Todos los capítulos de RIDE OR DIE: The Alpha's Reckless Queen : Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

He looked at me like I was a bill that had finally come due.Not confused. Not surprised, not really — more like a man watching a debt collector arrive exactly on the day he'd circled on the calendar, dreading and expecting it in equal measure. That unsettled me more than anger would have. Anger I could match. This — this careful, assessing stillness — I didn't have a name for yet."Ronan," someone called from further inside the compound, a woman's voice, sharp with warning. He didn't turn toward it. He didn't take his eyes off me at all."You've got a name," I said, when the silence had stretched long enough to feel like its own kind of insult. "I'd like to know it, since you already seem to know mine.""Ronan Vale." He said it the way some men say their rank — flat, factual, expecting it to mean something. And judging by the way the two men flanking the gatehouse straightened when he said it, it meant plenty. "You rode in here alone, at one in the morning, onto Reapers land, to accu

There's a rule about crying in front of insurance adjusters. I broke it.His name was Pete Hendricks, mid-fifties, the kind of tired, decent-looking man who'd clearly spent thirty years delivering bad news in a calm, practiced voice designed to keep people from doing exactly what I was about to do. He sat across my kitchen table — the one piece of furniture from the garage office that hadn't burned, salvaged because I'd taken the ledgers home the week before, some instinct I still don't understand — and told me, gently, that my policy wouldn't pay out."Not fully, at least," he said. "Arson exclusions are a nightmare, Rae. If there's any suspicion of a targeted fire — and given what the fire marshal's preliminary report is flagging — the payout's going to be tied up in review for months. Maybe longer.""I don't have months," I said. "I have a mortgage on a building that doesn't exist anymore and a payroll for two guys I haven't been able to pay since Tuesday.""I know." He did look li

I told myself I imagined the wolf. I did not imagine the second one.The garage rebuild was three days into permits and paperwork when I started noticing the small things — the kind of details you only catch when you've spent your whole life around men who work with their hands, who move through a shop with a particular economy of motion that either comes from years of practice or something else entirely.The Reapers moved like that. All of them. Not just Ronan, whose control I'd already clocked as unnatural, but every single man on that compound, down to the ones stacking lumber for the new garage frame. They passed tools to each other without looking. They cleared doorways in perfect sequence, like a dance nobody had bothered to choreograph because everybody already knew the steps. I'd worked construction crews before. Crews didn't move like that. Crews argued over who had the tape measure.And they never seemed cold. It was late October, the kind of biting, wet cold that made my fi

Moving in with werewolves felt like the world's worst home renovation deal.I signed no paperwork, because apparently pack law didn't run on paperwork, but I got a cabin at the edge of the compound anyway — small, clean, better furnished than my own place back home, which felt like a strange kind of insult given the circumstances. Someone had stocked the kitchen with groceries I actually liked, a detail I didn't examine too closely because examining it meant wondering how anyone here had learned my preferences in the span of a single conversation at a gate.I packed one bag. I told myself it was temporary, a practical measure until the garage was standing again, nothing more permanent than a hotel stay with better scenery and considerably worse implications. I did not let myself think too hard about the fact that I was moving in with an entire pack of werewolves on the strength of one man's word that it was for my own protection. Ronan walked me through it himself, pointing out the wo

He backed off like I was on fire. I've been called a lot of things. Never a house fire.I didn't examine the sting of that too closely, mostly because examining it meant admitting I'd wanted the kiss too, and admitting that felt like handing over a piece of leverage I couldn't afford to lose in a world where I still didn't fully understand the rules. So I did what I always did when a feeling got too big to look at directly: I buried it in work.It was easier than it should have been. There was always another measurement to check, another delivery to sign for, another decision about roofing pitch or electrical layout that needed a human eye to catch what the wolf-fast building crew occasionally missed in their hurry. I told myself the extra hours were about the garage. I didn't examine that lie too closely either.The garage rebuild was moving fast, faster than any human contractor crew could have managed, and I threw myself into every detail of it — pulling permits, reviewing the buil