Bound to the Wolves, The Blackwood Pack, Book 1

The carburetor was being a bitch.

Jade Grayson crouched in the gravel of a county road that didn’t deserve the name, her fingers buried in the guts of her 1983 Honda CB750, and willed the engine to cooperate. It had been coughing for ten miles, that particular stutter that meant either the fuel mixture was off or something had gotten into the line, again. She’d cleaned the damn thing two weeks ago in a motel parking lot outside Tulsa, but the bike had developed opinions lately. Opinions about staying places.

“You’re not dying today,” she muttered, not to the bike. Never to the bike. The bike was just metal. She talked to the engine like she talked to everything, mechanically, practically, like the machine could hear her and was just being stubborn. “Choke’s fine. Float’s fine. Come on, you piece of...”

The afternoon heat pressed down, thick and humid, turning the air into something she could chew. August in whatever-state-this-was. She’d crossed the border yesterday, barely noticed the sign. They all blurred together now, state lines, town limits, the invisible boundaries she crossed every few weeks like clockwork. Two weeks in Tulsa. Ten days in Little Rock. Three weeks outside Dallas, which had been a mistake. Too long. She’d started to learn the waitress’s name at the diner, started to anticipate the trucker’s order at the gas station. That was when you ran. Before they learned yours.

She wiped her forehead with her forearm, leaving a streak of grease across her skin. Her hair had escaped its tie an hour ago, falling in black strands around her face, and she didn’t bother pushing it back. The sun burned the back of her neck through her flannel. She should have worn the lighter shirt, but the flannel had pockets, and pockets meant carrying everything she owned without a bag that could be grabbed.

The bike coughed again, a wet, rattling sound that made her teeth clench. She knew that sound. She’d been running from that sound for eleven years, and now it was going to strand her a road that didn’t show up on maps, in a county she’d picked because it had no cameras, no tolls, nothing that could leave a trail.

Her hands knew the work. Muscle memory from a thousand motel parking lots, a thousand borrowed tools, a thousand sunrises spent with her fingers in someone else’s engine. The carburetor came apart under her touch, and she checked the float bowl, the jets, her mind cataloging problems and solutions while another part, the part she kept locked down, the part that knew things before she did, whispered that she’d done this before. Made problems where there were none. Created delays she could pretend were mechanical instead of something else entirely.

She ignored that part. She always did.

The sound reached her first. Tires on asphalt, slow and deliberate. Not the rush of someone passing, not the roar of a truck barreling through. A vehicle pulling onto the shoulder behind her, gravel crunching under weight, the tick of a cooling engine, silence.

She didn’t look up. Her shoulders tightened anyway, the old instinct flaring, exit, weapon distance, but she kept her hands steady on the wrench. The road stretched empty in both directions, just her and the bike and whatever had stopped behind her. No witnesses. No cameras. The isolation that had felt like safety ten minutes ago suddenly felt like a trap.

Not a cop. Anyone but a cop.

Cops meant questions. Questions meant databases. Databases meant Walter, eventually, if someone looked hard enough. If someone cared to look at all.

The footsteps were heavy. Confident. The stride of someone who owned the ground he walked on.

“Need help?”

The voice was gravel and authority, deep enough to vibrate in her chest. Jade kept her head down, her focus on the carburetor, her heart doing something strange in her ribs. Not fear. Fear she knew. Fear had a taste, metallic and cold. This was something else. Something warm that had no business being here, in the middle of nowhere, with a stranger’s boots in her peripheral vision.

“I’ve got it,” she said. Short. Clipped. The voice she used when she didn’t want to be remembered.

“Carburetor?”

She looked up then. She had to, he was crouching, it put them eye level, and the world tilted.

He was big. Not just tall, though he was that, broad shoulders filling out a tan uniform shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, forearms corded with muscle. Dark hair, dark stubble, eyes the color of storm clouds before they broke. A sheriff’s badge on his chest, glinting in the afternoon sun.

But it wasn’t the badge that stopped her breath.

It was the scent.

She’d spent eleven years ignoring her wolf, burying it so deep she sometimes forgot it existed but the animal surged up now, sudden and violent, clawing at the inside of her skin. Mine, it said. Him. That one. The smell of him hit her like a physical thing, pine and smoke and something darker, wilder, something that made her fingers loosen on the wrench and her thighs press together without her permission. Her mouth watered. Her skin felt too tight, too hot, like she was burning from the inside out.

No. No, no, no. This wasn’t happening. Not here. Not now. Not with a sheriff in a territory she’d never meant to enter.

His nostrils flared. His eyes, those grey, terrible eyes, widened, just a fraction. The muscle in his jaw jumped.

He smelled it too. Whatever this was. Recognition. Biology. Fate.

“I’m fine,” Jade said, and her voice came out rough. She cleared her throat, looked back at the engine, and forced her hands to move. “Just a clogged jet. Five minutes.”

“You’ve got tools?”

“Always.”

“Most people don’t carry a full kit on a bike.”

“Most people aren’t me.”

She felt him watching her work. It should have made her skin crawl, being observed, being seen, but instead it felt like warmth on her back, like sunlight after years of cold. She focused on the carburetor, on the specific resistance of the screw, on the familiar comfort of mechanical problems. Machines were honest. They broke, you fixed them, they ran. No hidden agendas. No ownership.

