All Chapters of Alpha Bikers: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

RILEYThe coffee shop on my corner does a very good almond flat white and plays music at a volume that allows you to exist near other people without having to interact with them, which is why I go there every Tuesday morning before the shop opens and sit in the back booth and drink coffee and read or think or just exist quietly for forty-five minutes before the day starts.She sat down across from me on a Tuesday.I hadn't seen her come in. That was the first thing I noticed afterward — that she'd moved through a busy coffee shop without triggering the low-grade awareness I'd been running since Knox arrived, the way you learn to notice things when your nervous system has decided that unexpected visitors are a category of event worth tracking.She was beautiful in the specific way of women who have been told so their whole lives and have organized their presentation around it without being obvious about it. Dark hair, dark eyes, a camel coat that cost more than my first car. She set he

KNOXI was writing at midnight for no particular reason. Just — sitting at the kitchen table after the twins were asleep with a notebook open, working through my thoughts the way I do, long-hand, the way my fourth-grade teacher taught me when she figured out I processed things better with a pen in my hand than out loud.I wrote about the lake. About the way it had felt to have my chin on his shoulder on the ride back and not move it. About Hunter's face when he learned the pull-back trick, that specific pride of a kid who's just discovered something his body can do. About Luna naming Grayson's stuffed wolf Brick and appointing it as a getaway driver.I stopped and looked at the page.The handwriting was doing something I didn't like. Getting looser the further down the page I got, more slanted, more — his. Like the muscle memory of writing things you feel was the same muscle memory I'd built reading fourteen letters, and the influence was still there somewhere in my hand.I closed the

DAMIENThe number that kept coming back was four-point-three million.Four-point-three million dollars across three development deals that had failed in sequence over eighteen months, each failure feeding the next one, the way these things do when you're leveraging one position to fund the bridge to the next and the whole structure is load-bearing debt and one bad quarter somewhere in the chain. He knew it was bad when the second deal fell through. He'd known it was critical when the third one collapsed eight weeks before Knox Blackthorn appeared in Riley's parking lot and turned the board completely over.He hadn't known the twins were Knox's. That was true, and it mattered to him that it was true, though he was aware that it only mattered to him.He sat in the hotel suite — he was staying at the Four Seasons because appearances were still a category of expenditure that could not be cut without cutting the thing that made the expenditure possible — and looked at the call log on his p

KNOXThe archivist's name was Petra. She'd been with the pack for thirty years — longer than me, longer than my father's tenure — and when she called me I knew before she said anything that whatever she'd found was the kind of thing that changes the shape of the past.She said: "During the estate audit. Documents in a sealed file. I need you to know about them before they go into the official record."She sent them encrypted.I read them once. Then I read them again. Then I put the phone face-down on the kitchen counter and stood in the empty penthouse and was very, very still for a long time.My father had contracted a tracker named Belos nine days after the rejection. Belos specialized in surveillance and containment — a euphemism that, in pack terms, meant he made problems go away quietly. The documents specified Riley's route. Her expected trajectory. Instructions to ensure she did not reach Seattle intact.The brake failure. Her first apartment's electrical fire, the one that too

KNOXI chose a Tuesday because Damien liked structure and I wanted him off-balance before we started.He arrived expecting something hostile — I could see it in how he came through the door, shoulders set, the expression of a man who's rehearsed an argument and is hoping you'll follow the script. I was sitting at the kitchen counter with coffee and my laptop open and the particular quality of stillness that I've been told is the most unsettling thing about me in a room."Knox," he said."Sit down, Damien."He sat.I turned the laptop to face him.The dossier was complete — every debt, the three failed development deals, the rogue faction contacts, the shell companies, the property filing on Riley's shop, the wire transfer from Elder Reth's intermediary. Forty-seven pages of documentation that Grayson had assembled in seventy-two hours because Grayson is extraordinary at his job and because Damien Voss is not as careful as he thinks he is.I let him read the summary page. Watched his f