Chapter Two #3
She’s beautiful in a way that doesn’t ask permission.
Petite, polished, and sharp-eyed, with hair that looks expensive and a spine that looks stronger than most men’s tempers.
She wears jeans and boots and a simple top, but nothing about her feels simple.
She steps beside Legend, not behind him, and slides one hand against his lower back.
Not calming him.
Claiming space beside him.
His woman.
I know that too, though I don’t know how.
Biker queen.
She looks at me, and unlike the men, she doesn’t assess me like a threat.
She sees too much.
That is worse and better at the same time.
“Bring them inside,” she says.
Legend’s gaze cuts to her.
She doesn’t look away from me. “The child is exhausted, she’s been crying, and half the club is staring at her like she’s tonight’s entertainment. Bring them inside.”
No one argues.
Not even Legend.
That tells me more about her power than any crown could.
“I’m not trying to cause trouble,” I say, and I hate how thin my voice sounds.
“I’m Sophie, by the way. This is Legend.” She bumps him with her elbow. “Trouble usually doesn’t announce itself. That makes you refreshing.”
Derby snorts.
I almost laugh.
Almost.
Legend doesn’t.
His eyes stay on me. “You said Mike is your father?”
There is no kindness in the question. No cruelty either. Just a demand for truth.
I nod. “I think so.”
“You think so.”
“My mother told me he was.”
“What was her name?”
The question is a bullet.
I brace even though I don’t know why. “Caroline Bell.”
The name hits him.
This time, I see it.
His face stills too much. Sophie notices because her hand tightens against his back. Derby notices too because he suddenly stops pretending to look bored.
Legend knows that name.
My knees threaten to go soft.
“You knew her,” I say.
Legend’s eyes meet mine.
For a second, I don’t see a biker president. I see a man who has just had the dead reach up and grab his ankle.
“My father did,” he says.
My father.
Not Mike.
Not Legendary Mike.
My father.
The words open something in me I didn’t know was still locked.
I’ve spent my whole life pretending I don’t care.
Pretending a missing father is a fact, not a wound.
Biology doesn't matter if a man never shows up. Pretending I don’t feel the empty chair at every school event, every birthday, every time Jeremy sneered that maybe women in my family just had a talent for making men leave.
And now I’m standing in Hell, Kentucky, holding my son, looking at a man who may be my brother.
A brother.
I don’t know what to do with that.
Sophie comes closer, slow enough not to spook me. “What’s your name?”
“Amelia.”
Her expression shifts. Not pity. Something warmer and more painful. “Amelia Bell?”
“Amelia Welles,” I say before I can stop myself.
Legend’s jaw tightens.
The name sounds reckless coming out of my mouth. But it’s the name my mother gave me. The one I kept despite Jeremy’s protests.
I have no proof in my hand. No DNA test. No letter from the grave. Just my father’s name, my mother’s stories, my own face, and a desperate hope that carried me across Kentucky with a child and a truck full of broken things.
“I know I should’ve called,” I say quickly.
“Or written. Or done this differently. I know showing up like this is insane. I wasn’t trying to ambush anyone.
I just…” I stop, swallow, and lift my chin because I can’t bear to beg while this many people are watching. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
The last sentence falls out naked anyway.
I hate it.
I hate every man in the yard for hearing it.
I hate Jeremy for making it true.
Legend’s eyes flick to my bare ring finger, then to the pale mark there.
Sophie sees it too.
So does Derby.
The air changes again, this time darker.
“Where’s your husband?” Legend asks.
My stomach drops.
August’s arms tighten around my neck.
I force my face not to flinch and fail. I know I fail because Derby’s expression goes flat in a way that makes him look suddenly less amused and more dangerous.
“Not here,” I say.
“That wasn’t the question.”
“No,” Sophie says softly, still looking at me. “But it may be all she can answer right now.”
Legend looks at Sophie.
Something silent passes between them. Marriage, maybe. War. Both.
He exhales through his nose and looks back at me.
I should look small in front of him. I know that. I’m broke, exhausted, carrying a child, and standing in another woman’s kingdom with my life hanging open in boxes outside.
But I can’t make myself shrink.
Not all the way.
Maybe that’s stupid.
Maybe that’s the only part of me Jeremy never managed to kill.
“Mike’s dead,” Legend says.
This time, hearing it from him makes it final.
My mouth trembles.
“When?” I ask.
“Years ago.”
Years.
Not weeks. Not months. Not a door I almost reached in time.
Years.
I’m too late by years.
The hope I’ve been dragging behind me like a suitcase with a broken wheel finally splits open, and there’s nothing inside but a little girl’s dream gone rotten.
I nod because I don’t trust my voice.
I nod like this is acceptable information.
I nod like I didn’t cross county lines chasing a ghost.
Sophie steps closer. “I’m sorry.”
There are the words again.
This time, I can’t hold myself together.
Not dramatically. I don’t collapse. I don’t wail. Women like me learn early that big grief makes people uncomfortable, and uncomfortable people either leave or get angry. So I do what I know how to do.
I go quiet.
Tears slide down my face.
Silent.
Hot.
Humiliating.
August starts crying because I’m crying. He presses his little face into my neck and makes a sound that shreds me.
That’s what moves Derby.
Not me.
The kid.
He shifts beside us, then looks at Legend. “Prez.”
Legend’s eyes cut to him.
“She needs a room,” Derby says. “Food. Tire can wait till morning. Truck’s a piece of shit, but it’ll roll if I patch it. Kid needs sleep.”
I should argue.
