IVY
The man behind the desk had three weeks’ worth of excuses and exactly twelve minutes left to produce the money.
I gave him ten.
His name was Lenny Rusk, and he ran a collision shop off Route 14 where the cars came in dented and left with different VINs. The office smelled of stale coffee, hot metal, and the lemon air freshener hanging from a rusted filing cabinet. Underneath it all lingered the sharper scent of nervous sweat.
Lenny leaned back in his chair as if we were discussing a late utility bill. “Business has been slow.”
“Then you shouldn’t have taken the shipment.”
His smile tightened. He was thick through the chest, with grease embedded in the creases of his hands and a faded Saints of Ruin tattoo crawling up his neck. The outlaw club had held this patch of highway before the Iron Wraiths took it from them. Some men adjusted to losing territory. Others spent years pretending they hadn’t.
“I didn’t take anything,” he said.
“You accepted twelve crates from us and delivered nine.”
“Counting error.”
“Three crates of silver ammunition don’t get misplaced behind the canned peaches.”
His eyes shifted toward the garage.
There it was.
The office door stood open behind me, giving me a clean view of two mechanics working beneath a lifted pickup. One was wiping the same wrench for the third time. The other kept glancing toward the rolling door, waiting for someone who hadn’t arrived yet.
Neither man concerned me.
The heartbeat behind the parts shelves did.
Another came from inside the restroom, too slow and deliberate to belong to anyone using it. Beyond the cinder-block wall, boots scraped over gravel near the rear exit. Three men had been listed in our intel. I could smell six, possibly seven if the sour trace of cheap aftershave drifting down from the storage loft was fresh.
Someone had given the Wraiths bad numbers.
I set a folded invoice on Lenny’s desk. “Nine minutes.”
He stared at my gloved hand. “Vale sends a woman to collect now?”
“Vale sent Reaper.”
That wiped the smile from his face.
My road name had done half my work for years. Men heard Reaper and imagined someone taller, uglier, maybe male. By the time they understood their mistake, I usually had a blade beneath somebody’s jaw.
Lenny recovered enough to sneer. “New president ought to keep a tighter leash on his girls.”
I drew my pistol and shot the framed photograph beside his head.
Glass burst across the wall. In the garage, the wrench clattered to the concrete.
“Eight minutes,” I said.
The man near the truck moved first.
He lunged through the doorway, relying on size rather than sense. I stepped aside, caught his wrist, and used his momentum to drive his face into the metal filing cabinet. Before he hit the floor, the second mechanic reached beneath the workbench.
I threw the chair into his knees.
He crashed backward. The hidden man came around the shelving with a tire iron raised, but I ducked beneath the swing and buried my elbow in his ribs. Bone gave under the impact. He folded with a strangled curse, and I took the tire iron before it struck the floor.
Lenny dove for his desk drawer.
I brought the iron down across his knuckles.
He screamed.
“You should’ve used the nine minutes.”
The restroom door flew open. A gun appeared before the man holding it did, which made disarming him almost insulting. I trapped his wrist against the doorframe, twisted until his fingers opened, then drove the butt of his own weapon into his temple.
He dropped at my feet.
The rolling door rattled upward.
Late-afternoon light spilled across the garage, outlining three more men outside. One carried a shotgun. Another held a length of silver chain looped around his fist, its metallic scent strong enough to burn the back of my throat.
Seven men, then.
I had been right.
I kicked the restroom gun beneath a tool cabinet and backed into the main garage as the first shot tore through the office wall. Buckshot peppered the cinder blocks. The truck overhead gave a groan on its hydraulic lift, and the mechanic by the workbench began dragging himself toward the control panel.
I swung the tire iron into his wrist and hit the red release button.
The lift dropped eighteen inches with a violent hiss. Everybody looked up.
Everybody except me.
I drove my boot into the nearest man’s knee, turned as he fell, and used his body to block the silver chain. The links wrapped around his shoulder. He howled as they touched skin, confirming what his scent had already told me.
Wolf.
Not Saints of Ruin, then. Hired muscle.
The shotgun tracked toward me again.
An engine roared outside.
It came low and hard, the unmistakable thunder of a Wraith-built Harley being pushed well past what the narrow service lane allowed. The bike shot through the open door, black paint flashing beneath the fluorescent lights. Ronan leaned it nearly sideways, his boot skimming the concrete before he brought the rear wheel around.
