3. Bella
THREE
BELLA
The worst part of coming back to the Kingdom Come compound is how little of it feels strange.
The gates still screech when they roll open. The yard still smells like hot metal, old oil and river damp.
A prospect crosses in front of me carrying a crate of beer. He dips his chin without meeting my eyes. The message is clear. Respect, distance, and don't make the president's guest uncomfortable.
I hate that I understand it. This place lived in my bones before I learned how to get it out of my life, and apparently I never did quite manage it.
"You coming in?" Kane stands in the doorway.
He's wearing the same black T-shirt he had on when he took me to the Landing this morning, stretched across his arms with no cut over it. Without the PRESIDENT patch, he should look less dangerous, but he doesn't.
"I'm deciding."
"About what?"
"Whether I'd rather sleep in the yard."
"Mosquitoes will carry you off."
"I'll take my chances."
"You already did that once this week."
The softness of the words makes them land harder.
I've been behind these gates for two days, going to work with brothers at my back and returning to the compound afterward.
Kane gives me his room every day and sleeps on the common-room couch, where every man in the club can see what his decision costs him.
He hasn't complained once, and that's becoming a problem. I walk past him.
The clubhouse is louder than it was when I was a kid and somehow exactly the same, with music grinding low behind the bar, and men arguing over pool. Heads turn as I enter.
Not all of them, only enough to notice before Kane steps in behind me and the attention disappears. He doesn't touch me; he never does. My brain betrays me by being a little disappointed that he doesn't.
He walks half a step behind, almost as if guarding me without laying claim where he hasn't earned it. That's becoming a problem too.
I'm almost at the hallway when the wall catches me and stops me cold.
Photographs cover most of it. Brothers on club runs, rallies, outside the old clubhouse, or beside bikes with their arms slung over one another's shoulders, young enough to believe they'll never die.
I remember this wall. I remember being small enough that my father had to lift me to show me his picture.
There should be a portrait near the center. Red Rourke at twenty-eight, broad-shouldered and grinning, his beard still dark. There should be a group shot from Kentucky, King and Red shoulder to shoulder. Another from the summer the clubhouse roof caved in and half the club rebuilt it in the rain.
They're all gone, without even an accidental glimpse of my father at the edge of somebody else's memory. There are gaps where frames used to be, but other photographs have been shifted to cover them. The wall looks complete unless you know how it looked before, and I do.
King didn't merely remove a portrait. He purged my father from the club's memory.
"Every picture," I say.
Kane's voice comes from close behind me. "Yeah."
"He took every one down."
"I know."
"And you left it like this?"
His silence is answer enough. I turn to find the muscle in his jaw tight and his eyes steady.
I want an excuse, something easy to hate. Kane never gives me easy.
"I've had the gavel three weeks," he says. "Some things haven't been dealt with yet."
My laugh is brittle. "Busy schedule, huh?"
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Turn everything I say into proof I'm him."
"You're standing in his clubhouse, looking at the wall he erased my father from."
"It's my clubhouse."
"Then why does it still tell his story?"
The words hit exactly where I intended. I walk away before he can answer.
His room is at the far end of the hall. It's barely lived in. The bed is made, boots are lined beneath a chair. There's no clutter, no photographs and nothing of King, not even the silver lighter King carried for as long as I knew him.
Kane has stripped King from this room as thoroughly as King stripped my father from the wall.
I don't know what to do with that. So I change out of my work clothes and sit on the edge of Kane's bed pretending I'm not breathing him in.
The door opens without a knock. Kane stops on the threshold. His eyes drop to my bare legs before coming back to my face.
I'm wearing sleep shorts and an old tank top, nothing I'd think twice about at home. But this isn't home.
"What?" I ask defensively.
He comes in but leaves the door open, because of course he does. He then reaches past me for a folder. His forearm brushes my shoulder.
"Need this."
"Take it."
The contact is barely anything, and my entire body reacts. Kane feels it too because his hand stills. For one suspended second, neither of us moves.
Then he straightens with the folder and notebook in hand and puts space between us, reasonable, controlled and completely infuriating.
"Your walls need fixing," I say.
His gaze narrows. "We've done this."
"No. You decided we were done."
"I decided the clubhouse wasn't the place."
"Because the brothers might hear?"
"Because that grief is yours."
"It was theirs too."
His jaw tightens. "Was."
The word cuts clean enough that I stand. "That's exactly the problem."
"Bella."
"They rode with him. Ate at our table. Slept on our couch. Half those men called him brother, and not one stopped King wiping him off the wall."
Kane sets the folder down. "What do you want me to say?"
"I want you to stop being so damn calm, Kane."
"That won't help you."
"You don't know what helps me."
"I know carrying it like this is hurting you."
Everything inside me goes still and he hears it as soon as he says it.
"You think I should let it go, don't you?"
"That's not what I said, Bella."
"It's what you meant though."
"No, it's not."
"You think I should stop carrying it because it makes everyone uncomfortable."
"I think your father's dead and mine is too, and you're still letting both of them decide what happens every time you walk into a room."
The breath leaves me. "How dare you?"
"I'm not asking you to forgive anybody."
"You're asking me to move on while the gaps are still on your walls."
His face hardens. "I'm asking you not to let what they did take the rest of your life."
"What they did?"
"Ok, I said that wrong. What my father did."
"And the club let him."
"Yes, I'm aware of that."
The answer comes immediately, without defense or lies, which only makes me angrier. I shove both hands into his chest.
He doesn't move, it's like he expected my anger.
