Chapter 4: Mine?

Ryder's wolf did not let him sleep.

By midnight he had given up trying. He pulled on a jacket and walked the complex perimeter, something he had done since he was a teenager when the thoughts got too loud. The circuit at night was quiet in a way that had its own texture. Cooling engines. The faint chemical smell of track rubber. Stars above the grandstands with no crowd noise to compete with.

He walked and tried to think.

Mine.

He had heard his wolf say that word once before in his life, when he was twenty two and his wolf had fixated briefly on a female from the Ashford Pack. That had passed after two weeks and turned out to be proximity, not bond. He had never given it much thought since.

This was not the same.

This was not proximity. He had been in the same room as Evelyn Hart for a combined total of less than two hours and his wolf had not quieted since that first moment in the paddock. It was a low-frequency pressure behind his sternum, constant and insistent, like a signal looking for a receiver.

He had read enough about fated mate bonds to know the markers. The immediate recognition. The pull that did not diminish with hostility. The wolf's certainty that operated completely independent of what the man thought or wanted.

His wolf did not care that her father's article had killed Damon Blackthorne.

His wolf did not care about anything except her.

Ryder stopped walking at the far end of the circuit, where the back straight met the second chicane. He put his hands on the barrier and looked out across the empty track.

He had built the last eight years around one thing. Win the championship. Restore the Blackthorne name. Become Alpha on his own terms and not in the shadow of what had been taken from his family. He had not dated seriously. He had not allowed attachments that could be used against him. He had made himself into something impenetrable and that had worked fine.

Now his wolf was telling him his fated mate was the daughter of the man who had destroyed them.

He wanted to find the universe's decision-maker and have a serious conversation.

A light was on in the media center.

He noticed it because everything else in the complex was dark. One window on the second floor, a pale blue laptop glow. At this hour, that was either a journalist on a deadline or someone who could not sleep.

He should have walked back to his suite.

He walked to the media center.

The building was unlocked during circuit hours. He took the stairs and pushed open the door to the main press room.

Evelyn Hart was sitting alone at the far end of a long table, laptop open, surrounded by printouts that fanned out in organized clusters. She had her shoes off. Her jacket was draped over the chair beside her. Her hair had come half out of its tie. She was so focused on the screen that she did not hear him come in.

He stood there longer than he should have.

"You're going to strain your eyes," he said.

She spun around so fast her elbow knocked a stack of printouts off the table. Papers scattered across the floor. She stared at him with one hand pressed to her chest.

"Do you make a habit of sneaking up on people?" she said.

"I walked normally. You just weren't paying attention." He looked at the papers on the floor. At the clusters still on the table. "What are you working on?"

She hesitated. "Feature prep."

"At midnight."

"I work better at night."

He crossed to the table. She did not stop him, which surprised him. He looked at the nearest cluster of printouts. Financial records. League sponsorship logs. He recognized one of the document headers.

That was from the year his father died.

He looked at her.

She held his gaze. "I told you I was reviewing the inconsistencies."

"Those are league financial records from eight years ago."

"They're publicly available through the league's transparency archive. I accessed them legally."

"That's not what I asked." He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down without being invited. "What did you find?"

She studied him for a moment. Then she turned her laptop around.

He looked at the screen. Two columns. His father's timeline from the original exposé on one side. A sponsorship transfer record on the other. The dates were aligned in a way that made his throat tighten.

"The story broke four days before this sponsorship contract was finalized," she said quietly. "The sponsor walked away from Blackthorne Racing and signed with Thorn Racing the following week. The contract had been in negotiation for six months before the story ran. Then suddenly it moved in four days."

He stared at the screen.

"That could be coincidence," he said. His voice did not sound like his own.

"Yes." She paused. "Do you think it is?"

He did not answer.

She reached across and turned the laptop back. "I'm not there yet. I don't have enough to make a claim. I just." She stopped. Reorganized her words. "I wanted you to know I'm looking."

Ryder sat across from her in the press room at midnight, in the glow of her laptop, and felt something shift inside him at a cellular level. Not his wolf this time. Something quieter. The part of him that had stopped trusting anyone after his father's funeral.

It noticed that she had turned the laptop to show him without him asking.

It noticed that she was running on no sleep and still putting pieces together for a story that would cost her professionally if she was wrong.

It noticed that she was not afraid of him even when she probably should be.

"Go to sleep," he said. His voice came out rougher than he intended. "The documents will still be there in the morning."

She blinked. Like she had expected him to say something else entirely. "Are you telling me to rest?"

"I'm telling you a tired journalist makes mistakes." He stood. "And if you're going to look into this, you can't make mistakes."

He walked out before she could respond.

He made it to the stairwell before his wolf said it again.

Mine.

This time, Ryder did not argue back.