The motorcycle slammed into the shotgunner and sent him crashing into a stack of tires.
Ronan killed the engine.
For half a second, the only sounds were the ticking pipes and Lenny whimpering in his office.
Ronan took in the lowered truck, the men on the floor, and the silver chain still smoking against a wolf’s jacket. His dark gaze settled on me.
“You started without me.”
“You weren’t invited.”
A man rushed him from behind.
I tossed the tire iron. Ronan caught it without looking, turned, and drove it into the attacker’s stomach. The same motion carried him toward the workbench, where he kicked a rolling tool chest into the path of another gunman.
I saw his plan before he glanced at me.
I grabbed the hanging air hose and yanked. The brass coupling tore free, releasing a shriek of compressed air. The gunman flinched, Ronan swept his legs out, and I caught the pistol that skidded across the floor.
It had always been like this between us.
Ronan moved as if violence were a language he’d learned before English, and somewhere along the way, I’d picked up the same dialect. He didn’t tell me to duck. I didn’t warn him before firing past his shoulder. We trusted each other’s aim more easily than we trusted most people’s promises.
The final attacker bolted for the rear exit.
Ronan caught the back of his jacket, but the man twisted free and came up with a silver-edged knife. He slashed toward Ronan’s ribs.
I fired.
The bullet struck the attacker’s shoulder, spinning him into the hood of a stripped Camaro.
Ronan looked at the hole in his leather vest, then at me.
“You let him get close.”
“I knew where my gun was.”
His mouth shifted at one corner, not quite a smile. “Good to know your concern has limits.”
“It has a waiting list.”
The humor vanished when he stepped closer. He had recently cut his dark hair shorter, though it was already curling near his collar from sweat. Blood streaked one side of his jaw, probably someone else’s. The new PRESIDENT patch on his vest still looked too clean beside the weathered Iron Wraiths insignia.
His attention dropped to the thin line of red on my forearm.
“What happened?”
“Paper cut.”
“That paper silver?”
I pulled my sleeve over the wound. “Occupational hazard.”
His expression hardened, but he didn’t reach for me. Ronan had learned years ago that grabbing me without warning was a good way to lose a finger.
Behind us, Lenny tried to crawl through the office doorway.
I crossed the garage, stepped on his ankle, and waited until he stopped moving.
“Where are the missing crates?”
“I don’t know.”
Ronan crouched beside him. Unlike most men his size, he didn’t need to raise his voice to make a room feel smaller.
“You stole from my club during my first week as president,” he said. “That makes me wonder whether you’re stupid or whether somebody promised to protect you.”
Lenny’s face went gray.
Ronan noticed it too. “Who?”
“No one.”
I searched the nearest attacker while Ronan continued asking questions. The man’s wallet held four hundred dollars, a fake driver’s license, and a motel key from across the county. Inside his jacket, my fingers closed around a small leather pouch.
The moment I opened it, the garage disappeared.
Pine smoke.
Frozen earth.
Wolfsbane burning in a ceremonial bowl while dozens of familiar faces watched me kneel alone. I could almost feel wet snow soaking through the knees of a white dress, and beneath it came the older pain—the invisible tearing beneath my ribs as the boy I had loved severed what fate had placed between us.
Ashgrove.
My hand closed around the object in the pouch.
A carved bone token bit into my palm. The crest burned into its surface was one I hadn’t seen in seven years: an ash tree beneath a crescent moon.
Something deep inside me shifted, lifting its head after a very long sleep.
“Ivy.”
Ronan’s voice reached me from a distance.
I looked up. He was standing now, watching me with none of the easy violence he’d brought into the garage. His nostrils flared once. He could hear the change in my heartbeat, perhaps even smell the fear I had spent seven years teaching myself not to feel.
“What is it?” he asked.
Before I could answer, the injured wolf by the Camaro laughed.
Blood coated his teeth, but triumph brightened his eyes as he looked at the token in my hand.
“You really don’t know, do you?”
Ronan crossed the space between them and pressed a boot against the man’s wounded shoulder. “Choose your next words carefully.”
The wolf groaned, yet his gaze never left mine.
“The crates were bait,” he said.
My fingers tightened around the Ashgrove crest.
“Bait for what?”
“For you, Reaper.” His smile widened. “Their Alpha wants his rejected mate back.”