I should say I can manage.
I should say I’m not helpless, not some stray woman to be sorted by men with leather cuts and blood under their nails.
But August is shaking in my arms, and I’m so tired I can feel it in my teeth.
Sophie reaches for him, then stops before touching. She looks at me first. “May I?”
That almost breaks me more than anything else.
May I.
Permission.
A choice.
I nod.
Sophie’s voice softens. “Hi, August. I’m Sophie. I have snacks inside. Maybe even something chocolate if the men haven’t eaten everything like raccoons.”
August lifts his head a little.
Derby mutters, “Raccoons got better manners than half this club.”
Sophie’s mouth twitches. “See? He agrees with me.”
August studies her through wet lashes. “Do you have dinosaurs?”
Sophie takes this question seriously. “Not real ones.”
He considers that. “Stuffed ones?”
“I can find one.”
Derby looks pained. “You can’t promise dinosaur inventory in an outlaw clubhouse.”
Sophie ignores him. “And if I can’t, I know a man who owes me a favor and can go get one.”
Her eyes flick to Derby.
His face hardens. “Absolutely not.”
August looks at him. “You know where dinosaurs are?”
“No.”
“He does,” Sophie says.
“I don’t.”
“You ride a motorcycle. That means you can find things.”
“That ain’t how motorcycles work,” Derby says.
For the first time all night, August smiles.
Tiny. Wobbly. But real.
And because he smiles, I can breathe.
Legend sees it. I know he does because some of the steel leaves his shoulders, though not much.
Sophie offers her arms again without pushing. August looks at me. I kiss his cheek.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “I’m right here.”
He lets Sophie take him, but only because I stay close.
She handles him like she has held frightened children before, with no fuss, no baby talk, just steady arms and a calm voice.
August rests his head against her shoulder and watches Derby like Derby might produce a dinosaur through sheer meanness.
Derby avoids his eyes.
A man on the porch coughs like he is hiding a laugh.
Derby points at him. “You want to keep breathing, don’t.”
The man finds the ground fascinating.
Sophie walks toward the clubhouse with my son in her arms.
I follow because there is nothing else to do.
The inside of the old jail smells like leather, smoke, bourbon, coffee, gun oil, and something fried.
The walls are brick, concrete and scarred wood, decorated with old signs, club photos, framed newspaper clippings, and things I’m probably better off not asking about.
Some of the old cell doors are still there, worked into the design like the club decided if history was ugly, they might as well make it useful.
Men watch us enter.
Women too.
I feel every glance like fingers on my skin.
My life is in boxes outside. My husband is somewhere behind me. My maybe-father is dead. My maybe-brother is the president of an outlaw motorcycle club. My son is being carried by a woman who looks like she belongs on a magazine cover.
This can’t be my life.
Except maybe my life has always been this strange. I just kept trying to dress it up as normal.
Legend stops near a long table. “Sophie, take the kid to a spare room.”
“I’ll take both of them,” she says.
“No.” He looks at me. “I need to talk to her.”
My spine stiffens.
Sophie turns slowly.
The room doesn’t go silent, but it listens.
“She has been through enough tonight,” Sophie says.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Legend’s jaw flexes.
For one wild second, I think they might fight because of me. Then he looks away first.
Not submission.
Choice.
Again, that tells me more about Sophie’s place here than anything else could.
“I need five minutes,” Legend says. “Then she can sleep.”
Sophie looks at me. “Is that okay?”
No one has asked me that in so long that I almost don’t understand the question.
Is that okay?
I glance at August. He is half-asleep against her shoulder already, fingers tangled in his dinosaur. He is warm. Safe for this second. I can survive five minutes if he is safe.
I nod. “It’s okay.”
Sophie studies me for another heartbeat, then inclines her head. “Five minutes.”
Legend almost smiles.
Almost.
She leaves with August, and I watch until they disappear up the stairs.
The second my son is out of sight, the strength goes out of my legs.
I catch the back of a chair before anyone can notice.
Derby notices.
Of course he does.
He pulls the chair out with his boot. “Sit down before you fall down and make this more dramatic.”
“I’m not dramatic.”
“You cried over a dead wrestler in a biker yard while holding a kid and a pair of attempted-murder panties in your purse.”
I stare at him.
He shrugs. “Little dramatic.”
A laugh slips out of me.
It’s watery and awful, but it’s a laugh.
I sit.
Legend watches that exchange with an expression I can’t read.
Then he sits across from me.
Up close, the resemblance hurts.
Not because he looks exactly like the man in my mother’s old photograph. Legend is his own man, harder in some ways, more controlled in others. But there are echoes. The brow. The mouth. The way silence seems to gather around him and wait for orders.
Derby stays standing to my left, arms crossed.
I shouldn’t like that.
I do anyway.
“What do you know?” Legend asks.
I fold my hands on the table so he can’t see them shake.
“My mother was Caroline Bell. She grew up near Lonerock, Oregon. She met Mike when he was wrestling some county fair circuit. This was before he got bigger. Before…” I gesture around because I don’t know how to say before all this.
“She said they were together only a little bit. Not long. She got pregnant. He left before she told him. Or she told him and he didn’t believe her.
The story changed depending on how much she hated him that day. ”
Legend’s face gives nothing away.
I keep going because stopping would hurt worse.
“She never asked him for money. Not that I know of. She said pride was the only thing he ever left her with, and she wasn’t wasting it on begging. But she kept a picture. She kept clippings.”
My voice catches.
I hate that.
“Your mom hang around bikers in Oregon?” he asks too quick.