11. The Brotherhood
eleven
The Brotherhood
Jax
Three days should have frayed the edges of my anger, but if anything, it seems to amplify it.
The back office of Priest's bar smells like stale hops, old leather, and my own rotting temper. I pace the narrow length of the room, my heavy boots thudding against the scarred oak floorboards.
A single, naked bulb hangs from a frayed cord in the center of the ceiling, cutting through the dense, blue haze of tobacco smoke and casting long, jagged shadows against the wood-paneled walls.
Outside the heavy door, the low, bass-heavy thrum of the jukebox vibrates through the floor, but inside this room, the air is thick enough to choke on.
I stop in the corner, leaning my shoulder against the doorframe, my arms locked tight across my chest. My jaw aches from how hard I've been grinding my teeth, and I can't bring myself to unclench them.
"Look at him," Reed says, leaning back in his creaking wooden chair and propping his scuffed boots on the edge of the large circular table in the center of the room.
He rolls an unlit cigarette between his fingers, a shit-eating grin splitting his face. "Man looks like he swallowed a box of nails and a gallon of battery acid."
"Worse," Colt chimes in from the far side of the table. He's leaning over a half-empty glass of amber bourbon, his large hands tracing the rim. "He's got that look he gets when a transmission drops on his foot, except there ain't no iron on the floor. Just a whole lot of brooding."
I don't look at them or pay them attention. I keep my eyes fixed on the peeling green paint of the baseboard. "Shut the hell up, Reed."
"Can't do it, brother," Reed says, chuckling low in his throat.
He tosses the cigarette onto the table and points a calloused finger at me.
"I drove past your shop at two in the morning last night.
The bay lights were burning white-hot, but I didn't hear any air wrenches sliding. I didn't hear any metal hitting metal."
"Man's gone nocturnal," Colt says, shaking his head with a slow, exaggerated sigh.
"He's watching the property," Rafe states from the shadows near the filing cabinet. His voice is flat and devoid of the humor the other two are throwing around, but the subtext is there. He's watching me closely.
"Sure," Reed mocks, a spectacular grin breaking across his face. "The property. That's what we're calling the redhead next door now? The property?"
"Reed," I warn.
"I'm just saying," Reed pushes, entirely unfazed by the threat radiating off my frame.
"What does she look like up close?" Colt asks, his humor slipping into a genuine, curious appraisal. He shifts his weight, the leather of his vest creaking. "I only caught a glimpse of her through the glass at the diner. Red hair, right? Bright as a flare?"
"Does it matter?" Reed asks.
"It always matters," Colt shoots back, a slow smile stretching his jaw. "A woman like that doesn't just wander into Moonrise without a reason. She's got a look at her. High-class, smells like money and looks like she'd break your fingers if you touched her wrong."
"Sit down," Rafe says, cutting his eyes toward Colt.
Across the room, Knox doesn't say a word. He's sitting on a low wooden bench, his massive back leaning against the wall, his eyes fixed entirely on the water-stained tiles of the ceiling.
I remain frozen in the corner, refusing to answer. My refusal to throw a punch or laugh it off is the only confirmation they need. They know she's under my skin.
"Are we done?" I ask flatly.
Reed leans forward, dropping his boots off the table with a loud thud. "We're never done, sunshine. But you should tell us what exactly is happening and why you look like you're about to blow a gasket."
I let out a slow, ragged breath, pushing myself away from the doorframe. Every instinct I have is telling me to keep my mouth shut.
Because if I tell them what happened, they are going to know exactly how deep the knife went. They are going to know that Jax Rowe, the man who hasn't lost his temper over a woman since the highway was dirt, stormed over to a neighbor's house like a territorial animal swinging blind.
But I don't have a choice. The stakes aren't just about my pride anymore. They are about the silver sedan at the café. They are about the look in her eyes when she saw the corporate file.
I stride to the table, my shadow eclipsing the light, and shove my hand into my front pocket. I pull out my phone, wake the screen, and slide it hard across the polished wood. It skids past Reed's discarded cigarette and knocks against Colt's bourbon glass with a sharp, glass clink.
"Look at the screen," I said.
Priest, who has been sitting silently at the head of the table like a stone carving, finally moves. He reaches out slowly, his heavy silver rings clicking against the phone casing. He pulls the device toward him and stares down at the screenshot of Stanley Hargrove III.
