Chapter One #2
My gaze slides around the room without meaning to.
Cain. Logan. Jimmy. Me. Dom. The old positions and the new blood stitched together into one thing.
Then beyond that, the rest of the family outside this room.
Mac upstairs or at home with Knox, probably trying to get the baby down or pacing with him against her shoulder if he’s fussy tonight.
Kya with Remy, her little boy too young to know any of this and too important not to shape every decision Dom makes.
Brooke with Mason, and I know for a fact Carter counts that baby’s breaths some nights because I’ve seen the look in his eyes when he thinks nobody’s paying attention.
Emma probably has Jason tucked against her hip and Amy not far from her, old enough now to notice when the adults get quiet and the tension changes shape.
Raven’s got Lexi. Ryan’s got Casey. The clubhouse and the houses attached to it have changed over the last few years.
There are more toys on the floors now. More bottles in the sinks.
More soft baby blankets draped over the backs of couches that have seen too much blood to deserve them.
That’s the thing about family growing. It gives a place more life.
It also gives men like Nolan Mercer more pressure points if they’re willing to use them.
Jimmy says what all of us are thinking, only rougher. “This isn’t just about us anymore.”
“No,” Logan says. “It isn’t.”
That lands hard because it isn’t a reminder. It’s a warning.
Cain folds his arms. “Which is why I want every fucking thing controlled. No loose ends. No unknowns. No brothers moving off-script because they think they’re handling shit alone.”
That one isn’t aimed at anybody specific, but there are enough men in this room with independent streaks for it to hit all of us.
Joker leans forward, forearms on the table. “You got a timeline?”
Dom shakes his head. “Not exact. Mercer’s too clean for that. But he’s been circling for at least a couple months, maybe longer. What changed after Drew is tempo. He started pressing.”
Jimmy’s gaze narrows. “You think Drew triggered it?”
“I think Drew created noise,” Dom says. “Noise draws attention. Even when you handle the source, the ripple stays.”
There’s a muscle jumping in Jimmy’s cheek now, but he keeps his mouth shut.
Logan looks back to Dom. “Tell them the rest.”
Dom’s eyes flick over the screen one more time, then lift. “Mercer doesn’t have many personal weak spots that I can find. Divorced. No kids. Keeps his life tight. Doesn’t drink publicly. No obvious debt. No side habits that scream exploitable. He’s careful.”
“So what the fuck are we doing in here?” Hammer asks. “If the man’s clean, say he’s clean.”
“He’s not clean,” Dom says calmly. “He’s just disciplined.”
That gets everyone’s attention back where it belongs.
Dom turns the laptop around a few inches, not enough for all of us to see but enough to make it clear he’s looking at something specific. “He has one family tie that keeps popping up. Younger sister. Brynn Mercer.”
The room stays quiet, but it’s a different kind now. More focused. Less broad threat, more shape.
Dom continues. “She lives in Bartsville. Works as a pediatric nurse at a doctor’s office on the north side of town. No record. No debt problems. No drug issues. No pattern of reckless behavior. By all accounts she keeps her head down, works hard, and stays out of her brother’s life.”
Carter tilts his head. “Stays out of it by choice?”
“Looks like it,” Dom says. “They’re estranged.”
That gets a few glances around the table.
“Estranged how?” Cain asks.
“Far as I can tell, they haven’t been close in years. He still checks in occasionally. She doesn’t answer half the time. There was an incident with their mother’s estate a while back that seems to have widened the gap. Beyond that, the details are thin, but the distance is real.”
Jimmy snorts softly. “Could be useful. Could be a setup.”
“It could be both,” Cain says.
I’m already thinking through the angles before anybody says them out loud.
Estranged family is messy. Sometimes distance means resentment.
Sometimes it means protection. Sometimes the one who claims not to care is the one who’ll still burn the world down if something happens.
If Mercer’s got a sister in town, she’s either a liability he hates having or an emergency line he keeps tucked away for himself.
Either way, she matters enough for Dom to bring her up in church.
Logan sits back, gaze moving from Dom to the rest of us. “We need to know which one she is.”
Shadow’s voice stays low. “You thinking pressure point?”
“I’m thinking information,” Logan says. “Leverage if it’s there. Insight into how he moves, who he is when he isn’t wearing the badge, what he’s willing to protect, what he’s willing to sacrifice.”
