Semua Bab Alpha Bikers: Bab 41 - Bab 50

RILEYThey gave their ruling at nine in the morning.Full Luna standing, contingent on bond completion within one year. Twins' heirs classification confirmed — first and second in line to Blackthorn Alpha authority. My half-blood parentage noted in the record and classified as a pending inquiry rather than a disqualification.That last part was Elder Reyes. I found that out later from Grayson, who found out everything, always, through a network of contacts I had stopped trying to map. Reyes had argued for forty minutes in closed deliberation that unknown parentage was a procedural matter, not a disqualifying condition, and that the pack's tendency to treat unknown parentage in half-bloods as automatically suspect was a practice with a history that did not reflect well on anyone in that room.Chen had been the last holdout. Reyes had said something to her, privately, in the last ten minutes of deliberation that Grayson didn't know the content of. Chen had changed her vote.I thought ab

RILEYDecker arrived at three-seventeen on a Thursday in a car that cost more than most people's houses, with two representatives and the kind of easy authority that comes from never having been told no by anyone who mattered.I was in bay one, elbow-deep in the engine of a '71 Norton Commando restoration. Hunter was after school and theoretically doing homework at the workbench in bay three, which in practice meant he'd done his homework in fifteen minutes and was now shadowing whichever mechanic would tolerate his commentary. Luna was at the corner table she'd claimed as her workspace, which currently held her marine biology book, a notebook where she was taking organizational notes on the book's contents, and Gerald.Knox was leaning against the side wall of bay one with a coffee and no particular expression.Decker walked in and took inventory. You could see him doing it — the quick read of a room that any Alpha does, cataloguing hierarchy and threat and opportunity. He was maybe

RILEYI thought about it for two weeks.Not in the way where you lose track of things — I kept working, took the twins to school, handled a full bay of work including a restoration that Mara had already invoiced ahead of actual completion, which was Mara's way of creating accountability through aggressive paperwork. I thought while I worked, which was when I did my best thinking, the physical task and the mental task running parallel on separate tracks.What I landed on was this: I was angry. Not devastated, not grieving in the way I might have expected — I'd never known this man, couldn't miss someone I didn't have. But I was angry in a specific, clear-eyed way, the anger of someone who has just understood that a thing was taken and they didn't know it was being taken at the time.My father had been killed — probably, with high probability, given what Grayson had found and what Reyes's silence implied — because he'd tried to change something. Because he'd looked at the way the pack t

RILEYI got to the facility at five-thirty. Knox met me in the parking lot, and Hunter came out the front door in his regular clothes — the shift back had apparently been faster than the first shift out, because he'd had motivation — and ran across the lot and hit me at full speed with both arms around my waist.I held him.He was warm the way children always are after significant physical exertion, and he smelled like himself plus something new, something with more depth to it, the beginning of the particular scent adult wolves carry. I held him for a long time and he let me without his usual commentary about the appropriate duration of hugs."You okay," I said into the top of his head."Yeah." His voice was muffled against my jacket. "The paws were a lot bigger.""Grayson says that happens.""Were Dad's paws big."I looked at Knox over Hunter's head. Knox looked back."Very big," Knox said. "Biggest in the pack for about six months. Grayson has evidence.""I'd like to see the eviden

RILEYMara found out about my father on a Tuesday.I hadn't planned on telling her — not yet, not before I'd fully processed it myself. But Mara had twenty years of reading my silences and she'd been watching me for three weeks with the compressed-lips expression and finally she walked into the shop on a Tuesday and said: "What happened."I told her.We were on the floor of bay two again — our floor, the floor of serious conversations, backs against the workbench with coffees between us. She listened through the whole thing without interrupting, which she only did when something was genuinely significant, and when I finished she was quiet for a long time."He was thirty-two," she said finally. "When he died.""Yes.""Younger than we are now.""Yes."She turned the coffee cup in her hands. Mara's hands are always precise — she was an accounting major before she became my business partner and everything she does with numbers and objects carries a kind of exactness. "And Reyes has known