Her hands were scarred. She knew he could see them, the pale lines across her knuckles, the burn mark on her thumb, the calluses from years of gripping wrenches too hard. She didn’t hide them. Couldn’t even if she’d wanted to. They were maps of her survival, written in healed flesh.

She worked methodically, ignoring the way her pulse hammered in her throat, ignoring the heat that pooled low in her belly when she caught another drift of his scent. The jet was clogged with sediment, she cleaned it with a rag from her pocket, reassembled the pieces with practiced efficiency, her movements precise despite the tremor in her fingers. She’d fixed bikes with broken ribs, with concussions, with Walter’s men watching from the doorway. She could fix this one with an Alpha sheriff crouched three feet away, smelling like everything she’d ever denied herself.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“Through.”

“Through to where?”

“Just through.”

A pause. She could feel him weighing her deflection, deciding whether to push. Most men pushed. Most men took silence as a challenge, as something to conquer.

“Name’s Elias,” he said. “Elias Black. Sheriff of Blackwood Territory.”

Of course he was. She’d seen the sign ten miles back. Blackwood: Population 3,400. Sanctuary for the Strange. She’d almost turned around then. Almost.

“Jade,” she said. Just Jade. No last name. No history. “You always interrogate stranded motorists, Sheriff Black?”

“Only the ones who look like they’re running from something.”

Her hands stilled. Just for a second. Then she was moving again, tightening the final bolt, checking the fuel line, her heart hammering against her ribs. He doesn’t know. He can’t know. No one knows.

“Not running,” she said. “Passing through. Like I said.”

“Passing through usually looks different.”

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“Less like you’re waiting for someone to come up behind you. Less like you’re sleeping with one eye open.”

She stood then, wiping her hands on her jeans, meeting those storm-grey eyes deliberately. He was still crouched, which put him below her for a moment, and she knew it was intentional. A show of non-threat from a man who couldn’t hide the threat in his bones. He was Alpha. She knew it without needing the confirmation of scent or status, knew it in the way he held himself, coiled and careful, power leashed so tight it vibrated. A man who could command her compliance with a word, if he chose to. A man who, she suspected, was choosing not to.

“You psychic, Sheriff? Or just nosy?”

“Observant.” He rose slowly, unfolding his considerable height, and the sun caught his eyes again. “Comes with the badge. And the territory.”

“Well observe this.” She kicked the starter. The engine caught, roared, settled into a smooth purr that sounded like triumph. “See, fixed. No help required.”

She swung her leg over the seat, settling into the familiar groove of the leather. The bike was old, scarred, reliable. The only thing she’d owned that had never betrayed her. The only thing that had never tried to own her back.

Elias stood slowly. He wasn’t smiling, his face looked like it forgot how, sometime long ago, but something had softened around his eyes. Interest, maybe. Or concern. Or that same biological recognition that was currently making her wolf whine and pace and want. The bond, or whatever this was, pulled at her like a hook in her ribs, urging her toward him, toward the promise of his warmth and his weight and the safety she knew was an illusion.

“Blackwood’s got a good diner,” he said. “If you’re hungry. Decent mechanic shop too, if that carburetor gives you trouble again.”

“Not staying.”

“Didn’t say you were.”

They looked at each other. The moment stretched, humming with something Jade didn’t have words for. Her wolf was pressing, insisting, closer, touch, stay, but she shoved it down with years of practice, of denial, of survival. She’d buried the animal so deep she’d forgotten what it felt like to want something, to need someone, and now it was rising up, starving, desperate, making her hands shake on the grips.

“Thanks for the offer,” she said. “But I’ve got miles to make.”

She throttled the engine. It responded, eager, ready. She didn’t look at him again, couldn’t, not without doing something stupid like asking his name again, like memorizing the line of his jaw, like wondering what it would feel like to be seen by someone who looked at her lie she was real and not just useful. Not just a healer. Not just an asset to be leased.

Jade pulled onto the asphalt, the bike surging forward, the wind cutting away the scent of pine and smoke and him. The sudden absence of his smell felt like loss, like grief, like a limb she’d never had suddenly amputated. She didn’t look in the mirror. Not immediately. She made herself wait, made herself focus on the road, on the yellow line, on the sign ahead that read Blackwood – 2 miles.

Don’t look back. Never look back.

The words were ritual. Prayer. The only thing that had kept her free so far. She’d whispered them in motel rooms at 3 AM, hearing footsteps that weren’t there. She’d carved them into her own mind, deeper than any scar, until they were the only truth she trusted. Looking back meant wanting. Wanting meant weakness. Weakness meant chains.

But her hand twitched on the throttle, and her eyes flicked to the mirror, just for a second.

He was still standing there. In the middle of the empty road, watching her go, his figure getting smaller and smaller until she crested the hill and lost him entirely. Still watching. Still waiting. Still there.

Her chest ached. Her wolf howled, mournful, wrong.

She rode toward the sign, toward the town, toward the diner where she’d stop just long enough to eat, to refuel, to remind herself that she didn’t stay places. That she didn’t get attached. That the only thing waiting for her if she stopped running was Walter, and chains, and the thing she’d been before she learned how to disappear. The girl who healed because she was told to. The girl who didn’t know she could say no.

The bike purred beneath her, steady and true.

She didn’t look back again.