"Say something that makes this easier."
"I can't."
I shove him again. His hands close around my wrists, not hard, only enough to stop me. Heat flashes through me so fast it feels like fury, but it isn't.
"Kane."
His grip loosens, but he doesn't let go. We're close enough that I can see the scar beneath his lower lip, and the chain. It hangs outside his shirt now, dragged free when I shoved him.
It's a cheap death's head, a skull over crossed blades in tarnished silver, one side nicked where I dropped it on the garage floor before pressing it into his palm.
I was sixteen and he was nineteen. My first car had died a week after I bought it, and Kane spent six hours under the hood while my father laughed and called it junk. I found the pendant at a market stall the next day. It cost almost nothing.
I shoved it at Kane because thank you was safer than telling him I had feelings for him. He's still wearing it all these years later.
My wrists go slack. His eyes search mine. He knows what I'm looking at, but he doesn't explain because he doesn't have to.
The room changes temperature. All the rage is still there. My father, King, the wall, the club. But beneath it is the thing I've held down so long it's grown teeth.
Want.
Kane's thumb moves once over the inside of my wrist, and that's all it takes. I kiss him.
There's no softness in it. I kiss him, and for half a second he doesn't react. Then something in him breaks.
His hand catches the back of my neck. The other closes around my hip, pulling me hard against him.
He tastes like restraint finally giving up. I bite his lower lip. A rough sound tears from his chest, and he turns us, backing me into the closed door.
His mouth moves over mine, hungry and punishing, and I give it back. Every year between us burns under his hands.
"Kane," I say breathlessly.
He drags his mouth down my throat.
"Tell me to stop."
I fist both hands in his shirt. "Don't you dare."
His eyes lift to mine. Then he takes me at my word.
He hooks his hands beneath my thighs and lifts me. My legs lock around his waist. The hard length of him presses against me, and I gasp into his mouth. He carries me to the bed.
There's nothing careful about the way he lays me down, but the second his weight comes over me, he pauses. Even now, he gives me the choice.
"Bella."
"Yes." One word is enough.
He strips my tank top over my head and looks at me like he's spent half his life imagining this and the other half punishing himself for it.
His mouth closes over my breast, and the pull of it draws a sound from me I didn't know I could make. His tongue circles, then flattens, and his teeth graze the peak until my spine lifts off the mattress.
Pleasure spears through me. I arch, nails dragging over his shoulders while his mouth moves to the other side and does it again, slower, harder. Learning me by the sounds I make. He works me with his mouth until I'm shaking, then moves lower, his beard scraping a trail of heat down my stomach.
When he pulls my shorts down, I should feel exposed. Instead, I feel seen. His gaze burns over me.
"You're going to ruin me." The words come out low, almost angry.
I reach for him. "Take your clothes off." He does, pulling off his shirt to reveal ink from collarbone to knuckles, heavy muscle and the pendant against his chest before shedding his jeans.
I stop breathing. His mouth curves, a flash of the boy I knew inside the man he became.
"Problem?"
"I hate you."
"No, you don't."
Then his hand slides between my thighs, and the argument dissolves.
He knows exactly how to touch me. Slow enough to make me frantic.
Firm enough that I can't pretend this is anything but what it is.
His fingers find the rhythm my body begs for, and when I try to close my thighs against the intensity, he holds them apart with his free hand and keeps going until I can't think, can't breathe, can't do anything but feel.
I come panting his name. He catches the sound with a kiss and settles between my thighs, and looks at me.
The clubhouse carries on beyond the door. Boots in the hallway, music through the wall, laughter from the bar. In here, there's only him.
He pushes inside me slowly. The stretch is sharp, full, almost too much. My fingers dig into his arms.
"Easy," he murmurs.
"Don't tell me easy."
Something dark flashes in his eyes. He drives the rest of the way in. I cry out.
He stills, breath ragged against my mouth, body shaking with the effort of holding back.
"Still want to fight me?"
"God, yes."
"Good."
Then he moves hard and deep, every thrust carrying twenty years of silence behind it. I meet him, angry and desperate, dragging him closer when there's nowhere closer to go.
He kisses me like he can't decide whether to devour me or keep me, and maybe he wants both.
The pressure builds again. His hand slips between us, and I break apart beneath him. Kane follows with my name rough against my throat.
For a few seconds, neither of us moves. His weight is heavy and warm, the pendant pressed between us.
Reality returns in pieces. The missing photographs, my father's empty place on the wall, Kane still inside me.
Shame hits before I've caught my breath. "What the hell did I just do?"
He goes still when I push at his shoulder. "Move."
He does immediately, and the loss of him is sudden and cold.
I scramble for my clothes, dragging the sheet around me while he disposes of the condom and pulls on his jeans.
"This can't happen again," I say.
Kane keeps his back to me for a moment, shoulders tight, before he turns.
He doesn't plead or ask whether I mean it. He doesn't throw the pendant in my face or demand I explain why I kissed him first. He just looks at me.
"I can't let myself want you," I say before he can get a word in.
His expression barely changes, but I see the hit land. "All right."
The calmness is unbearable. "That's all you've got?"
"What do you want from me, Bella?"
"I don't know. That's the problem."
At the door, he pauses. "I'll give you room."
Then he walks out without anger, a slammed door or any demand that I take back what I said. He simply leaves because I asked him to.
I sit on the edge of his bed with the sheet clutched to my chest and hate him for making respect feel like another kind of wound. But mostly I stare at the door and think about the tarnished silver resting over his heart. Twenty years, and he never took it off.