20. Penny
PENNY
The Wicked Sinners clubhouse looks different in daylight than it did the night of Havoc and Sasha’s wedding, less like a fairy tale and more like exactly what it is—a compound.
Gravel lot full of bikes lined up like soldiers at attention, a security camera bolted above the door that I clock without meaning to, old habit dying hard even here.
I park my truck at the edge of the lot, not the cruiser, because whatever this is, it isn’t official, and I already know I’m going to lie about where I’ve been if anybody asks.
Sasha meets me at the door before I even knock, wearing jeans and an old Wicked Sinners T-shirt that’s clearly not hers.
“Hey.” She glances past me toward my truck, then back, something careful in her expression that wasn’t there over lunch last week. “Thanks for coming out here instead of the diner.”
“It’s fine.”
She steps back to let me through, and the door swings shut behind me. “Havoc thought it’d be better if we talked here. Not that he doesn’t trust the diner, just—” She shrugs, a little apologetic. “Fewer ears.”
The main room’s mostly empty this time of day, pool table quiet, the bar wiped down and waiting for tonight.
It smells like leather and stale beer and something else underneath, cigarette smoke that’s soaked into the walls over the years.
I follow her toward a smaller room off the back, and I hesitate when I see who’s already sitting at the table inside.
Jenson, first, silver hair catching the overhead light, hands folded loose in front of him like a man who’s used to being the calmest person in any room he occupies. And Evan, beside him, leaning back in his chair with one boot hooked over his knee, watching me walk in.
“Is it okay,” Sasha says, and there’s a note of apology in it now, “if Havoc and Diesel sit in? I know this is—I know it’s a lot to ask.”
I hesitate. Every rule I’ve ever followed says this is the moment to turn around, walk back out to my truck, drive to the station and forget I ever floated this idea to anybody wearing a cut.
But I already crossed that line the second I dialed Sasha’s number, and there’s no clean way to un-cross it now.
In for a penny, in for a pound. My mother used to say that when I was small, usually right before letting me do something she knew was a bad idea because the alternative was worse.
“Fine,” I say. “It’s fine.”
I take the chair across from them, and Evan’s mouth curves, just slightly, something warm passing behind his eyes that I feel in my chest before I can stop it.
He doesn’t reach for me. Doesn’t stand, doesn’t touch my shoulder on the way past, doesn’t do a single thing that would make this room feel like anything other than a business meeting, even though I can see exactly how much he wants to.
I appreciate that more than I expected to. For an outlaw biker who fucked me against an evidence shelf just days ago, he’s turned into a surprisingly respectful man in front of an audience.
He was like that before, too, I remember—before the cut, before the patches, before prospecting swallowed every free hour he had and turned him into somebody who came home with split knuckles instead of homework.
He used to open car doors. Used to walk on the traffic side of the sidewalk without anybody asking him to.
Some things, apparently, don’t get burned out of a person no matter what they become.
“So.” Jenson leans forward, elbows on the table, watching me closely. “Sasha says you need help with something that’s got your hands tied.”
“That’s one way to put it.” I pull my phone out, set it face-down on the table for now, not ready to show them Addison’s picture yet. “There’s a missing six-year-old. Addison Miller. Six days now.”
“We heard,” Jenson says quietly.
“What you haven’t heard is that she’s not the first.” I lay it out the way I laid it out in my own head last night—Emily Doss, Callie Whitfield, Maren Pruitt, all of them gone between four and seven days, all of them found alive, all of them coming home wearing something new nobody in the family bought them.
“Every single case got closed inside forty-eight hours of the kid being found. Vague explanations. Parents who sound relieved on paper and terrified in the actual transcripts.”
Jenson’s expression doesn’t change, but something in the room does, a stillness settling over the table that wasn’t there before.
“And you think it’s Pemberton,” he says. Sasha clearly shared everything about our phone call.
I take a deep breath. “I think every one of those families owes him something. Rent, a job, a note on their house. I don’t think those three connections are a coincidence.
” I flatten my palm against the table like I can pin the thought down there.
“I took it to Morris. He shut me down before I got two sentences out. Told me if I went near Pemberton, I’d end my career and probably his whole department along with it. ”
“He’s not wrong,” Jenson says.
My back straightens. “Excuse me?”
“He’s not wrong that it’d end your career.
” Jenson glances at Diesel, something passing between them too fast for me to read, and when he looks back at me, his voice has gone flatter, more careful.
“Pemberton funded the mayor’s last two campaigns.
Wrote checks big enough that nobody on the county council so much as clears their throat without checking which way he’s leaning first. And the mayor’s the one who reappoints your Chief every term. ”
My stomach drops. “So Morris isn’t protecting Pemberton. He’s protecting his own job.”
