Chapter 9
Trudy's hands needed work.
Three days of sitting idle, of being protected and cared for and fed while other people handled everything—it was making her skin crawl.
She wasn't built for stillness. Hadn't been since she was sixteen and took over running the house while her father worked himself sick in the mines.
Idle hands meant time to think, and time to think meant time to worry, and worry was a luxury she couldn't afford.
So on the morning of the fourth day, she found the compound's laundry situation and claimed it as her own.
"Situation" was generous. The utility building behind the main clubhouse had three washers, two dryers, and a mountain of dirty clothes that looked like it had been accumulating since the founding of the republic.
Prospects had apparently been tasked with handling it, and prospects had apparently decided that shoving everything in together and hoping for the best constituted a laundry system.
It did not.
"No." Trudy pulled a leather cut out of a washer full of jeans and motor oil. "No, no, absolutely not. Who taught you to wash clothes?"
The prospect—barely twenty, with the eager-to-please expression of someone who hadn't yet learned that some mistakes had permanent consequences—stared at her like she'd started speaking in tongues. "I just... put them in?"
"You just—" Trudy took a breath. Counted to five.
Reminded herself that this kid probably grew up with a mother who did everything and never learned the basics.
"Okay. Lesson one. Leather never goes in a washer.
Ever. You're going to condition this cut by hand, and you're going to pray it's not ruined. "
"But Ridge said—"
"I don't care what Ridge said. I've been washing clothes professionally for four years. You want these men to look like they rolled through a mud pit, keep doing what you're doing. You want them to look like a club that deserves respect, you're going to listen to me."
The prospect—Tim, she learned later—listened.
By noon, Trudy had sorted three weeks' worth of laundry into proper piles: darks, lights, delicates, work clothes, cuts that needed hand treatment.
She'd started the first real wash cycle the compound had seen in what looked like months, and she'd given Tim a crash course in stain treatment that left him looking shell-shocked but educated.
By afternoon, word had spread.
"Heard you're the laundry whisperer."
Trudy looked up from the folding table she'd commandeered to find a woman leaning in the utility building doorway. Red hair, sharp eyes, a smile that said she found something amusing about this whole situation.
"I'm Trudy."
"I know who you are. Everyone knows who you are—you're Kilgore's." The woman said it casually, like it was obvious. "I'm Katie Porter. Ridge's wife."
Ridge. The intelligence brother, Trudy remembered. The one who knew everyone in three counties.
"Nice to meet you." She kept folding, not sure what else to say. "Did you need something washed?"
Katie's smile widened. "Actually, yes. But first—" She stepped inside, producing a bundle of fabric from behind her back. "I brought you a challenge."
The shirt she dropped on the folding table was white. Or had been white, once. Now it was a horror show of grease, motor oil, what looked like blood, and something black that Trudy couldn't immediately identify.
"My husband," Katie said, "decided to rebuild a carburetor while wearing his Sunday shirt. Because apparently common sense is not a requirement for club membership."
Trudy picked up the shirt, turned it over, assessed the damage. The stains had set—at least a day old, maybe more. Normal treatment wouldn't touch them. Normal people would throw this in the trash.
Trudy wasn't normal people.
"Give me an hour," she said.
Katie's eyebrows rose. "You're serious."
"I've gotten coal dust out of wedding dresses. This is nothing."
The challenge had been thrown. Katie pulled up a crate and sat down to watch, and somehow—Trudy wasn't sure how—other women started appearing.
Emma Kate Mason, who introduced herself as Rebel's wife and brought her own impossible stain: tree sap on denim.
Sara Hayes, the doctor who was apparently married to the president, with a lab coat that had seen better centuries.
Layla Olmstead-Clark, Timber's wife, with field clothes that smelled like they'd been through a swamp.
One by one, Trudy tackled them all.
The work settled something in her. The rhythm of sorting and treating and washing, the satisfaction of watching stains surrender to the right combination of chemistry and persistence.
This was what she knew. What she was good at.
In a world turned upside down by violence and poison and a man whose touch made her forget her own name, this was solid ground.
"You're good at this." Sara Hayes accepted her restored lab coat with something like wonder. "I was about to throw this away."
"People always say that." Trudy folded the coat neatly, creases sharp. "They don't realize that most stains aren't permanent. You just have to know how to fight them."
