Chapter Four
Marisol
Four days after I found those flip-flops on my porch, I sat across a folding table in the back office of a strip-mall law practice and signed my name off a business I'd spent six years building, and it was easier than I expected it to be, which worried me more than if it had been hard.
Foster Grimaldi had handled Death Souls' legal work since before I was involved with any of it, a soft-spoken man in his sixties who kept a coffee maker older than some of the prospects and never once, in six years of contracts and licensing headaches, asked me a question about my personal life.
I appreciated that about him more than usual that particular Tuesday.
His office smelled like the same burnt coffee it always had, files stacked in towers along one wall that looked disorganized until you actually needed something and watched him find it in under ten seconds.
He'd represented Cormac before Rourke, had drafted half the paperwork that governed how Death Souls' legitimate businesses ran, and I think some part of him had watched Marisol Vega grow from a nervous twenty-eight-year-old asking basic questions about commercial licensing into someone who occasionally corrected his own citations, and took a quiet, grandfatherly pride in it he'd never once said out loud.
He slid the paperwork across the table, walked me through what removing my name from the Boneyard's ownership structure would actually mean, made sure I understood I'd still be owed a settlement figure for the equity I'd built into the place over the years, whenever I wanted to collect it.
"You built more into that business than the ownership papers ever fully captured," he said, not looking up from the document he was annotating.
"Sweat equity, they call it in a courtroom, though that always struck me as too small a word for what you actually did.
I want you walking out of here today understanding that whatever else happens, that value doesn't disappear just because your name comes off a line. "
"I appreciate that, Foster. I really do."
He set his pen down for a moment, folded his hands, and looked at me over the top of his reading glasses with an expression that was, for him, unusually direct.
"I've drafted a great many separation papers in this town over the years, Marisol, for a great many reasons.
I want to say, and then I'll let it go, that yours is the first set I've drafted for someone who built the very business the papers concern from nothing.
That matters to how this gets read, legally and otherwise, and I intend to make sure it's reflected properly. "
"You don't have to decide the settlement piece today," he said. "Some people want a clean break all at once. Some people want to leave that door open a while longer, in case things sort themselves out different than they look right now."
"Leave it open," I said, before I'd fully thought it through.
Then, because I didn't like hearing myself sound uncertain, I added, "I'm not deciding anything about Rourke today.
I'm deciding that whatever happens between us, nobody gets to say I stayed because I needed his name on a piece of paper to survive. "
Foster nodded like that made perfect sense to him, which it probably did, since half his business in this town was built on people trying to protect themselves from decisions somebody else made for them.
He asked, gently, whether I wanted him to also draft something formal regarding the house, and I told him not yet, that one thing at a time was about all I could manage, and he didn't push, just made a note and moved on to the next page.
I signed where he pointed. My hand was steadier than I expected.
I want to say something here about what building the Boneyard actually meant to me, because I think it's easy for people who haven't done it to imagine a business as just a stack of numbers, and it was never that for me.
When I started doing the books for that place, I was twenty-eight years old and the club's finances were a genuine mess, cash stuffed in a shoebox in the back office, receipts that hadn't been reconciled in over a year, a health inspector who'd flagged three separate violations that nobody had bothered to fix because nobody wanted to spend the money.
I could have walked away from it. Instead I spent a solid year of Sundays teaching myself commercial licensing law, sitting through community college accounting classes at night after full days doing contract work for actual paying clients, because some stubborn part of me looked at that shoebox of receipts and saw a puzzle I refused to leave unsolved.
By the time I was done, the Boneyard wasn't just clean.
It was the kind of business a county inspector could walk through without finding a single thing to write up, the kind of operation that made Death Souls' entire legal footprint sturdier just by existing.
I did that. Me, with a calculator and a stubborn streak and eventually a CPA license I'd earned specifically so nobody could ever again look at my work and assume a man had done it.
Signing my name off that ownership structure felt less like losing something and more like reclaiming the part of it that had always, actually, been mine regardless of whose name sat next to it on paper.
My competence. My work. The thing nobody, not even Rourke, not even Harlow with her drawer and her seat at church, could ever actually take from me.
I called Essie on my way back from Foster's office, mostly just to hear another voice, and she asked how it went, and I told her, and she was quiet for a second before she said, "You know that doesn't mean you're done with any of it.
You know Death Souls doesn't just let you walk away clean because you signed a form. "
"I know."
"You hear from him?"
"Three texts and a voicemail I haven't listened to yet."
"You going to?"
"Eventually. Not today. I need at least one day where I get to decide what I have the strength to deal with, instead of just reacting to whatever gets thrown at me next."
"That's fair," Essie said. "That's more than fair, actually. Take the day."
I meant that when I said it, and I still meant it two hours later, sitting at Essie's kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold in front of me, when my phone rang with a number that wasn't Rourke's, wasn't Essie calling from the next room, wasn't anyone I expected. Deacon Marsh.
I almost didn't pick up. In eight years of being Rourke's Old Lady, Deacon had called me directly maybe four times, always for something specific, always brief, a man who didn't waste words any more than he wasted anything else.
I answered on the fourth ring, mostly out of a stubborn refusal to let a phone call intimidate me on top of everything else that week.
"Marisol." His voice was steady, careful in a way that told me he'd thought about how to open this conversation before he dialed. "I know this isn't a good week to be asking you for anything, and I want you to know I understand that going in."
"What do you need, Deacon."
"Cassidy flagged some discrepancies in the Boneyard's books.
Invoices that don't match inventory, going back a couple months.
He's a good man but he's not you, and this club needs somebody who actually understands those numbers to look at it properly before it turns into a bigger problem than it already is. "
I sat with that for a second, feeling several things land at once.
Relief, oddly, that someone had finally called me for a reason that had nothing to do with Rourke's personal failures.
A cold, professional alertness, the same feeling I get whenever a client's books don't reconcile and I know I'm about to find something somebody didn't want found.
And underneath both of those, a slower, uglier dread, because a couple months lined up with a timeline I didn't need explained to me.
"How bad is it," I asked.
"Cassidy thinks tens of thousands. Could be more. I don't want to speculate past what he's actually confirmed, because that's exactly the kind of thing that gets exaggerated before anybody's actually run the numbers, which is why I'm calling you instead of guessing myself."
"Does Rourke know you're calling me."
"He will by the time I hang up with you.
This isn't going through him, Marisol. I'm not asking you as a favor to him, and I'm not going to let this turn into a reason for the two of you to be forced back into each other's business before you're ready for that.
I'm asking you because you're the best qualified person in three counties to find what's actually wrong in those books, and because whoever did this, however it connects to everything else that's happened, needs to be found and stopped before it costs this club a lot more than money. "
I appreciated, more than I let on, that he'd said "however it connects to everything else that's happened" instead of pretending the timing was some unrelated coincidence.
Deacon Marsh had never struck me as a man who insulted people's intelligence, and it was, in a strange way, a relief to be spoken to plainly by somebody in that world for the first time in two weeks.
"You understand what you're asking me to walk back into."
"I do. I wouldn't be calling if I had another option that made sense.
This isn't me asking you to patch things up with Rourke, Marisol.
This is me asking you to protect a business you built, because whatever's happening in those books is happening to something that's still partly yours whether your name's on the paperwork or not, and because you're the only person in this club who can find it fast enough to matter. "
"And if I say no?"