Chapter 48
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
King
The clubhouse was quieter than usual, which probably should have warned me something was coming.
Grace was upstairs asleep. It seemed the further she got in her pregnancy, the more she wanted to fuck.
Which I wasn’t fucking complaining about.
What I was complaining about was how my old lady kept me up all goddamn night then slept all day while I had to deal with the constant bullshit.
I’d already reheated my coffee twice and still hadn’t finished it.
I was half listening to Gunner give Cash shit about something neither of them would remember by lunchtime.
Nav sat farther down the bar with his laptop open, ignoring both of them with the practiced ease of a man who had spent years pretending the rest of us weren’t irritating as hell.
Several brothers were gone, others were sleeping after being up half the night, and for once, there wasn’t a goddamn crisis demanding my attention.
Then Carly’s name appeared on my phone.
I stared at it long enough for Cash to notice.
“That look never means anything good,” he said.
“No shit.”
Carly didn’t call me to catch up. The last time that woman called, I found out half my family tree had apparently been written by a drunk Irishman with a breeding fetish. I answered anyway and barely got her name out before the tone of her voice had me getting to my feet.
“Who’s with you?”
I glanced around the common room. Cash was already watching me, and Gunner had stopped talking. Even Nav looked up from his screen. “Cash, Gunner, and Nav. Why?”
“Go somewhere private.”
I headed for church without asking another question.
The three assholes followed me because officers developed a sixth sense for trouble, and apparently the only three available this morning had decided whatever Carly wanted was automatically their business.
I didn’t bother kicking them out; it would save me time later.
By the time I took my seat at the head of the table, Cash had closed the doors behind us, Gunner dropped into his usual chair, and Nav was already opening his laptop again.
“You need me to call everyone in?” I asked Carly.
“No. You can fill them in later. Christian and Montana are here with me, but I need Reaper on too.”
I closed my eyes.
Of fucking course she did.
Cash snickered as he sat down.
“Fuck you, Cash.”
“That woman gets Reaper and Montana on the same call; you know damn well this is about to turn into a shitshow.”
He wasn’t wrong, which only made me want to hit him more.
“Give me a second.” I patched Reaper into the call and put the phone on the table between us. He answered sounding irritated before he knew why he was being bothered, which was Reaper’s natural state whenever one of us called him.
“What?”
“Such a ray of fucking sunshine,” Montana said in the background.
“Shut the hell up, Fucknuts,” Reaper snapped.
“Here we go,” Cash muttered.
I pointed at him to shut the hell up while Carly tried to regain control before Reaper and Montana remembered whatever stupid argument they were currently having and took the whole call down with them.
“Can everybody please shut up for five fucking minutes?”
Fury’s voice came faintly through her end. “Baby, you might be asking too much.”
“Christian,” she warned.
“I’m shutting up.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Carly, you called me. Talk.”
The pause that followed wiped away what little amusement remained. I could hear papers moving on Carly’s end before she finally said, “I’ve been going through more of Sienna’s files.”
That got my attention.
Carly had spent the last few years digging through information left behind by the Society, pulling apart records that seemed designed to create three new questions for every answer she found.
The woman saw connections nobody else noticed, which was useful right up until she called and told you the latest connection involved your fucking family.
“I found a file on Kaitlyn Grace Ward.”
My eyes went immediately to Nav.
His hands stopped over the keyboard.
Kaitlyn was Angel’s daughter and Banshee’s niece.
Angel had been searching for Kay’s youngest daughter from the moment he learned the baby had survived.
Kyllian remembered her mother giving birth and calling the baby Kaitlyn Grace, but said the baby disappeared.
Later, Chasm found a file with her name on it without a single useful fucking detail attached to it.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“A lot more than I expected.” Carly hesitated, and I heard Montana tell her to get on with it before Fury warned him not to start. She ignored both men. “The original request came from Knuckles.”
Gunner leaned forward. “Satan’s Angels Knuckles?”
“The former VP,” Carly confirmed. “He contacted the Society because he wanted a child to disappear.”
The coffee in my stomach turned sour.
We all knew enough about the Society to know disappear could mean damn near anything depending on who made the request and who handled it. Children became leverage, commodities, names on paper. Lives rewritten because somebody with enough money or influence wanted a problem erased.
Carly continued before any of us could interrupt. “Isaac took the call, but he didn’t process the child through normal Society channels. He went around them. His brother and sister-in-law couldn’t have children, so Isaac arranged for them to take her instead.”
