CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS BIKER KING

Chapter 8 — Deflection

Marlowe

Water still running. Wrap still dangling from one hand. A President leaning against the other side of a door thin enough to hear my heartbeat through, and I had maybe three seconds before silence started counting as an answer all by itself.

"Nightmares." It came out steadier than I expected, given that my whole body had gone rigid enough to crack. "Since I was a kid. Nothing exciting."

"Since you were a kid." He said it slow, testing the shape of it the way he tested everything — a wrench, a lie, a prospect's nerve. "Funny. You don't strike me as someone who scares easy."

"Everybody scares easy at three in the morning."

A pause on the other side of the door, long enough that I started composing my second lie in case the first one needed backup. Then, quieter: "Four."

"What?"

"It's four in the morning. Not three." Something in his voice that might, on a less terrifying man, have almost been amusement. "If you're going to lie to me, Finch, get the details right. It's the details that give people away."

My stomach dropped somewhere near the drain. "Wasn't lying about the nightmares."

"Didn't say you were." A shift of weight against the frame, unhurried, in absolutely no rush to leave. "Said get the details right. In general. As advice."

*Advice.* I stood there dripping, wrap forgotten in my fist, trying to figure out if I was being threatened, tested, or — impossibly, insultingly — mentored, and settled on the deeply unhelpful conclusion that it might be all three at once.

"I'll keep that in mind," I said, and even I heard how thin my voice had gone.

Another silence. The water kept running, wasteful and loud, covering nothing anymore because there was nothing left to cover except my own held breath.

"Finch." My name, or the version of it he knew, low enough that I had to lean toward the door to catch it. "I'm not going anywhere on this. Not tonight. Not next week. Sooner or later you're going to tell me what actually keeps you up." A beat. "I'd rather it be sooner. For both our sakes."

Footsteps, finally, moving away down the hall — unhurried, deliberate, a man who'd said exactly as much as he meant to and not one word more.

I didn't move until I heard his door click shut at the far end of the hall. Then I sank down against the bathroom wall, wrap still in my hand, and let myself shake for exactly thirty seconds before I made myself stop.

*For both our sakes.* Not a threat. I turned the sentence over twice, three times, looking for the trap in it, and didn't find one. Just something worse — a promise. The kind of thing a man like Alaric Steele didn't say lightly, and didn't say twice.

---

Nova was already awake when I slid back into the room, sitting up in her bunk with her hair a disaster and one eye barely open. "You're up early even for someone avoiding a bathroom line."

"Couldn't sleep."

"Uh-huh." She squinted at me properly, taking in whatever was left on my face after four in the morning with the King of the Ironclad Wolves leaning against a locked door. "You look like you saw a ghost. Or worse. Did King catch you sneaking snacks from the kitchen? Because Cricket did that once and I've genuinely never seen a grown man cry that fast."

"Nothing like that."

"Sure." She flopped back down, already half-asleep again, entirely unbothered. "Whatever it is, tell me at breakfast. I need coffee before I can process anything more dramatic than which snoring guy to smother first."

I lay back on my own bunk and stared at the ceiling, wrap still damp in my hand, and thought about the exact, deliberate weight King had put behind *sooner or later* — like a man laying the first stone of something he already knew the shape of, long before I did.

Four days ago I hadn't had a name that was mine. Now I had a countdown I hadn't agreed to, ticking down toward a conversation I had no idea how to survive.

I closed my eyes. Sleep didn't come. It hadn't, really, since the moment his fingers first caught my chin in that recruitment line — and lying there in the dark, listening to two strangers snore three feet away and one very specific, very dangerous man breathe easy on the other side of a wall, I understood, with a clarity that scared me more than anything Blackfang had done yet, that *sooner or later* was going to arrive a lot sooner than I wanted it to.