Judge’s Redemption (Kingdom Come MC #2)

1. Shay

SHAY

The first time I see Judge in five years, I'm carrying my daughter's glittery pink backpack and trying to convince her that a dead worm doesn't need a funeral.

“It was alive this morning,” Evie says, crouched at the edge of the sidewalk with both hands planted on her knees. “Maybe it got tired.”

“Maybe.” I check the time on my phone. Four twelve. My last client is due at four thirty, Dottie's already covering longer than she agreed to. “But we can't stay here until it wakes up.”

Evie considers that with the solemn frown she gives everything from broccoli to bedtime. “We should move it so nobody squishes it more.”

I'm bending to help her find a leaf when a motorcycle turns onto Main Street.

The sound reaches inside me before I look up.

Ransom has plenty of bikes. More now than when I left, or maybe I only notice them because I've spent six weeks expecting one particular man every time an engine growls nearby.

I know better than to react to every black Harley and leather cut in town.

My body reacts anyway.

The bike rolls toward us, black paint shining beneath a sky gone gray with rain. The rider slows outside the pharmacy, one boot dropping to the pavement while a truck pulls away from the curb.

Short dark hair. Black leather stretched across broad shoulders. One steady hand resting on the bars.

Judge.

The years between us collapse so fast my stomach drops.

He turns his head. His gaze finds me across the street, and everything inside him seems to stop.

The truck moves. A horn sounds behind him. Judge doesn't react until the driver leans on it a second time. Then he pulls forward, crosses the empty lane, and brings the bike to the curb ten feet from where Evie is still worrying over the worm.

I should move. I've had six weeks to plan what I'll do when this happens, and every version involves keeping my head high, my voice cool, and my daughter away from the man who once told me exactly how little I meant to him.

Instead, I stand there gripping a backpack covered in silver stars while my heart tries to bruise its way out.

Judge kills the engine and somehow the sudden quiet is worse.

He swings off the bike and removes his sunglasses.

Time has made him harder. He was powerful before, but the man walking toward me has grown broader, his body packed with heavy muscle beneath his black T-shirt and cut.

Dark stubble shadows his jaw. Ink covers both arms, disappearing beneath the leather at his shoulders and running down over his hands.

Judge was dangerous at thirty-one. At thirty-six, he looks like danger learned patience.

My body remembers him with humiliating precision. The roughness of those tattooed fingers against my skin. His mouth at the place where my neck meets my shoulder. The low sound he used to make when I climbed into his lap and tested how long his control would hold.

Want moves through me, hot and vicious.

Then I remember the last time I saw him and the things he said to me.

Temporary. That's all you ever were. The club comes first. It always will.

The heat curdles into anger, but it doesn't disappear. That would be too easy.

“Shay.”

My name sounds the same in his voice. Low. Careful. Like it still belongs to him.

“It's been a while,” I say.

His eyes move over my face, taking in every difference time left behind. Then his attention drops.

Evie has finally abandoned the worm and come to stand against my leg. Her small fingers curl into the hem of my shirt.

Judge looks at her.

I see the moment recognition strikes him.

His face empties. Not the controlled stillness he uses when he's thinking, but shock. His gaze moves over Evie's dark hair, the stubborn crease between her brows, and the solemn way she studies him without looking away.

Then he looks at me. Back at her.

His hand slips from the edge of his cut as though he's forgotten what he was doing.

“How old is she?”

Evie tilts her head. “I'm four. I had a pink cake.”

Judge stares at her. The color drains beneath his stubble, and for one impossible second, the man who never lets anybody see him shaken looks completely lost.

“Four,” he repeats.

His eyes close briefly. When they open again, they're fixed on me.

“Shay.”

The way he says my name tightens my chest. It isn't a question yet. It's disbelief and a plea for me to tell him he's worked it out wrong. But I don't.

His breath leaves him hard. “Jesus Christ.”

Evie edges closer to my leg. Judge notices and immediately forces his voice lower, but the shock remains written across his face.

“Is she mine?”

People are already looking. Mrs. Tillman has stopped halfway out of the pharmacy with a paper bag tucked against her chest. Two men outside the hardware store have gone silent.

Ransom might distrust Kingdom Come, but that has never stopped the town from treating club business like free entertainment.

“Not here,” I say.

Judge takes one step toward me. “Shay, is that little girl my daughter?”

The words sound torn out of him.

My anger rises to meet the pain in his face because he doesn't get to make me answer this in the middle of Main Street. Not after all this time, with Evie listening and half the town preparing to carry the story home.

“Not here, Judge.”

His jaw tightens, but he looks at Evie again, and the devastation in his expression nearly knocks the breath from me.

He already knows. He just needs to hear me say it.

“When?” he asks.

The reasonable answer is never. The realistic one is that there's no avoiding this now.

“Tonight. Seven thirty.”

“Where are you living?”

“The Dawson place on River Street.”

“I know it.”

Of course he does. Judge knows every road in Ransom and most of what happens on them.

“Evie will be asleep,” I say. “You stay on the porch.”

His gaze returns to her. Something raw moves behind his eyes before he shuts it down. Then he looks at me again, and there's nothing fatherly in the way his attention drags over my mouth.

My pulse jumps hard enough to make me furious.

He has no right to look at me as though the years apart are an inconvenience he intends to remove. Worse, I have no right to want him to try.

“I'll be there.”

He says it like a promise, and my anger sharpens because promises from Judge used to mean something.

Evie reaches for my hand. “Mommy, we're late.”

“Yes honey, I know.”

Judge's attention flicks to the word Mommy, then back to my face. The weight of it is physical, heavy with questions and something darker that my skin recognizes even when I don't want it to.

Time hasn't cooled the way he looks at me and that knowledge lands low in my belly.