Cash shifted beside me. “They raised her?”
“For a while. According to the records I found, she had a legitimate childhood with them. New name, legal paperwork, everything. As far as anyone outside a very small circle knew, she was theirs.”
I could hear something in Carly’s voice that told me there was a but coming.
“What happened?”
“They died in a car accident.”
“Fuck,” Gunner muttered.
“The girl was still a child, and once they were gone, she ended up in foster care. That’s where the Society lost track of her.”
I leaned back in my chair, staring at the phone while pieces shifted into places I didn’t like. “What does this have to do with me and Fucknuts?” Reaper asked.
“Because Kaitlyn Ward is listed in Sienna’s records as Remington ‘Steele’ Ward’s daughter.”
The table went still.
Reaper swore first, Montana following a second later, but I barely heard either of them.
“She’s not Steele’s kid.”
Silence came down hard enough that even Cash stopped moving.
Carly spoke first. “What?”
“Steele was her father on paper, but he wasn’t her biological father.” I leaned forward, forearms against the table, my thoughts already moving through everything Angel had told us. “Angel was Steele’s enforcer. He had an affair with Kay. Kaitlyn is Angel’s daughter.”
For once, Reaper didn’t have a smartass comment ready.
Montana broke the silence instead. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“Wish I was.”
Carly was quiet for several seconds, processing information that hadn’t existed anywhere in Sienna’s records. “The Society file identifies Steele as her father. There’s nothing in here about Angel.”
“Because Sylvia doesn’t fucking know.” That was the part that mattered.
Sylvia St. James would look at exactly the same information Carly had found and see another heir with St. James blood.
She wouldn’t know the blood running through Kaitlyn had nothing to do with Steele.
“As far as Sylvia would know, Kaitlyn is Steele’s daughter. ”
“And that makes her valuable to Sylvia,” Fury said from Carly’s end.
“Exactly.”
Montana exhaled slowly. “Then we need to find her before Sylvia does.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We fucking do.”
“I already did.” Something in the way Carly said it made every instinct I had sharpen.
“Where?”
“Virginia.”
Something cold slid along my spine.
“She moved through several foster homes before ending up in Rosewood, living on the street after her foster parents kicked her out when she told them she was pregnant. After she gave birth, she placed her son up for adoption and was then adopted herself by a woman named Martha Steiner.”
Martha Steiner.
Rosewood.
My mind stopped on one name.
Fiona.
For a second, I couldn’t hear Carly anymore. I was back in the Sons of Hell clubhouse having a conversation with Romeo, who insisted an eighteen-year-old girl was his fucking soulmate.
Fiona.
Martha Steiner’s granddaughter.
“Her name now is—”
“Fiona Mitchell-Steiner,” I said, cutting Carly off as my chair hit the floor behind me.
I was already moving before anyone in church asked what the fuck I was doing. I crossed the room, yanked open the door, and looked out over the common room.
“Someone find fucking Romeo and tell him to get his ass to church!”
The few brothers outside stopped whatever they were doing.
Behind me, nobody said a word. That silence irritated me enough that I turned around and found Nav watching me with a guilty fucking look.
A very specific kind of guilty that instantly made my temper spike.
“What?” I ground out, still angry about the phone call from Zeus almost a month ago.
He closed the laptop halfway. “Romeo isn’t here.”
“No fucking shit, Nav. That’s why I just told someone to find him.”
“He’s in Virginia.”
I stared at him.
Cash muttered, “Oh fuck.”
“When did he go to fucking Virginia?”
Nav’s eyes stayed on mine. “Couple days ago.”
I walked slowly back into church because moving slowly was the only thing keeping me from grabbing the laptop and beating the fuck out of him with it. “And how the fuck do you know that?”
“He called me last night.”
The room got very quiet.
“From Virginia?”
“Yeah.”
“And somehow you forgot to mention that one of my fucking men rode halfway across the country without telling his president?”
Nav’s jaw tightened. “He needed me to find someone.”
That stopped me for half a second. “Who?”
Before he could answer, another call flashed across my phone.
Callum Montclair.
I stared at the name.
There were certain people who could call at any hour and immediately make a man wonder what fresh hell had been unleashed.
Callum fucking Montclair was one of them.
“Fuck!”
Cash’s shoulders started shaking.