8. Chapter 8
McKenna
Less than half an hour after we leave the clubhouse, Alan’s frightened voice fills the command SUV parked across from the motel.
Lock sits beside me while Grim’s entry team moves through the two rooms upstairs. Camera feeds cover the screens in front of us, and the open comm line carries every voice directly into my ear.
“Hands where I can see them,” Striker orders.
“I didn’t do anything. Rivers handled the contract.”
Grim’s voice follows, low enough that Lock glances at me. “You entered your sister in an auction. When she refused to go through with it, you came to Roseburn Falls to force her. Choose your next lie carefully.”
I close my eyes.
Part of me still wants Alan to say there has been a mistake. That part remembers the older brother who taught me to ride a bicycle and carried me inside after I scraped both knees.
The rest of me understands that boy can exist in the same body as the man who sold me.
“Both rooms secure,” Hound reports.
“Rivers?” Lock asks.
“Gone,” Torch replies. “His coffee hasn’t gone cold. He can’t be far.”
Grim curses softly.
“The safe?” Lock asks.
“Still here,” Torch says. “Rivers wired it to a thermite charge.”
Lock’s fingers move across his keyboard. “Don’t touch the keypad. Give me the serial plate.”
Torch reads the number aloud.
For the next ten minutes, Torch reports each step as he exposes the wiring. Lock tells him where to place the bypass and waits for confirmation before giving the next instruction. Their voices remain calm enough to make the charge sound less dangerous than it is.
I watch the motel exits across the camera feeds and fight the urge to run upstairs.
Grim agreed to bring me because he respected my choice. I respect the boundary that keeps me from becoming another threat his team must manage.
“Bypass accepted,” Lock says. “Open it.”
Metal scrapes over the comm.
Torch releases a breath. “We have drives, passports, paper contracts, and enough cash to explain why Rivers travels light.”
“Bring everything,” Grim says. “We process it at the clubhouse.”
“What about the brother?” Striker asks.
I open my eyes.
Grim answers without hesitation. “McKenna decides.”
An hour later, Alan sits at the clubhouse meeting table with Striker behind him and Grim at my side. His expensive jacket is wrinkled, and a bruise darkens his jaw from trying to shove past Striker.
For the first time in our lives, nobody in the room assumes he deserves more sympathy than I do.
“I was trying to save the house,” he says.
“You gambled the house.”
“I made one mistake.”
“You made hundreds of choices. You placed the bet, borrowed more, hid the debt, uploaded my photographs, advertised my virginity, and watched Mom and Dad pressure me into signing.”
His gaze darts toward Grim. “She agreed to the year.”
Grim begins to rise.
I place my hand on his arm. “Mine.”
He sits, though fury rolls from him.
I turn back to Alan. “You keep using my signature as if it erases everything you did to get it.”
“What was I supposed to do? Let them take the house?”
“You were supposed to lose something of your own.”
The truth silences him.
“Mom is sick over this,” he says eventually.
He offers me the same weapon my family has used for years, sharpened on my guilt.
“Mom is upset because I stopped fixing your mistakes. That is different from being hurt by me.”
“So you choose him over your family?” Alan jerks his chin toward Grim.
I look at the man beside me.
Grim does not answer for me. He leaves the choice where it belongs.
“I choose myself,” I say. “Grim is the first person who showed me that choosing someone else doesn’t require surrendering myself to him.”
Grim’s silver eyes close for one beat.
“You will give Lock every password, account, and message connected to Rivers,” I continue. “Then you will sign a statement describing what you did. I won’t lie to protect you from whatever happens next.”
Alan stares at me as if I have become a stranger.
Perhaps I have.
I hope she stays.
Striker takes him to another room.
Lock spends the next two hours working through Rivers’s drives while Torch catalogs the paper contracts and passports.
Grim remains beside me, but his attention refuses to settle.
He paces to the window, checks the gate feed, and returns to stand behind my chair with one hand resting at the base of my neck.
The touch anchors both of us.
“I found the buyer certificate,” Lock says.
The room tightens.
Torch closes the blinds and locks the door.
Lock mirrors his laptop to the large screen on the wall. Lines of encrypted data appear, followed by a document bearing the broker’s seal.
“The payment came from a private holding company called Aster Crown,” Lock explains. “Its registered controller is Anthony St. Valecourt.”
The hand at my neck disappears.
I turn.
Grim has gone completely still.
Striker notices, but surprise never reaches his face.
Torch looks between them. “Prez?”
“Keep reading,” Grim says.
His voice carries a warning I do not understand.
Lock enlarges the certificate. “Anthony St. Valecourt is listed as the purchaser and sponsoring party. He was not the intended spouse.”
My pulse pounds against my throat.
“Who was?”
Lock scrolls.
The screen changes to a legal identity record.
Intended spouse: John St. Valecourt.
A photograph loads beneath the name.
Grim looks back at us from the screen in a formal military portrait, younger and unscarred but unmistakable. The same hard mouth. The same silver eyes.
Nobody speaks.
Grim is John St. Valecourt.
The marriage contract names the man who saved me from it.
Lock opens another file. Corporate records and inheritance trusts fill the screen, the numbers large enough that I read them twice.
The St. Valecourts are old money. Their name appears on hospitals, museums, universities, and financial institutions across the country. Their fortune has survived generations of wars, scandals, and market crashes.
Torch stares at Grim. “You’re one of those St. Valecourts?”
“I was.”
“You have access to this kind of money?”
“That isn’t the problem.”
Lock’s gaze moves from the trusts to Grim. “The shelter. The medical room. Every time the club needed money and it somehow appeared…”
Grim looks at him.
Lock stops speaking.
Striker remains silent. He is the only man in the room who does not look surprised.
Grim’s eyes find mine. Guilt appears there before I can form the question.
“Your father bought me for you.”
The words wound both of us.
Grim looks at the certificate as if he could destroy it with his hands. “That’s what it says.”
“Why would he hire you as my escort if you were the intended groom?”
“I don’t know.”
The answer sounds different this time. It comes from a man discovering that someone has been living behind the door he buried.
Lock opens the original protection request. “The client specified Grim by road name.”
Torch turns toward him. “You told us your father was dead.”
“He has been to me for more than twenty years.”
The room becomes too small.
The men at the station. Grim’s arrival. The gun in my hand. Every choice we made inside a crisis someone else created.
Grim steps away from me.
“Don’t,” I say.
His gaze snaps back to mine.
“Don’t decide what this means before we know why.”
“My name is on the contract.”
Pain moves through his face.
An alarm sounds at the gate.
Hound’s voice comes over the speaker. “Prez, we have an older man in a black Mercedes. He requested entry and gave his full name.”
Grim does not ask which name.
“Search him,” he says. “Then bring him to the meeting room.”
Headlights sweep across the yard beyond the blinds. A few minutes later, footsteps approach the door.
It opens.
The man who enters is in his late sixties, silver-haired and elegant in a dark coat. He has Grim’s height, the same hard mouth, and the same severe bones beneath his skin.
None of Grim’s scars mark him.
He looks at the certificate on the screen. Then at me.
Finally, he faces his son.
“John.”
The name sounds like a hand reaching into a grave.
Grim places himself between us.
“Start with why you bought her.”