Chapter 20
Knox
The warehouse door shuts behind Malachi with a heavy, final clang, and the lock snicks into place.
Chuck's in there with him, cuffed to a chair under one shitty buzzing bulb.
We're in the hallway outside. I'm bracing against the cinderblock, Nash is pacing tight and lethal, East leans on the opposite wall like the only thing keeping him still is the concrete at his back.
Through the door I hear it, not clearly, just the rhythm of it.
A low voice answers, then a thud. Silence.
Another thud. Metal chair scraping a fraction.
Someone choking on air. Malachi's not a man you want locked in a room with your sins.
My fingers twitch toward the handle on instinct.
Old habit. In the life I had before the club, they never shut the door on me when things got ugly.
But this isn't that life. Malachi's got this, and my job is to hold the perimeter and keep my shit together. My phone is dead weight in my pocket.
Sloane's last text: Girls are staying in Candace's room. Ruby has 3 bottles of wine and a dangerous glint in her eyes. If we die, tell Maggie it was fun.
I'd answered: Don't die. I've got plans.
Then spent ten minutes staring at the word plans like it was a confession. I shouldn't be thinking about her in pajama shorts on Malachi's bed while her friend's father gets the truth beaten out of him ten feet away.
But my brain doesn't do compartmentalization when it comes to Sloane. She is in my head all the time, even now.
A dull, thick thump echoes from inside.
East mutters, "He deserves worse."
He's not wrong. I let my head fall back against the wall. The concrete's cool against my skull, but it doesn't touch the heat running under my skin.
"You're wearing a path," I say to Nash without opening my eyes.
His boots pause, then keep moving. "Walking keeps me from putting a bullet through the door and ending it early." Fair point.
Another sound filters through. It's more chair than fist this time. Malachi's voice, pitched low. Can't catch the words. Just the tone. Hungry.
This goes beyond Chuck. First Graves selling Darla.
Now rumors of "auctions" threaded between them.
Every road we're tracing keeps circling back to fathers and daughters.
Somewhere on that map there's Sloane's father.
I've got a name, an article, and two years of silence around it.
He's the one door I haven't kicked in, the one subject that makes her go distant and sharp around the eyes.
A heavier slam from inside. Chair, wall, or skull; could be any of the three.
East's shoulders roll, restless. "I swear to God, if that son of a bitch so much as says Candace's name like it belongs to him…"
"You'll have to get in line." Rougher than I mean.
Nash stops pacing. Looks at me. "You're thinking about Sloane." Always. "She flinched hard at Donovan," he adds matter-of-factly. "When Rider said he'd been spotted, you looked ready to tear the walls down. That wasn't just club business."
No use lying to a man built on reading tells. "She's running from something. Someone."
He nods once, quiet and solid. "Question is whether that someone is plugged into the same network as Graves and Moreland."
I don't answer. Because if her father's tied into this shit—if he's one more suit selling daughters to buy power—I'm going to have to decide which burns first: the society they built, or every firewall she's put around her past.
Another hit from inside. Then a pause so sharp it makes the hairs on my neck rise.
Silence. Then the door slams open. Malachi steps out.
He looks like hell. Knuckles split and swelling.
Shirt damp with sweat down the spine. Eyes dark, wild around the edges but caged in the middle.
His breathing is too steady for what he just did. We all straighten.
"That bad?" I ask.
He doesn't answer right away. His hand goes to the back of his neck, scrubbing hard as if he's trying to erase whatever Chuck just put there. Doesn't work. The grime's under the skin. When he finally speaks, his voice is low and guttural.
"He said Candace's mom is alive."
The hallway goes dead quiet. I blink. East goes still. Nash might as well be carved from stone. Candace's mom. The woman whose grave doesn't exist. The ghost Candace has been hating and mourning in equal measure her whole life. My brain stalls. Then starts slotting pieces.
"Alive how?" East asks, voice sharp.
Malachi's gaze cuts to him, then across all of us. "She's working with Donovan. Alice Brighton. Funding the auctions. Running recruitment. Donovan's just the muscle. She's the one behind it now."
Candace's mother was always a ghost story. No paper trail, no photographs, no belongings left behind. Just a name Candace grew up hating and missing in the same breath. A name everyone assumed belonged to a dead woman.
"She thinks her mom's dead," I say.
"I know," Malachi bites out, something fraying under the words. "But it gets worse."
Nash doesn't blink. "Tell us."
"They've got a whole system," Malachi says, eyes flat and dangerous. "A society. Winston, Trent… they're part of it. You wanna move up the ranks?" He looks at each of us in turn as if he expects someone to look away. "You have to sell your firstborn daughter."
The hallway might as well freeze over. Just that sentence echoes. Sell your firstborn daughter. My jaw locks so hard my teeth ache. Firstborn daughters. Sold. A system where men decide their own children are currency.
The interpreter's family hits before I can stop it.
Kandahar. That compound. The girl, eight, pigtails, sitting in the dirt.
I can still see her. We had a window. I knew it.
I said it. Command said stand down. So I stood down.
By the time they let them go, her father was already dead.
I swallow hard. My hands start to shake.
I ball them into fists before anyone sees.
"Knox?" Nash's voice cuts through.
I blink hard. Warehouse. Mississippi. Not Kandahar. "I'm good," I rasp. I'm not.
