The President's Captive

Snowbound with the Devil's Reapers.

I wasn't supposed to be on that ridge road after dark.

The ice storm came out of nowhere, and so did he.

One second I'm gripping the wheel of a dying rental car, the next I'm watching my headlights die against a wall of sleet, stranded somewhere between Widow's Peak and nowhere at all.

Then Jim Baker appears out of the frozen dark like something conjured, all leather and grit and a voice that doesn't ask permission.

He's the president of the Devil's Reapers, and apparently that means he doesn't wait for an invitation before hauling me onto the back of his bike and disappearing into the storm.

His compound sits deep in the hills, cut off by downed lines and drifted snow, and for the next three days it's just the two of us, a woodstove, and walls too thin to hide anything.

I came up this mountain running from a wedding I never wanted, trying to disappear before anyone noticed I was gone.

I did not expect to end up trapped with a man who looks at me like I'm something he's already decided to keep.

Jim says the roads won't clear for days. I say he's lying. We're both probably right.

Every hour in that cabin peels back another layer, his ink, his scars, the quiet violence he carries like a second skin, and something underneath all of it that I wasn't ready to see.

He tells me I was his the second my headlights hit his windshield.

I tell myself I'll be gone the moment the snow melts.

Neither of us believes it.