Chapter Three
Legend
A dead man can still make a mess.
I know that better than most.
My father has been in the ground for years, but Legendary Mike Welles still reaches up whenever he feels like it and grabs hold of my life with both fists.
Sometimes it’s an old debt. Sometimes it’s an enemy with a memory longer than his common sense.
Sometimes it’s some woman at a bar who remembers him as bigger, meaner, sweeter, or crueler than he ever really was, depending on what she wanted from him and what he left behind.
Tonight, it’s a woman standing in my clubhouse with his eyes.
That’s the part I don’t like.
Not the crying. Not the kid. Not the boxes in the yard or the busted truck Derby dragged in behind the gate. Not even the name Caroline Bell, though that one hits hard enough to make ghosts stir.
It’s the eyes.
A con can carry a story.
A desperate woman can carry a dead man’s name.
An enemy can carry paperwork.
But eyes are harder to fake.
Amelia Welles stands in front of me trying not to shake, and I hate how much of my father I see in the set of her jaw.
Not the face he showed the crowd when he was winning matches and making fools cheer for blood.
Not the face he used when he wanted a woman, a favor, or forgiveness.
The older one. The private one. The look that came over him when the room was closing in and he decided he’d rather burn the walls down than admit he was trapped.
She has that.
That scares me more than it should.
Sophie comes downstairs and sits beside her at the long table, angled toward Amelia like a shield in a silk blouse and boots.
My fiancée doesn’t have to say a word to get in my way.
She’s made an art out of it. One hand rests near Amelia’s, not touching, just there.
Giving the woman space and support at the same time.
That kind of thing don’t come natural to me.
I protect with locked gates, loaded guns, and men posted in the dark.
Sophie protects by making a woman believe the floor will hold. Sophie’s hand stays near Amelia’s, steady as a promise I’ve already tested too hard. I don’t deserve how easily she stands beside me.
I know that.
I just don’t know how to stop needing it.
Derby stands behind Amelia’s chair with his arms folded, pretending he doesn’t give a damn.
He’s doing a piss-poor job of it. His gaze keeps cutting toward the stairs where the kid is asleep, then back to the front door, then to Amelia’s pale face.
He looks like a man who brought home a stray dog and is pissed to find out it’s bleeding.
Whiskey has been called from the Fire Pit. Wildcat is out in the yard going through Amelia’s truck for trackers, wires, tags, anything that don’t belong. Oaks is somewhere outside the gate with two prospects, because the second Derby said the name Vale, the night stopped being simple.
I don’t know Jeremy Vale personally.
I know the name.
That’s enough.
In our world, names travel before men do.
They come on receipts, rumors, debt sheets, police whispers, church rosters, and the mouths of people who think trading information will buy them another day breathing.
Vale ain’t a big name, not in the way a chapter president is a big name or a county judge is a big name. But it touches too many corners.
And now it touches the woman who says she’s my sister.
Too damn many coincidences have been crawling out of the dark lately.
Royal’s sister shows up carrying her own wreckage. Now mine does too.
The Pearly Gates keep reaching with clean hands and rotten fingers. The Depraved Sinners haven’t been quiet enough for my liking.
“Start again,” I say.
Amelia looks up at me.
She’s tired enough that anger and fear keep trading places on her face. Her eyes are swollen. Her hair is coming loose from a messy knot. She wears a shirt that’s been slept in or cried in, maybe both, and jeans dusty from the road. There’s a bruise near her wrist, half-hidden by her sleeve.
That bruise bothers me.
I don’t let it show.
“If you’re asking because you didn’t hear me,” she says, voice thin but steady, “I can repeat it. If you’re asking because you think I’m lying, I don’t know how saying it twice fixes that.”
Derby’s mouth twitches.
Sophie looks down like she’s hiding a smile.
I ain’t amused.
“Where are you from?” I ask.
Amelia hesitates.
That hesitation has teeth.
“Originally?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Lonerock, Oregon.”
The whole room goes still in the places that matter.
Not everyone catches it. Some of the younger members at the bar keep pretending they ain’t listening.
A girl near the hall laughs too loud at something one of the prospects says.
Ice clinks in a glass. But Oaks hears it.
So does Royal, standing in the shadow near the old cell door, his dark eyes lifting from the floor like a blade sliding free.
Oregon.
Of course.
Sophie feels the change. Her gaze goes to me.
I keep my eyes on Amelia. “Lonerock.”
“Yes.”