East lets out a sound half laugh, half snarl. "Jesus Christ. That's… fucked. Next-level evil. Who the hell even comes up with that?"
"What about Chuck?" Nash asks.
"He knew," Malachi says. "All of it. Got into bed with Alice. Was gonna sell his own daughter for a payout."
"Jesus Christ," East mutters again, looking away as if he needs something to hit that isn't alive.
Malachi's lip curls, pure disgust. "He said she cut him off financially. That's why he did it. Blamed her."
He blamed her. Fathers. Graves trying to sell Darla. Chuck trying to sell Candace. Winston and Moreland in some secret society that uses daughters as dues. And Sloane.
Sloane, who flinched at Donovan's name. Who shut down when I pushed. Who told me in my kitchen, voice shaking, What if the second I hand it to you, you decide it's too heavy and set it down?
If her father is part of this—if he's cut from the same rot—I get a flash I don't want. A younger Sloane, polished and perfect, standing in a room like this, hearing men talk numbers and "lots" while they glance her way.
For a second, everything flashes red. I force it back.
"We killin' him now?" I ask, nodding toward the door. Rough, scraping. Not sure if I'm asking about Chuck or every man tied into this society. Both.
Malachi's hands ball into fists. "Not yet."
East's head snaps up. "Why the hell not?"
"Because we bring Candace in. She deserves to know what he said. What he did. And if anyone's gonna decide what happens to that piece of shit, it's her."
He's right, and I hate it. "You sure she's ready to hear this?"
"No," he says quietly. "But it's hers to hear anyway."
Nash cracks his neck, tension breaking into motion. "Where is she?"
"With Ruby. Frankie said all the girls are up in my room, drinking and talking. Darla's the only one not there. Still recovering."
I picture it. Last night's girls' night wreckage. Malachi's bed buried under blankets, takeout, glitter. Sloane still there this morning, one of my hoodies hanging off her shoulder, half-asleep in the middle of it.
"Then we better go get her," I say.
Malachi takes a step, then pauses. For the first time since he walked out of that room, he looks unsure. "She's going to hate me for this," he mutters.
Nash's voice is steady. "Pretty sure she's past that."
East huffs a breath that might be a laugh. "But she still trusts you enough to break."
I meet Malachi's eyes. "So go be the one she breaks in front of." It comes out without me thinking; it's easier to say the truth when it's about someone else. He nods once, as if I've reminded him of his own job description. Then he turns and heads for the stairs.
When he disappears around the corner, East blows out a breath. "Secret societies selling daughters. Dead moms back from the grave. Donovan playing attack dog for a woman we all thought was a headstone."
"Hydra shit," Nash mutters. "Cut one head off, three more grow back."
"Yeah, well," I say, straightening. "We've done more with less." But have we?
I could text Sloane right now. Tell her everything.
Watch what that does to her. The instinct hits loud: tell her now, warn her, get ahead of the blow.
But another voice, colder and smarter, cuts through.
If her father's tied into this circle, she's about to break in a way I can't fix on the fly.
Not until I know what we're dealing with.
Not until I can control the variables before the first blow lands.
I shove the phone back in my pocket. Tonight is about Candace's world collapsing, not Sloane's.
Nash hears the silence. "You know this isn't staying contained to Candace."
I look at him. "I know."
"Good. Because you're not the only one with a past that doesn't like the light."
East lingers, eyes on the closed door. "I'm going to check on Darla," he says finally. "If the world's going to burn, I want her with me where I can keep an eye on her."
"Yeah. Makes sense."
East heads out. Nash stays where he is, arms crossed, watching me like he's waiting for a play call.
The muffled sound of Chuck breathing filters through the door, the sound of a man who doesn't know he's run out of road.
I push off the wall, turn toward the war room, and start walking.
Because that's the one thing I can do right now that doesn't involve dragging my wife into a nightmare she's already lived once. Not yet.
Nash falls into step beside me without a word. "I'm going to start digging," I say. "If Brighton's alive, she left a paper trail somewhere. Nobody at that level stays completely dark."
"Sure you want to dive into that alone?"
"If I need backup breaking into county servers, I'll holler. Right now I just… need to do something that isn't standing here picturing every girl we know on an auction block."
Nash's jaw works once. "Yeah. I get that more than you think."
I grab my laptop from the war room and carry it back out to the main floor, settling at the long table facing the bottom of the staircase.
The one spot where I can catch her face the second she walks down—before she masks it, before she remembers how to hide.
Nash clocks the move but doesn't comment.
I flip open the laptop. Systems boot up.
My focus narrows to numbers, names, and hidden money.
Brighton, Graves, Moreland, Castiel. The same name I pulled out of Whitcomb's server two years ago in Chicago, tied to a Mississippi fraud fund that reeked of laundered money.
I flagged him then as a financial threat.
Turns out the money was always just the skeleton.
The flesh was girls. Each name another thread in the web these bastards wove, stretching wider every time I pull.
Beneath every thread I trace, every shell company I peel back, one thought loops steady and vicious. Mercer. Her maiden name. A name I've never touched. Never searched. Never typed because I meant it when I said I wouldn't take what she wasn't willing to give.
But now? Now, with fathers selling daughters and men hiding behind polite smiles? I hover over the keyboard. For the first time, I consider it. If this circle touches Sloane's father…
I will tear the whole machine apart until nothing is left. And hope she is still there when it's over.