Chapter 44
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Romeo
By the time King let the rest of us into church, whatever Zeus had told the officers had already settled over the room.
Jack wasn’t running his mouth, which told me plenty.
Cash looked pissed, Mimic looked worse, and Nav had that particular expression he wore when there was a problem somewhere in the world refusing to surrender to his keyboard.
We all listened without interrupting as King explained about Arizona and Dakota. Two fewer enemies should’ve felt better than it did. But Sylvia St. James was still out there somewhere, Zephyr was still breathing, and whatever those men had helped build hadn’t died with them.
King let that sink in before his attention moved around the room. “There’s something else. Stone Ward is dead.”
That name hit differently.
Stone had been VP of the Mother Chapter.
I’d patched into the Silver Shadows in Arkansas with Titan at the head of the table and Steele sitting beside him. When Titan was killed Steele took over and Stone became VP. I’d listened when Stone spoke. Followed his orders. Trusted the patch on his chest because that was what brothers did.
Finding out later what kind of man he really was had poisoned plenty of those memories. Knowing he was dead didn’t clean them up.
King didn’t linger on his death because the story behind it mattered more.
“Brandy’s father is Hex.”
For a second, the two names refused to fit together.
Hex belonged to the Mother Chapter’s history, one of those names that survived long after the man disappeared.
Brandy belonged to this clubhouse. She’d spent years feeding us, cleaning up after us, insulting us, and quietly taking care of every asshole under this roof while pretending she wasn’t doing any such thing.
Ace frowned beside me. “Brandy’s father is Dominic Griffin.”
King nodded. “That’s who Brandy thought he was. She didn’t know her father had ever been in a club. She didn’t know Griffin wasn’t the name he was born with.”
Something cold shifted in my stomach.
“Hex was Dominic Ward.”
Fuck.
King gave us the history the officers had already heard, and with every piece, the Silver Shadows I remembered from Arkansas looked a little different.
Dominic Ward Senior had been president before Titan. Titan was his younger brother, and apparently being second hadn’t sat well with him. With the Society helping from the shadows, Titan had Dominic murdered, blamed a rival club, then stepped into his brother’s chair.
I knew that story.
Not that version of it, but the shape.
“Steele and Stone,” I muttered.
King’s eyes found mine.
The same realization was already souring my stomach. Years after Titan murdered his brother and implicated a rival club, Steele and Stone arranged Titan’s murder, blamed another club, and Steele took the presidency.
Same family. Same lie. Same fucking chair.
We had all believed them. Titan was Steele and Stone’s father. When they told us who killed one of ours, we didn’t question whether they were using our loyalty to aim us at an innocent target. He was their fucking father.
Apparently, Hex hadn’t questioned Titan either.
He’d been young when his father died, with no idea his uncle was responsible. Steele was still too young for the VP position, so Titan put Hex beside him instead, letting his dead brother’s son believe he was being groomed to someday inherit the presidency that had been his father’s.
Then Stone got old enough to want Hex out of the way.
An arms deal, a dead federal agent, and a setup that depended on Hex doing exactly what a loyal vice president would do when the law came down on his club.
He took the fall.
Five years later, the truth came out. Hex went back to Arkansas, nearly beat Stone to death, then burned his cut, covered his ink, and disappeared. Dominic Ward eventually became Dominic Griffin and raised a family who knew nothing about the Silver Shadows.
Including Brandy.
That was the part that stayed lodged in my head while King summarized what happened after Stone discovered exactly who she was.
Brandy had spent five years living under a Silver Shadows roof without knowing her father once sat in the VP chair, without knowing her grandfather had been president, without even knowing the Ward name belonged anywhere in her family.
Then Stone dragged her into it anyway.
King didn’t need to give us every detail.
Stone took Brandy to force Hex out of hiding.
Death Dogs were waiting. Brandy was pregnant, caught in the middle of a war that had started before she was born, and for a few ugly minutes, all I could see was the woman who used to shove food at me when she noticed I hadn’t eaten, rolling her eyes while she told me my flirting needed work.
The ordinary memories hurt worse than anything King could’ve described.
Brandy had been ours long before any of us knew she had Silver Shadows blood.
Knowing Stone had put his hands on her made me wish death came with a fucking encore.
Torment got her out and Brandy was alive. The baby was alive.
Stone wasn’t.
That was what mattered.
It still didn’t erase the thought that followed me through the rest of church.
