Chapter 6
SIX
DUKE
Rook found the secretary. It wasn’t hard.
It came out of church that morning, after I’d sat at the table and told Angel everything Trixie had told me.
The grip that left bruises. The hand on her throat.
The three seconds. Angel’s face didn’t change while I talked, but his hands did.
They went flat on the table, the fingers spread, the knuckles white, and he listened with the stillness of a man who was deciding how much damage to authorise.
None of us tolerate men who bully women, and Angel as president of our club was no different.
Rook had been digging since day one. County records, campaign finances, public filings.
Buck Hawkins was clean on paper. Spotless.
But Rook didn’t work on paper. He worked in the spaces between paper, the hotel bookings and the dinner reservations that people forgot existed because they’d never met someone like Rook.
By noon he had the secretary. A woman named Claire, twenty-six, who’d been working in Buck’s office for eighteen months.
Hotels in Billings, dinners in Missoula, a trail of receipts that told a story Buck’s campaign website didn’t.
The man who’d made Trixie feel like nobody else would ever want her had been sleeping with his secretary the whole time.
I rode into town with Ghost beside me. Ghost didn’t talk much, which was fine because I didn’t need small talk right now.
I needed someone steady at my back when I told Trixie that her husband was a cheat on top of everything else.
On one hand, it was leverage. The kind that could destroy Buck’s public image, his campaign, his carefully constructed life.
On the other hand, I was about to tell a woman who’d spent six years believing she wasn’t enough that the man who’d told her that had been fucking someone else behind her back.
The fact is, Claire wasn’t the only one.
There had been a string of women and we had the dirt on him for every single one.
Both things were true. Both things were weapons. I just wasn’t sure who they’d wound the most.
We pulled up outside Rosie’s and cut the engines. I swung off the bike and was reaching for my helmet when Ruby came tearing around the corner of the back of the diner building.
Barefoot. No teddy which was almost unheard of for her. She was crying so hard her whole body was shaking, the words coming out in a flood that I couldn’t understand. Mommy, Daddy, please, the back, he’s there, he’s got Mommy, please please please.
I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk. She slammed into me, her arms around my neck, her face buried against my shoulder, her small body heaving with sobs. Her heart hammered through her chest, fast, frantic, a bird trapped in a cage.
“Ruby. Ruby, listen to me. Where’s your mom?”
“B-behind the diner. Daddy’s there. He’s got her arm. She told me to go and find Rosie.”
Rosie came out the front door, wiping her hands on a towel probably having heard the commotion. Her face already reading the scene. Ruby in my arms, Ghost standing behind me, the sound of a child crying on Main Street in the middle of the afternoon.
I looked at Ghost. “Looks like we’re dealing with this sooner than I planned. You good?”
Ghost looked at Ruby. Looked at me. His face was calm, unreadable, the particular stillness of a man who’d been in worse situations than this and had come out the other side of all of them. “Lead the way, brother.”
I stood with Ruby in my arms and handed her to Rosie. She took the girl without a word, folding her against her chest, one hand on the back of her head. Ruby clung.
“Rosie, can you watch her? We’ve got some business out back.”
Rosie’s eyes were hard. She looked at me, looked at Ghost, and something passed across her face that wasn’t fear or surprise or hesitation.
It was permission. Thirty years of running a diner in a small town, thirty years of watching women walk through her door with careful smiles and covered bruises, and she was done.
“Do what you’ve got to do,” she said. “Take your time.” And with that she took Ruby into the diner and the door closed behind her.
We walked around the side of the building. The alley to the back was narrow, shaded, the dumpsters on one side. His voice reached me before the rest of him. Calm, measured, the patient cadence of a man explaining something to someone he considered stupid.
I turned the corner.
Buck had Trixie against the wall. His hand on her arm, just above the elbow, his body positioned between her and the exit.
He wasn’t shouting and wasn’t threatening.
Men like Buck got to a point where he didn’t need to do that anymore.
He was just standing there, holding her in place with one hand and the weight of six years of conditioning, talking about what was best for their daughter, talking about coming home, talking in the voice of a man who had never once considered that the answer might be no.