Cain cuts in. “And I’m thinking if one of us gets too close to a federal agent’s sister without doing it right, we hand him exactly what he needs.”
“That’s why we do it right,” Logan says.
Jimmy shakes his head once. “Or we don’t do it at all.
” A few heads turn his way. Jimmy doesn’t care.
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, eyes on Logan.
“We just got done cleaning up a mess that started because an outside man got too close to one of ours. We all know what that cost. We all know how fast shit can go sideways when women get caught in the middle. If this girl’s clean, if she’s not in whatever the fuck her brother’s building, dragging her into it could light a fire we don’t need. ”
There it is. Not caution for the sake of it. Personal caution. The kind that’s been sharpened by watching Allison threatened and knowing how much worse it could’ve gone.
Logan’s expression doesn’t change, but he listens. That’s one thing I’ll give him over a lot of presidents who came before. He listens before he decides.
Cain taps two fingers on the table once. “I’m not worried about her feelings. I’m worried about operational control. If we use her, we do it with rules. Tight ones. No freelancing. No improvising because a brother thinks with the wrong damn head.”
Joker smirks faintly. “That rule for all of us or one of us in particular?”
Cain doesn’t even look at him. “If the shoe fits, don’t wear it.”
Blaze snorts. Hammer looks like he wants to grin but thinks better of it.
Jimmy ignores them. “You say control like feelings are separate from risk. They’re not. We put a man on her and he gets in too deep, she becomes a problem. He doesn’t get in deep enough, Mercer smells him coming. Either way it can go bad.”
Dom looks at Jimmy. “It can also give us the only line we’re gonna get before the feds squeeze tighter.”
“And what if Mercer’s using her too?” Jimmy shoots back. “What if he keeps distance because it looks clean on paper, but the second somebody breathes too close to her he’s got eyes on them? We roll one brother in there and end up painting a target on his back and hers.”
I don’t miss the way Logan’s eyes move between them, weighing both sides. He already knows Jimmy’s right about the risk. He also knows Dom’s right about the need.
That’s the kind of choice leadership really is. Not good and bad. Just bad and worse, then picking the one you think you can survive.
Carter finally speaks. “You’re both right. That’s why this has to be someone who won’t get stupid and won’t get seen.”
No one says anything for a second, because now we’re at the part where the room starts deciding who gets handed the match.
My gaze drifts to Dom. He’s out. Kya and Remy alone make that obvious, and even without them, he’s too valuable where he is.
Cain won’t do it because Sergeant at Arms has too much visibility and too much to coordinate.
Logan can’t. Jimmy’s attached and too hot right now anyway.
Carter has Brooke and Mason. Shadow has Shaina and enough history with the patch-over mess that putting him near a federal agent’s family is asking for complication.
Joker has Raven and Lexi. The room starts narrowing all on its own.
I feel the shape of it before anybody says my name.
Maybe because I’ve already been thinking it too.
Landon Mitchell. Treasurer. No old lady. No kids. No baby waiting upstairs. No woman watching the door for me to come back through it tonight.
It doesn’t bother me the way people think it should. I’ve never been the kind of man who needed softness just to prove I could still feel it. But I know what my position in this room looks like. I know why the eyes start finding me one by one.
Jimmy sees it first and swears under his breath. “No.”
I turn my head just enough to look at him. “You volunteering?”
He glares. “That’s not the point.”
“It’s part of it.”
Logan doesn’t interrupt. He lets it play.
Cain’s stare lands on me, assessing, hard. “You think you can get close without tipping our hand?”
“Yes.” One word, steady and certain.
Jimmy looks at me like I’ve lost my damn mind. “You don’t even know the woman.”
“That’s why it’s called getting close.”
“Cute,” he bites out. “You know exactly what I mean.”
I do. He means I don’t know if she’s the kind of woman who’ll make a man hesitate. The kind who’ll start out as leverage and end up mattering before he notices the shift. The kind who’ll blur the line between assignment and instinct until it’s too late to pull back clean.
That possibility doesn’t scare me the way it scares him.
Maybe it should.
“Landon,” Logan says, and his tone is enough to cut off the side conversation. “You understand what this is.”
It isn’t a question, but I answer anyway. “Yeah.”
“Say it.”
The room goes still on that. Logan only does this when he wants the truth nailed down clean enough that nobody can claim confusion later.