I turn before he can see it and walk Evie toward the crosswalk. Judge doesn't call after me or try to block my path. He simply stands beside his motorcycle and watches until we disappear through the salon door.

Dottie has my client shampooed and in the chair when I hurry inside.

“You're a saint,” I tell her.

“I'm charging you chair rent by the minute.” She pats Mrs. Bell's shoulder and passes me the comb. “And you've clearly got a situation.”

Mrs. Bell's eyes sharpen in the mirror. “What situation?”

“No situation.”

Dottie's eyebrows lift above the black frames of her glasses. She's sixty-two, has owned Main Street Hair for almost thirty years, and can identify a lie before the person telling it knows they've opened their mouth.

“The vice president of Kingdom Come has been standing across the street staring through my window for the last three minutes,” she says.

My hand pauses over the cutting cape.

I don't look. Mrs. Bell does.

“Judge?”

“Unless they've patched in another dark-haired man built like he could break somebody in half without raising his voice.” Dottie lowers her voice as though that might stop Mrs. Bell from hearing. “He saw the little one, didn't he?”

Mrs. Bell catches my gaze in the mirror. “I thought Evie had familiar eyes.”

I close mine briefly. “Could we please talk about your layers?”

She smiles. “You're the professional.”

I focus on her hair because hair makes sense. There's always a shape beneath the mess if I cut carefully enough. I can't say the same for the rest of my life.

Moving back to Ransom was supposed to make things simpler.

The apartment in Springfield took nearly half my monthly income before utilities.

Preschool cost more than my first car, and the salon where I worked changed owners twice in a year.

Here, the River Street rental is small but cheap, Evie's preschool is three blocks from Main Street, and Dottie had an empty chair she was willing to rent without asking for six months upfront.

I can pay my bills. I can collect Evie every afternoon. I can build a client list from women who remember me and people who've heard I'm good with difficult color.

The only impossible part was avoiding Judge.

For six weeks, I managed it. I learned which mornings Kingdom Come usually rode through town, took the back road to the grocery store, and ignored the fact that the Landing had reopened after the fire.

Kane, the new president’s club had become more visible instead of less.

Men in cuts came into town for food, parts, and supplies without everybody locking their doors behind them.

Ransom is beginning to look at Kingdom Come differently.

People talk about Kane stepping in before the fire spread through town.

Nobody suddenly trusts the club. Thirty years of King as the MC president don't disappear because his son makes a few better choices, but cuts on Main Street no longer empty the sidewalk quite as quickly.

When I finally risk a glance through the front window, Judge is gone. The empty curb should ease the pressure behind my ribs. But it doesn't.

Dottie waits until Mrs. Bell leaves with fresh layers and enough information to feed three weeks of gossip. Then she locks the front door, turns the sign to CLOSED, and leans against the reception desk.

“You want me to keep Evie tonight?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“She likes my house.”

“She likes your cookie jar.”

“Same thing at four.” Dottie's expression softens. “You don't have to do this alone.”

“I've been doing everything alone for five years.” The words come out sharper than she deserves.

Dottie doesn't flinch. “That wasn't what I said.”

I sweep a line of hair into a pile beneath my chair. “Judge is coming to the house after she's asleep. We're going to talk on the porch. That's all.”

“And when he asks why you didn't tell him?”

“I did try.”

Dottie knows that. She waited in the car while I walked up to the compound gates six months pregnant and terrified.

King met me before I got inside.

He'd been president of Kingdom Come for thirty years and ruled the club, and everyone connected to it, as though they belonged to him. Kane's father was cold, ruthless, and very good at making a threat sound like advice.

He made sure I understood there was nothing waiting for me beyond those gates.

Dottie's mouth pinches. “He was a cruel bastard.”

“Yeah…he was.”

“Judge isn't King though.”

“No.” I straighten and meet her eyes. “Judge was the man who made King easy to believe.”

She doesn't argue with that.

At home, Evie eats half a grilled cheese, all the apple slices, and exactly one bite of tomato because I ask her to. She tells me the worm probably has a worm family and wants to know whether worms have preschool. I answer as best I can while watching the clock move toward seven thirty.

Her bath takes fifteen minutes. Finding the correct stuffed rabbit takes ten more because apparently the near identical rabbit on the bed is not Bun-Bun but Bun-Bun's cousin, Steven.

By seven twenty, she's tucked beneath her yellow blanket with Bun-Bun under one arm.

“Who was the motorcycle man?” she asks as I turn on the night-light.

The question stops me beside the door.

“His name is Judge.”

“That's a funny name.”

“It's what his friends call him.”

“Is he your friend?”

Once, he was everything.

“He's someone I knew before you were born.”

Evie accepts that more easily than I do. “He looked sad.”

“He was surprised.”

“Because I'm four and I had a pink cake?”

A laugh escapes before I can stop it. “Probably.”

She smiles, satisfied that the mystery has been solved. “Good night, Mommy.”

“Good night, baby.”

I leave her door open a few inches and stand in the narrow hallway listening until her breathing settles.

The rental is quiet around me. Two bedrooms, a living room barely wide enough for the secondhand couch, and a kitchen with cabinet doors that won't close unless I lift them first. The porch light flickers when I switch it on.

The bad hinge on the gate scrapes every time the wind moves it. It isn't much, but it's ours.

At seven twenty-nine, an engine turns onto River Street. I know the sound before the headlight washes across the curtains. Judge's motorcycle rolls to a stop. A moment later, the gate hinge gives its ugly metal scrape. Boots cross the short path to my porch.

My anger is ready, along with years of questions I never wanted answered. The wanting is ready too, alive beneath my skin and more dangerous than either of them.

Judge knocks once and I open the door.