Trixie saw me first. Her eyes found mine over Buck’s shoulder and the relief in them was so raw, so desperate, that something behind my ribs locked into place and never moved again.
“Get your hand off her,” I said.
Buck turned. He saw me, saw Ghost behind me, and I watched the calculation happen. Two men, both bigger than him, both wearing cuts. The back of the diner was isolated and the street was close, but not close enough. He was smart enough to know the math had changed.
He let go of Trixie’s arm. She pulled away from the wall and moved toward me and I put her behind me, my hand on her waist, guiding her past. She went to Ghost, who stepped sideways to put himself between her and the alley. Covering her. Giving me room.
“Trixie,” Buck said. Still calm. Still performing. “We’re having a conversation.”
“The conversation’s over,” I said.
“This is between me and my wife.”
“No. It isn’t. Not anymore.”
He looked at me. The warm eyes, the easy smile, the concerned husband.
All of it still running, still operating, the machine that had charmed half the town working at full capacity.
And underneath it, the real man. Cold, calculating, a man who’d spent his life controlling people and had never met a problem he couldn’t manage.
“I don’t know what she’s told you,” he said. Reasonable. Gentle. The tone of a man being very patient with someone who didn’t understand the situation. “But Trixie has a history of exaggerating. She’s emotional. She gets overwhelmed. I’m just trying to take care of my family.”
“Like you took care of Claire?”
The name landed like a slap. Buck’s face didn’t move, but something behind it did. A flinch in the machinery. A gear slipping.
“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Claire Whitfield. Twenty-six. Works in your office. You’ve been fucking her for eighteen months. Taking her to hotels, hoping you wouldn’t get found out. You want me to keep going? Because my guy found out the details, Buck. All of them.”
Silence. Everything was quiet. Behind me, I could feel Trixie, could feel the stillness of her, the held breath, the new information landing in a place that was already raw. I didn’t want her to find out this way, but there was no choice.
Buck’s jaw tightened and the mask flickered. For the first time since he’d walked into Forsaken, the performance wavered, and the man underneath looked out at me with something that was closer to hatred than anything I’d seen from him.
“That has nothing to do with this.”
“It has everything to do with this. Your whole game is the story. Concerned husband. Devoted father. Pillar of the community. That story falls apart when people find out you’ve been cheating on the wife you claim to love so much.
It falls apart more when they hear what your five-year-old daughter said when she saw me, that daddy was hurting mommy.
That’s what she said Buck, listen to it.
She ran from you, Buck. Into the street, barefoot, crying, and the first person she ran to was me.
And I’m not letting you fucking hurt either of them again.
You’ll have to come through me, do you feel like such a big man now? Do you fancy those chances?”
He stared at me. The warmth was gone. The charm, the patience, the carefully constructed facade. What was left was the man Trixie had lived with for six years. Hard, cold, a man who saw people as things to be managed.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said. Low. Quiet.
“No. You made the mistake. You made it when you put your hands on her. You made it when you put your hand around her throat. You made it when you walked into this town and thought nobody would look past the suit.”
Ghost moved up beside me. Didn’t speak. Didn’t need to. His presence was the statement. Two men in cuts, a club behind them, and a trail of evidence that would end Buck’s career if it got out.
“Here’s how this goes,” I said. “You leave Forsaken tonight. You don’t come back.
You don’t call, you don’t write, you don’t send anyone.
You contest the divorce, we release the records.
You fight for custody, we put your daughter on the stand and let her tell a judge what she told me today.
You come near Trixie or Ruby again, ever, and every newspaper in the state gets the whole file.
Claire, the other women, the hotels, everything Rook dug up, and I promise you there’s more. ”
Buck looked at me. Looked at Ghost. Looked past us, at Trixie, who was standing behind Ghost with her arms tight at her sides and her face wet and her chin up.
“You’ll regret this,” he said. To her. To me and then to Ghost.
“I regret a lot of things,” I said. “This won’t be one of them. I might regret not rearranging your face, of course.”