“Probably.” Jenson’s tone stays even, but there’s something almost gentle underneath it, like he’s breaking bad news to somebody he doesn’t want to see get hurt worse than she already is.
“Man’s got maybe two years left before retirement.
He’s not gonna torch that for a hunch, even a good one. Even yours.”
I sit back, and the frustration that’s been sitting low in my gut finally boils up into something I can’t swallow down anymore.
“So that’s it. I’ve got a pattern, four girls, and a name that keeps showing up in every single file, and I can’t even walk up to his front gate and ask him a question, because the law I swore to uphold is the exact thing tying my hands behind my back. ”
Nobody says anything for a second. Evan’s jaw works, and he exchanges another look with Jenson. I wait for one of them to speak.
“We can go where you can’t,” Jenson says finally.
I blink. “What?”
“We raid the estate.” He says it like he’s suggesting we order takeout instead of committing a felony.
“Quiet. In and out. If she’s there, we bring her home and figure out how to get her back to her family without it tracing to you, us, or anybody official.
If she’s not there—” He shrugs, one shoulder.
“No harm done. Nobody official ever knew we looked.”
“No harm done.” I stare at him. “You’re talking about breaking into the home of the wealthiest, best-connected man in this county.”
“We’ve broken into worse for less good reason,” Diesel says, and there’s no humor in it, just fact, flat and simple.
I know exactly what he means by that. I know what this club does when the sun goes down, know it the way I know most things about them—half rumor, half instinct, never quite enough to prove in a courtroom.
Guns, moving through this county and probably three states past it if half of what crosses my desk is even close to accurate.
The department spent years building cases that, if they ever come together right, end with men in this room in handcuffs.
And here I am, sitting in their clubhouse, asking them to break federal and state law on my behalf because the law itself won’t move fast enough to save a little girl.
I think about that for exactly as long as it takes to feel sick about it. Then I turn my phone over, unlock it, and slide it across the table until Addison’s school picture is facing all three of them—round cheeks, missing front tooth, two uneven pigtails.
Jenson looks at it a long moment. Doesn’t say anything.
Evan doesn’t either, but something shifts in his face, something that looks less like an outlaw calculating risk and more like a man who’s spent the last week watching me run myself into the ground over exactly this.
“Do it,” I say, before I can talk myself back out of it. “Whatever you need to do it clean, do it.”
“You sure?” Jenson asks, and it’s not a challenge, just a real question, giving me the exit if I want it.
“No.” I meet his eyes. “But she’s been gone for almost a week, and I’ve got nothing else. I’m coming with you,” I add, looking at Evan now, because that part feels non-negotiable in my head even as the words leave my mouth.
He shakes his head before I finish the sentence. “No, you’re not.”
“Excuse me?”
“You show up on Pemberton’s property and it ties every single thing that happens there directly back to you.
” His voice stays gentle, but there’s steel under it.
“You need to be somewhere with a timestamp on it. Somewhere that puts you nowhere near Pemberton’s front gate tonight, no matter what happens on it. ”
“He’s right,” Jenson says. “Being there only puts you at more risk, Officer. You’ve already put enough on the line.”
I hate that he’s right. I hate it the exact same way I hate Morris being right about the funding and the litigation and the whole rotten machine that’s been protecting Douglas Pemberton for years while parents lied to their neighbors about relief they didn’t feel.
“Where do you want me,” I ask, and my voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.
“The station,” Evan says. “Working late on something boring. Paperwork, radar logs, whatever puts your ass in a chair with a deputy walking past who can vouch for you later.”
“And if it goes wrong out there?”
“It won’t.”
“Evan.”
He looks at me then, really looks, and for a second I forget about the club and my job, and it’s just him, steady and certain in a way that used to terrify me at eighteen and terrifies me differently now.
“If it goes wrong,” he says, quiet, “you won’t know a thing about it. That’s the whole point.”
I don’t like it. I sit there a long moment not liking it, turning the whole plan over in my head, looking for a version where I get to be there when they find her, if they find her, where I don’t have to sit at a desk half a county away from whatever happens behind that gate tonight.
There isn’t one. Not if I want this to actually work.
“Fine,” I say finally. “The station. Paperwork.”
Jenson nods once, satisfied, already turning something over behind his eyes that looks like planning, logistics, a man building a job the same way he’s probably built a hundred jobs before this one.
I pick my phone back up off the table, Addison’s face disappearing into the dark screen, and I try not to think too hard about what I’ve just agreed to, or what it means that the safest place for me to be tonight is far away from the one thing I actually want to see through with my own eyes.