"Sounds like a metaphor."
"Maybe it is."
Through the utility building's window, Trudy could see the compound yard. Brothers working on bikes, prospects running errands, the constant motion of a community that functioned like a well-oiled machine.
And Kilgore.
He was across the yard, doing something to his motorcycle that required focus and didn't require company. Alone, as always. The other brothers gave him space—not out of dislike, she'd realized, but out of respect for boundaries he'd built so high nobody tried to climb them anymore.
She watched him work. The way his hands moved, confident and sure. The way his shoulders flexed under his cut. The way the sun caught the dark of his hair and made her think about running her fingers through it.
"You're staring."
Trudy jerked her attention back to find Katie Porter watching her with a knowing grin. The other women had drifted away, leaving just the two of them in the utility building, surrounded by clean laundry and the smell of fabric softener.
"I wasn't—"
"You absolutely were." Katie's grin softened into something warmer. "It's okay. We've all been there. That first month when you can't stop watching them, can't stop wondering what they're thinking, can't stop your heart from doing stupid things every time they walk into a room."
Trudy's face heated. "It's not like that."
"Honey, it's exactly like that. I've been where you are. Every woman on this compound has been where you are." Katie glanced out the window, where Kilgore was still bent over his bike. "The scary ones are always the hardest to read."
"He's not scary."
The words came out before Trudy could think about them, and Katie's eyebrows shot up.
"Kilgore? Not scary?" She laughed, not unkindly. "He's one of the most dangerous men in this club. He handles the jobs nobody else wants to think about. I've seen grown men cross the street to avoid him."
"That's not—" Trudy struggled to find the right words. "He's not scary to me. He's... careful. Controlled. Like he's so used to being seen as dangerous that he doesn't know how to be anything else."
Katie was quiet for a moment, studying Trudy with new interest.
"You see that," she said. "Most people don't."
"Most people don't see a lot of things." Trudy turned back to her folding, hands moving automatically.
"They see my laundromat and think 'poor mountain woman, barely scraping by.
' They see my father's oxygen tank and think 'dying old man, not worth the effort.
' They don't see that we survived. That we're still here, still fighting, when half the county gave up and left. "
"And what do you see when you look at Kilgore?"
Trudy's hands stilled on the fabric. Through the window, Kilgore straightened from his bike, rolling his shoulders like they ached. For a moment—just a moment—he looked toward the utility building. Toward her.
Then he looked away, and she remembered how to breathe.
"I see someone who's been carrying weight so long he doesn't remember what it feels like to put it down.
" The words came slowly, pulled from somewhere deep.
"I see someone who lost everyone he loved and decided the safest thing was to never love anyone again.
I see—" She stopped, throat tight. "I see someone who saved my life and won't let me close enough to thank him properly. "
Katie was silent for a long moment. When Trudy finally looked at her, the knowing grin was gone, replaced by something softer. Something like understanding.
"Enforcers are hard men," Katie said quietly. "They have to be, for the work they do. The things they see, the things they handle—it changes a person. Puts walls up that most people can't get through."
"I know."
"But the ones from mining families?" Katie leaned closer, her voice dropping.
"They're different. They've got this... softness, buried so deep most people never find it.
Because they grew up watching their fathers and grandfathers love these mountains, love their families, give everything they had until there was nothing left.
That kind of love—it doesn't go away. It just gets buried under all that bitterness and grief. "
Trudy's heart was pounding. She thought about Kilgore sitting by her father's bed, talking about Danny. The way his voice had cracked. The way her father had gripped his arm and called him son.
"You think he has that?" she asked. "That softness?"
Katie stood, brushing off her jeans. "I think you've already found it.
I think that scares the hell out of him.
And I think—" She paused at the door, looking back with a smile that had nothing mocking in it anymore.
"I think you're exactly stubborn enough to dig it out, no matter how hard he tries to bury it again. "
She left. Trudy stood alone in the utility building, surrounded by clean laundry and the smell of soap, watching through the window as Kilgore went back to his bike.
He didn't look her way again.
But she noticed how his hands had stilled on the handlebars. How his body had angled slightly toward the utility building, like he knew exactly where she was even when he wasn't looking.
Katie was right. The enforcers with mining in their blood had soft centers.
And Trudy was going to find Kilgore's if it was the last thing she did.