Chapter Fifteen
Kylo
“You have to bring her in,” Huck said, shrugging.
“She’s not in on it,” I reminded him, my tone dancing that line between insistent and disrespectful.
“I get that,” he agreed with a brow raise that told me he clocked the tone. “But she is in it. From the sound of things, up to her neck. Either we bring her in and try to help her keep her head above water, or she drowns. That what you want?”
No, of course not.
That said, bringing her in meant she was going to find out. About it all.
That our first meeting wasn’t just happenstance.
That I’d been lying to her from the jump.
That, yes, I’d been following her, noting down her every move.
That I wasn’t the good guy she wanted to believe I was.
Yeah, I got it.
Club over everything.
But, fuck, I didn’t expect it to have to come over her.
I hadn’t been expecting her, period. Or the strange, almost overwhelming urge I had to not only get my hands on her again, but to protect her, to show her it was safe to explore the world a little more.
I knew damn well that the second she found out the truth, she would never trust me again.
Yes, she’d been lying too. But her lie had been to protect herself. From Marco and his crew. From the law.
I couldn’t claim as much.
“Look, I get it. You don’t want some innocent dragged deeper into this shit, but this is how it has to be. You bring her in, or I do it.”
Absolutely not.
The woman was barely hanging on as it was.
The last thing she needed was someone else to scare the shit out of her.
It had to be me.
No matter how much I hated that.
“Fine. Tuesday. She’s off Tuesday. I’ll bring her here Tuesday night.”
After giving her what I promised her: a day away from her worries. Another thing or two to notch off her bucket list. Something good before I turned it all to shit.
“Alright. We’ll be here. And we can figure out what she knows. Then decide what to do from there.”
I bit back the urge to say that if our entire strategy relied on a terrified woman already roped into a bad situation, then we really needed to work on ourselves. That was only going to get me in hot water and get Rue scooped up by someone unfamiliar and terrifying.
“We’re not going to hurt her, Kylo,” Huck reminded me.
Not physically, no. Not this club.
But I don’t think he was grasping how fragile she was.
The months of dealing with Marco were clearly grinding down her defenses, making it impossible to keep the anxiety and depression from sucking her in again.
Add in that things seemed to be escalating with that crew, and, yeah, she was just barely holding it together.
Finding out that one of the very few people in her life she thought was solid had been lying to her from the jump was not going to help her mental health.
“Think you’ll find she’s a lot stronger than you’re giving her credit for,” Huck said, reading my mind.
Easy for him to say.
He hadn’t held her while she cried.
He hadn’t been watching her get more and more beaten down with each passing day.
“And even if she takes this hard, we are doing this to remove Marco as a problem. Which would also make her life better. Might suck in the moment, but it’s good in the long run.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
And it was.
What she needed more than anything else was to get rid of that fuck so she could move on with her life.
And if that meant I had to sacrifice whatever was growing between the two of us, then, well I had to agree it was worth it.
But before I blew her whole world up, I was going to give her a day to fucking remember. And remember me by, since I was pretty sure she’d want nothing to do with me once the truth came out.
“Hey, Teddy,” I said as I moved outside and called him. “I’ve got a favor to ask.”
—
I spent days getting everything set up.
Part of it was to give Rue the day I knew she needed.
The other part was to keep me from thinking too much about how everything was going to change after this.
“Where you going?” Caymen asked as I snatched the keys for the club SUV off the hook in the kitchen.
“My place,” I blurted out before I could think better of it.
“Your place?” Velle asked, head jerking back like he’d been slapped. “What do you mean, your place?”
Velle prided himself on knowing people, seeing things before anyone else. It was clearly bothering him that he’d missed something so big about me.
“I bought a place a while back,” I admitted. “Been working on it here and there.”
“Does Huck know?” Caymen asked.
“Told him when he got back.”
“But kept it from us?” Velle asked.
“It’s nothing personal. I wasn’t even sure I was going to keep it at first. But now that I’ve been working on it, I think I will.”
“Are you moving out?” Velle asked.
“No. I mean, not yet anyway. Maybe eventually. I haven’t gotten that far. I gotta get going, though,” I said, reaching for the doorknob.
I could tell by the look on Velle’s face that this wouldn’t be the end of it, that he was going to have some questions for me.