The room goes completely quiet.
"Who's the suit?" Reed asks, his smile evaporating instantly as he senses the shift in the room's temperature.
"Stanley Hargrove," I say, the name tasting like copper in my mouth. "Vice President of Acquisitions for Whitfield Development. Out of Houston."
Priest reads the text file beneath the image, his face entirely unreadable.
He sets the phone down on the center of the table, his movements slow, and goes completely still.
He is the most dangerous quiet person any of us has ever been near, and when his eyes lift to meet mine, the air in the room loses five degrees.
"They want the yard," Priest states. It's not a question.
"They want everything," I reply roughly.
I slide the manila folder Rafe had printed for me earlier across the wood, spreading out the corporate correspondence, the logged calls to my shop line, and the blueprint maps of the coastal bend.
"Three weeks of calls. They started with voicemails on the shop machine.
Blanket offers. Blank checks. Then they sent the paperwork. "
Rafe steps out of the shadows, his boots silent on the floorboards as he approaches the table. He leans over the documents, his finger tracking the red lines mapped out along the riverbank.
"It's a four-hundred-million-dollar resort play," Rafe says, his professional intimidation language kicking in.
He doesn't sound like a civilian; he sounds like an analyst mapping a target package.
"Victor Hargrove Senior. Gulf Coast resort empire.
He's been quietly buying up small parcels along the cruise ship corridor for a decade.
This isn't some independent regional developer looking to build a few condos, Jax.
This is a multi-billion-dollar apparatus that reshapes coastlines.
If they build here, Moonrise as we know it is gone. "
"They need river access," Priest murmurs, his blue eyes fixed on the map. "Deep water access for the private marina corridor."
"Exactly," Rafe nods, his face tight. "Look at the parcel lines. They want the salvage yard for the main infrastructure, the road access and the dry docks. But they can't break ground without the eastern parcel. The Beckett property."
"So they want Jax's land," Reed says, his voice losing every trace of its previous banter.
"And the Beckett parcel," Priest adds, his voice dropping into a lethal register. "They need both. If either property holds out, the entire four-hundred-million-dollar development collapses under its own weight. The state won't approve the environmental permits without the full acreage."
"They're not getting either one," I say.
The room doesn't argue with me. That is the code we live by. If a brother says a line is drawn in the dirt, we don't ask how much the dirt is worth. We just start digging the trenches.
"I saw from your security system that you went over there," Rafe says, not looking up from the documents. "To the cottage. After you left us and saw the suit at the diner."
I tighten my jaw, my chest expanding as I take a heavy breath. "Yeah. I went over there."
"Why?" Colt asks, his eyes narrowing. "Did you ask why she's meeting him?"
"I thought she was flipping it," I admit, the confession burning my throat like raw lye.
I look at Priest, then at Reed, forcing myself to face their judgment.
"I thought she came down from the city to hustle me.
I thought she was going to buy my eastern parcel, package it with the one she wants to buy, and hand it to Whitfield Development for a massive payout.
So I went to her porch to call her out."
Reed lets out a short, sharp breath through his nose. "Jax..."
"What!" I cut him off, my voice rough with the memory. "I showed her the picture of Hargrove. I told her she was a corporate parasite selling out her own blood."
"What did she do?" Priest asks quietly.
"She didn't run a play," I say, and the image of her face flashes behind my eyelids so vividly I can smell the vanilla and sweat on her skin.
"She short-circuited. Her pupils blew out until her eyes were black.
Her chest started heaving like she was drowning right there on the wood.
She stumbled back against the house so hard I thought she was going to fall through the wall. "
The room goes completely silent again. The teasing from earlier is entirely gone, wiped away by the visceral description of a woman's terror.
"She wasn't guilty," I tell them, my voice dropping into a gravelly whisper. "She was terrified."
I know what guilt looks like. I've seen it my whole life — men who took things they shouldn't have and couldn't meet your eyes after.
That wasn't guilt.
Guilt flinches. Terror goes still.
She went still.
"She looked at that picture as if she was staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. Then she went pure iron. She told me I didn't know the first thing about her, drove her finger into my chest, and told me she owed me nothing before she slammed the door in my face."