The Oregon chapter has been muttering through the grapevine after getting taken over by a woman who has more ambition than fear.
And now a woman claiming Welles blood appears on a backroad in Kentucky, coming from the west with a kid, a dead phone, and a husband who may have friends in places he shouldn’t.
I don’t believe in coincidence.
Not when it knocks on my gate after midnight.
“When did you leave?”
Her brow pinches. “I was little.”
“How little?”
“Grade school. Fourth grade, I think. Maybe third. My mother moved us to Paducah.”
Paducah.
Kentucky.
That lands better.
Not good, but better.
“Why?” I ask.
Amelia gives a short laugh without humor. “Because my mother could make bad choices in every state, and Kentucky was next.”
Derby huffs once.
I look at him.
He stops.
Amelia rubs her forehead. “She said she had family near Paducah. She didn’t, not really.
A cousin she hadn’t spoken to in ten years and a friend who owed her money.
We stayed because she found work waitressing, then because moving took money, then because I started school there and she decided maybe one of us ought to have something close to normal. ”
“You have ties to Oregon now?”
“No.”
“You know anyone from the Kings chapter there?”
Her face goes blank. Not guilty. Confused.
“No.”
“Think before you answer.”
Sophie says my name softly. “Legend.”
I don’t look at her.
Amelia straightens in the chair. There it is again.
That Welles pride, showing its teeth even with exhaustion wrapped around her throat.
She’s half-broke, half-scared, and sitting in a room full of men who could swallow her whole, but she still lifts her chin like she’s deciding whether we’ve earned the right to speak to her.
“I’m thinking,” she says. “I don’t know anyone from a Kings chapter in Oregon.
I didn’t even know there were Kings chapters until tonight.
I knew the name Welles. I knew Legendary Mike.
I knew he wrestled, rode, and had a reputation bad enough my mother got mad if I asked too many questions. That is it.”
Royal steps out of the shadow. “Lonerock, ain’t that close to the old clubhouse?”
“Don’t know,” Amelia says, looking at him now. “It’s not close to much.”
Royal studies her like he’s reading handwriting on a suicide note. “Who was your mother connected to there?”
“No one important.”
I lean back. “People always think that until someone important comes looking.”
Her gaze returns to me. “My mother was a waitress, a bartender sometimes, and a woman who liked men who made terrible decisions. If that counts as a criminal network, then half of America is in trouble.”
Derby coughs like he’s covering a laugh.
I don’t smile, but damn if that don’t sound like my father’s kind of woman.
Caroline Bell.
I remember the name because my father only said it once in front of me.
I was seventeen, maybe eighteen, old enough to know he had women tucked into stories all over the country and young enough to still hate him for it.
He had been drinking after a run that went sideways.
Not falling-down drunk. Mike rarely let himself get that loose.
Just drunk enough for memory to sit beside him and start running its mouth.
“Oh, sweet sweet, Caroline Bell, she could suck chrome off a tailpipe,” he said.
That was it.
One sentence. I only registered it so deep in my soul because it wasn’t my mama’s name. And the fact he could get over her stung. Then he shut down, picked a fight with a brother twice his size, and broke the man’s nose over a pool cue.
I never heard her name again.
Now her daughter sits in my clubhouse asking for a dead man.
Maybe my father knew.
Maybe he didn’t.
Maybe he knew and buried the truth because Legendary Mike was better at making legends than taking responsibility.
That thought sits bitter on my tongue.
“You got proof?” I ask.
Amelia’s shoulders tense. “Not on me.”
“Where?”
“In a box. Maybe. My mother kept a picture and some old things. I packed what I could grab.”
“What kind of old things?”
“Clippings. A photo. A bracelet, I think. He gave it to her. Or she stole it. Depends which version of the story I believed.”
My father would have liked her.
That irritates me.
Sophie reaches for Amelia’s wrist this time, her fingers light over the sleeve where the bruise hides. Amelia flinches before she can stop herself.
The room goes quiet again.
Derby sees it.
Royal sees it.
I see it.
Sophie keeps her hand still, not chasing. “Did he do that? Your husband.”
Amelia looks at the bruise like it belongs to someone else.
“No,” she says.
A lie.
Clean. Automatic. Practiced.
I hate it.
Not because she lies to me. People lie to me all the time. They lie because they’re scared, stupid, greedy, loyal, desperate, or all of the above. I hate this lie because I know why women tell it. They tell it because the truth comes with consequences they can’t control.