Chapter Three #2
Sophie’s voice changes. Gentle, but not weak. “Amelia.”
Amelia closes her eyes. “It happened when I was packing. Jeremy grabbed me. I pulled away.”
“Has he hit you before?” I ask.
Sophie’s eyes cut to me.
Too hard.
Too fast.
I know what she’s saying without words.
Careful.
I ain’t built careful. Not with bruises on women. Not with kids nearby. Not with men who think marriage is a license to terrorize.
Amelia’s face goes pale. “I don’t want to talk about that with a room full of strangers.”
“You’re right,” Sophie says before I can answer. “You don’t have to.”
I grind my teeth.
Derby shifts behind the chair. “I’ll clear the room.”
“No,” Amelia says quickly.
That gets my attention.
Her cheeks color, but she doesn’t look away. “I mean, no. Please don’t make everyone move because of me. I don’t want to be more of a problem than I already am.”
Problem.
I hear that word and know someone has used it on her until she carries it in her own mouth.
Sophie hears it too.
My ol’ lady to be’s expression softens, and that makes me more dangerous, not less. Sophie has a heart that still reaches for people after everything the world tried to take from her. It’s one of the reasons I love her. It’s also one of the reasons I have to be mean enough for both of us.
“You’re not a problem,” Sophie says.
Amelia looks like she wants to believe her.
She don’t know how.
Royal’s sister came through our gates with secrets and a history that pulled on his throat like a noose. Now Amelia is here with mine. Two women tied to old blood at the same time. Two men in my club forced to look backward when we’ve got enemies moving forward.
It stinks.
I look at Derby. “What did she tell you on the road?”
He shrugs. “Flat tire. Kid. Looking for Mike. Husband not here. That was the important part.”
Derby’s eyes cut toward the stairs before he finishes.
Not Amelia first.
The kid.
Interesting.
Dangerous too, if the fool starts caring before we know what kind of trap this is.
“Did anyone follow?”
“Not that I saw.”
“What did you see?”
Derby’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t like being questioned as if he’s a prospect. Tough shit. This is my table, my clubhouse, my father’s ghost.
“Boxes dumped in the road,” he says. “Truck tire shredded. No fresh vehicle tracks that stood out, but the shoulder’s gravel and half-washed from rain. Kid crying. Her trying not to. No phone in her hand. No weapon I could see.”
Amelia lifts her chin. “I had pepper spray.”
Derby looks down at her. “That little pink thing on your keychain?”
“It works.”
“On mosquitoes?”
“It would have worked on you if I needed it to.”
The corner of his mouth tips. “Darlin’, if you pepper-sprayed me after your panties already assaulted me, I would’ve had to marry you on principle.”
Color rushes over her face.
Sophie makes a sound dangerously close to a laugh.
I stare at Derby. “Is this your way of being useful?”
His grin drops. “No. My way of being useful is telling you she’s scared, broke, tired, and telling enough truth to be dangerous.”
Amelia goes still.
Derby looks at me, not her. “Could be trouble. Probably is. But she ain’t some planted sweetbutt with a recording device in her bra. She’s a woman with a kid who ran until her wheels gave out.”
“You know that after thirty minutes?”
“I know fear when I see it.”
Something ugly flickers behind his eyes.
There’s more there than he’s ever told me.
Derby is a brother. Loyal. Violent. Funny when it suits him.
Mean when it doesn’t. He keeps his past like most of us do, buried under miles, ink, and the roar of an engine.
I’ve never asked much. Men come to the Kings with names, scars, and lies they eventually grow tired of carrying.
We don’t dig unless the dirt starts moving on its own.
Tonight, his dirt shifts.
Amelia looks up at him like she’s seeing the crack too.
He looks away first.
Interesting.
Sophie notices.
Of course she does.
The front door opens, and Wildcat comes in wiping grease off his hands with a shop rag.
He’s lean, twitchy, and too damn smart for his own survival.
He got the name not just because the mascot, because he looks half-feral when cornered and has a habit of solving technical problems by swearing at them until they surrender.
“Truck’s clean so far,” Wildcat says. “No hardwired tracker. No obvious airtags taped under the wheel wells or inside the cab. I’m still checking boxes and bags. Found a dead phone wrapped in a sweatshirt. Hers?”
Amelia nods. “It has a new number. I turned it off.”
“Turning it off don’t always kill the trail,” Wildcat says.
“I threw my regular phone away outside Richmond. That one is old. I brought it in case I needed to call 911.”
Wildcat glances at me.
That tracks.
“Keep looking,” I say. “Anything with Vale’s name comes to me.”
