the road dust still on his jacket. “Ride out with me tonight. Or stay and take whatever they’ve got planned for sunrise.” His eyes didn’t move from mine. “You were never meant to rot in a place like this, Rae.”

The bulb buzzed overhead.

I looked at the chains on my wrists.

Then I looked at him.