Hex had burned his cut, changed his name, moved away, and spent decades keeping his children outside the life he’d escaped.
Stone still found Brandy.
I’d spent months telling myself Fiona was safer in Virginia.
Tonight, fifteen hundred miles felt less like protection and more like endless fucking miles.
The scrape of chairs finally pulled me back into church. King had ended the meeting, and brothers were starting to move around me, conversations picking up in low voices as men headed for the door. I stayed where I was long enough for Ace to bump my shoulder on his way past.
“You coming?”
“In a minute.”
He gave me a look but kept walking.
I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for.
Maybe for the feeling to pass.
It didn’t.
By the time I made it upstairs, I had my phone in my hand. Fiona’s name sat on the screen, and for once I didn’t want the buffer of a text. I didn’t want to type something, wait, watch the three little dots appear, then disappear while she decided how much of herself to give me.
I wanted the parts she couldn’t censor.
Fiona answered on the third ring, her voice soft enough that the last remnants of church finally loosened their grip on me.
“Hi.”
I pushed open my bedroom door and let it swing shut behind me. “There’s my girl.”
The breath she took was barely more than a hitch, but the phone caught it. I’d started collecting those little reactions without meaning to. A pause half a second too long. A laugh that went breathless around the edges. The way she inhaled when I slipped past whatever answer she’d been expecting.
“You called,” she said.
A smile tugged at my mouth as I shrugged out of my cut. “Starting to worry about that Virginia education, Cher. Usually when the phone rings and my voice comes out of it, that means I called.”
“You know what I meant.” Her laugh followed me across the room. “You usually text first.”
“Texting gives you an unfair advantage.” I hung my cut over the chair and sat on the edge of the bed, toeing off one boot. “You get to see what I said, glare at the screen, call me an asshole, rethink whatever you were about to send, then pretend I didn’t get to you.”
“I do not do that.”
The denial came too quickly.
I grinned as the second boot hit the floor. “You absolutely fucking do.”
“You have a very inflated opinion of your effect on me.”
“Accurately inflated.”
She made a dismissive little sound, but I could hear the smile underneath it. That was another thing the phone gave me. Fiona could type an eye roll with the best of them, but her voice betrayed her constantly.
I stretched out across the mattress and tucked one arm behind my head. “Besides, tonight I wanted the unedited version.”
“The unedited version of what?”
“You.”
Silence.
Then that breath again.
My eyes closed as a slow smile spread across my face. “See?”
“See what?”
“That.”
“I breathed, Jasper.”
“Not the way you did five seconds ago.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Sure, Ma Belle.”
She laughed softly. “You’re impossible tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“More than usual.”
“That sounds like a compliment.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Still taking it.”
The rustle of paper came through the phone, followed by the soft thump of what sounded like a book closing. I pictured her curled up somewhere, probably in bed, and the thought arrived with enough detail that I decided to check.
“What were you reading?”
“Nothing exciting.”
“Where?”
She hesitated.
There went my smile again.
“Why does that matter?” she asked.
“It didn’t until you took that long to answer.”
“I did not take that long.”
“Fiona.”
Another soft laugh. “I’m in bed.”
“Well, shit.”
“What?”
I stared at the ceiling, enjoying the picture forming in my head far too much. “That improves the conversation considerably.”
“I’m reading.”
“So you said.”
There was a pause, and I could practically see her narrowing her eyes at the phone. “What exactly are you imagining?”
I laughed under my breath. “You really want to open that door?”
Her inhale answered before she did. “Jasper.”
“Christ, I love calling you.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because every time I say something you aren’t ready for, you make that little sound.”
“I do not make a sound.”
“You just did.”
“I breathed.”
“Baby, if that’s how you normally breathe, you need a doctor.”
Her laugh burst through the phone, warm and helpless, and I found myself smiling like an idiot at the ceiling. After everything King had dumped on us downstairs, hearing Fiona laugh felt better than it had any right to.
“What are you wearing?” I asked.
The laugh disappeared into a sharp gasp.
I barked out one of my own. “That. Right fucking there.”
“You did that on purpose!”
“Absolutely.”
“You’re terrible.”
“You knew that.”
“I forget sometimes.”
“Then I’m doing you a service.”
She sighed dramatically enough that I knew she’d probably rolled her eyes too. “A T-shirt and shorts.”
The picture in my head sharpened.