He nods and disappears back outside.
Amelia watches him leave. “You’re really checking my things?”
“Yes.”
Her jaw sets. “There are private things in there.”
“I expect so.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“Not as much as someone finding you because we cared more about your privacy than your safety.”
Her eyes flash. “That sounds exactly like something Jeremy would say.”
The table goes silent.
I feel Sophie’s gaze on me before she speaks.
“She’s right,” Sophie says.
The words hit harder than they should because I know she means them.
I turn to her.
Sophie doesn’t back down. She never has. Not from my temper. Not from my club. Not from my past. Not from the parts of me that still think love and control sometimes wear the same cut.
“She ran from a man who used protection as a cage,” Sophie says. “If you make every decision for her tonight, you become another locked door.”
My first instinct is anger.
Not at Sophie.
At the truth.
I look at Amelia. Her face is guarded again, but underneath it’s something rawer. She expects me to dismiss her. She’s braced for it. A woman gets that brace from practice.
I drag a hand over my beard. “Wildcat will check what you allow him to check.”
Surprise flickers across her face.
I keep going before anyone congratulates me for basic decency.
“But anything electronic gets inspected. Phone, tablet, GPS, kid toys with chips, all of it. If you don’t want a man going through clothes or personal boxes, Sophie can do it with him outside the door.”
Amelia swallows. “Okay.”
Sophie’s hand finds my thigh under the table and squeezes once.
A small thing.
A reward.
I don’t need rewards for acting like a civilized man.
I take it anyway.
Royal speaks from the wall. “The Oregon thing still bothers me.”
“Everything bothers you,” Derby says.
Royal ignores him. His eyes stay on Amelia. “You leave Lonerock in grade school. Come to Paducah. Your mother tells you Mike Welles is your father. Years later, you run to Hell. Soon after my sister shows up. Same names start getting dug out of places they were better left buried.”
Amelia looks between us. “I don’t know anything about your sister.”
“No,” Royal says. “I don’t suppose you do.”
His voice is mild.
Royal’s mild voice makes people nervous if they have sense.
Amelia has sense. She sits back a little.
I look at Royal. “You think they’re connected?”
“I think women don’t fall out of the sky at the same time unless someone is shaking the heavens.”
That’s the kind of thing Royal says when he wants to sound like he’s writing poetry on the inside of his skull. It also happens to be right more often than I like.
Amelia’s hands curl in her lap. “I’m not part of some plan.”
Sophie’s expression sharpens. “No one is saying you are.”
“They’re looking at me like I’m.”
I lean forward. “Because if you’re my sister, you’re valuable.”
She flinches.
Not from the word sister.
From valuable.
That tells me something too.
I soften my voice as much as it will go, which admittedly ain’t much. “Valuable means useful to enemies. To people who want leverage. To men who think blood is a handle they can grab.”
“Jeremy doesn’t know about this,” she says.
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
That’s honest.
Good.
“I didn’t tell him,” she says. “But he went through my things. He read my mother’s letters after she died. He knew I wondered about Mike. He mocked me for it.”
Her voice changes on that last part.
Mocked.
I can hear him through her. Men like that are all the same in different shirts. They don’t just bruise skin. They bruise wanting. They find the thing you ache for and make it dirty in your hand.
Sophie’s eyes go sad.
Mine go cold.
“What did he say?” I ask.
Amelia looks away. “Nothing important.”
“What did he say?”
She rubs both hands over her face. “That women like my mother don’t know who fathered their kids. That if Mike Welles was my father, he clearly didn’t want me. That maybe I was chasing outlaw trash because trash recognizes trash.”
Derby makes a sound low in his chest.
Royal’s face empties.
Sophie whispers, “Amelia.”
My father was many things.
Outlaw trash may be one of them.
But no man gets to use that to make a woman feel unclaimed by the blood she had no say in carrying.
I stand because sitting still no longer works.
Amelia stiffens at the movement.
That stops me faster than Sophie’s warning could.
I force my hands open.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say.
She gives me a look that is so tired it nearly guts me. “Men usually say that before they explain why hurting you wasn’t their fault.”
Sophie closes her eyes for half a second.
Derby turns and walks three steps away like he needs distance from the sentence.
Royal watches me.
The whole damn room watches me.
This is the problem with being president. Every reaction becomes law if you let it. If I rage, men rage. If I dismiss her, they dismiss her. If I treat her like a liar, she becomes one in their eyes before proof gets a chance to breathe.
And if she is my sister, then the first thing I give her can’t be another man’s temper.
I sit back down.
Slowly.
“Fair,” I say.
Amelia blinks.
“What?”