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Her jaw tightens. “I don’t know him.”

“But you know what he is.”

“Everybody around here knows what bikers are.”

“That’s cute. Wrong, but cute.”

“I have work to do.”

She tries to step around me.

I block her without touching her. “You got a Reaper watching you outside my club’s school, and you think I’m moving because you said my name hard?”

“I think you’re moving because I’m not your business.”

There is that word.

Business.

Useful. Cold. A place men like me hide all kinds of things.

“You’re on Grave Prowlers property,” I say. “That makes you club business.”

“Convenient.”

“Usually.”

“I don’t need protection.”

“People who don’t need protection usually ain’t pale and lying in a parking lot.”

“I’m not lying in a parking lot.”

“You’re lying while standing in one.”

Her phone buzzes in her apron pocket. She looks down before she can stop herself, and her whole face changes.

I don’t mean to look. That is a lie. I absolutely mean to look.

The text is from an unknown number.

I like the new name, Sweet. But I liked what you answered to better.

Her thumb locks over the screen too late.

The air turns thin around us.

My temper wakes slow, stretching in my chest like something with claws. “Who is he?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody got a name?”

“Everybody does.”

“Sweet.”

She flinches, not from fear of me, but from the name. From the way I say it like it already belongs in my mouth. Like it belongs to me, which it doesn’t. Which it won’t.