Honestly, once the day was over, I might welcome that. I was sure I wasn’t going to be in a great place mentally. And maybe his ass could help me sort through it all and compartmentalize it.
But that was a problem for another time.
Right then, I had to get to my place to wait for Rue.
It was a busy day in that I was trying to fit as much into it as possible, but it was a low-stress kind of busy. Since almost everything on the list involved things meant to relax and pamper Rue.
I didn’t realize she was right behind me until I pulled into my driveway and had her pull up beside me.
“Oh, hey,” I said, shaking my head, realizing how lost I’d been in my own thoughts for her to sneak up on me like that.
“I figured you didn’t know it was me. I’ve been following you since you pulled out. I was dropping Ernest at my grandmother’s place again.”
She looked a little better.
I mean, that wasn’t hard, considering how upset and worn out she’d been the last time I’d seen her.
But there was a looseness in her shoulders. She didn’t seem like she was trudging through quicksand.
There was a bracelet on her wrist, a big, chunky thing that completely disguised the bruise I knew was there. She likely didn’t want her grandmother to know that she’d been manhandled the night of the destruction at Vital Greens.
“I should have thought to offer to pick you up from there,” I said. “Does Ernest ever stay home alone?”
“Only when I’m running errands. Honestly, he probably wouldn’t even know I was gone if I did leave him, but I, well, get anxious at the idea of him being alone. So it just makes sense to let my grandmother keep an eye on him.”
“I get that. Especially since he’s never really been on his own. But this works out. You don’t have to worry about rushing home to let him out or feed him. Gives us time.”
“Time to do what?” she asked, wiggling her brows at me.
“Nope. No spoilers. But we should get going,” I said, walking over to open the passenger door for her.
“Can I at least know where we’re going?”
“Miami. Nope, don’t tense up,” I said as she froze when reaching for her seatbelt. “It’s a very relaxing day.”
“Okay. I trust you,” she said, offering me a little smile.
The words were like a knife to the gut, but I forced a smile too.
She was chatty on the drive, telling me about the new designs Traeger was going to work on to replace the old pots, a huge sale she’d gotten for a local brewery, and a bunch of stories about her grandmother and her antics.
When I slowed, then parked, in front of a towering hotel, she turned to me with her brows pinched.
“On your list was staying in a presidential suite,” I said, gesturing toward the hotel before hopping out when the valet came to my side of the car.
“Kylo!” Rue whisper-yelled at me as she climbed out to join me under the porte cochère that protected us from the unyielding sun beating down on us. “A presidential suite is like fifteen grand a night!”
“I pulled some strings,” I said, loving her shock and borderline outrage at the idea of spending that much money on her.
I wrapped an arm around her lower back, hauled her against my side, and led her toward the revolving doors.
“Really, this is too…oh,” she sighed as we moved inside to the marble-drenched floors and walls with the aged bronze chandeliers that cast warm light all around the space.
“Not too shabby, huh?”
“Have you stayed here before?”
“In a normal room, yes. We hit the clubs once and no one wanted to go all the way home, so we rented out several rooms and crashed here. I don’t remember much of that night, though.
Except the continental breakfast the next morning.
No waxy eggs and packaged bagels. That shit was banging.
Of course, I was hungover, so maybe that memory wasn’t super clear.
“We will test out the food, though,” I said as I led her toward the desk. “Since ordering room service is also on the list.”
“Are you sure we can be here now? Isn’t it early for check—”
“Miss Quinn?” a voice interrupted, making us both turn to find a man in a suit standing to the side of the desk.
“Yes?”
“If you will follow me,” he said, gesturing toward a special set of elevators set further away from the other elevator bank.
“My name is Daniel. I will be your personal butler for the day,” he explained, producing a keycard, tapping it to the screen, then leading us into the small elevator.
Taking advantage of the small space, I pulled Rue up against my chest to make room for Daniel.
She leaned back into me, and I cursed the efficiency of the elevator when it made it up to the floor, then chimed as the doors slid open… right into the suite.
Rue walked out, her eyes huge, her mouth parted.
“I’ll let you know if we need anything,” I said, taking the keycard and the small leather portfolio Daniel handed to me.
With that, I slipped him a twenty and he was gone without a sound.
“Oh. My. God,” Rue gasped when she knew we were alone.
“And we’re just getting started,” I said, waving the portfolio at her.