Chapter 7 Jace
JACE
Cal’s phone hasn’t moved from Parker’s suite in twenty-one minutes.
Twenty-one minutes is twenty minutes longer than it should take to drop a bag, say “you’re welcome,” and leave.
The hallway hums with the steady breath of the vents and the quieter pulse of the harbor below.
Through the door, we catch the rise and fall of voices—hers high and sharp with heat, his low and infuriatingly calm.
A zipper rakes shut. A muttered curse. Cal’s soft laugh.
Silas drags a hand through his hair, standing next to me. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Apparently not.” I slide the master key card. Green. Click.
Lemon polish and ocean salt meet us as the door swings open.
The afternoon throws broken light across the floor, and Parker stands in the middle of it, yoga leggings inked to her thighs, crop top damp from rehearsal, curls sticking to her neck.
She looks flushed and fierce and done with the day.
Cal leans near the window like it’s his living room, arms folded, eyes bright with the kind of interest that gets him into trouble.
She whips around when we enter. “Are you kidding me?” Her voice fractures on the second word. “Is there a schedule where you take turns invading my space, or did you all decide to do it at once? Did Charles send you?”
“Your space,” Silas says, shutting the door with a soft click.
Cal sighs. “Bold, considering you just charged half the boutique to my account.”
“That was different,” she fires back. “That was a lesson in hospitality.”
Cal’s mouth curves. “Consider all of us being a tax, then, angel.”
Silas pushes off the door and drifts deeper into the room with that predatory patience people mistake for laziness.
He clocks the open case, the neat stacks of hotel bags, the garment bag loose on the bed like a secret deciding whether to be told.
He reaches for it, peels it back, and holds up the costume between two fingers.
Red and black, glitter catching sunlight, more suggestion than fabric.
He turns it once, studying it like evidence.
“Is this what you’re wearing to the party, killer? ”
Parker lunges, breathless. “Give me that.”
He lifts it out of reach, eyes flicking over the sheer panels and straps. “Doesn’t look like a bridesmaid dress.”
“It’s for the dance,” she says, frustration shivering through the words. “For Sienna’s bachelorette. Put it down.”
The word dance lands in my gut like ice water. I’d half-listened when Sienna mentioned choreography, filed it beside cake flavors and seating charts. Not this. Not Parker under lights while a room of drunk men measure her with their eyes and talk about Carter’s daughter like she’s an open question.
“The dance is canceled,” I say.
Silence tightens the room. She turns to me slowly, eyes gone very still. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
She comes closer, heat rolling off her skin, the faint coconut of her shampoo cutting through lemon and salt. “You don’t make that call. This is Sienna’s party. Her idea. Her joy. I said yes.”
“Not in that,” I nod toward the costume, “and not in front of—”
“In front of who?” Her chin tips up. “Adults? Men who can handle a woman on a stage without combusting?”
“Parker,” I start, and she slices a hand through the air.
“No. You don’t get to do this anymore. You don’t get to say it’s about protection and make it law.
” Her voice doesn’t shake; it shivers with held-back years.
“I’m not part of your organization! I’ve done just fine without you three skulking around, scaring off every potential of me having a life. I am not your problem to manage.”
She was never a problem to manage, though.
We were the sons, Dominic Carter’s lieutenants.
We were born into this life just like Charles.
She was just a bonus. Aside from the standard bro code that most boys and men follow, Parker has always been off-limits.
Not just because she’s a criminal empire princess, but because she’s our best friend’s sister.
Aside from that, women born into our world don’t hold the same titles or responsibilities as men.
They married, they birthed children, raised them, rinse and repeat.
It made Parker, as independent as she’s always been, more of an asset.
Potential leverage or possible bridge into aligning outside families to the Carter name.
Charles swears he’ll change that when he takes over, but I don’t think Parker will ever want anything to do with the business, no matter how modern he makes everything.
Silas’s mouth flattens. “You say that like we woke up one day and decided the rules for fun.”
“You enforced them for fun,” she shoots back. “Every party, one of you at my shoulder. Every boy who looked at me twice was gone by morning. ‘For my own good.’ You didn’t keep me safe. You kept me small.”
“We kept you breathing,” I say, and it comes out rougher than I intend.
“Your father would’ve married you off at eighteen if your mother hadn’t set the divorce in motion and put you on a plane.
You think that was a fairy tale? Men lined up with rings and alliances attached.
You were a chess piece long before you were ever a girl in a white skirt at our dock. ”
Her expression flickers, then hardens. “And you decided I’d stay a piece even after she got me out. Great. Thank you for the recap.”
Cal’s voice threads in, softer, coaxing. “You went to USC, built a life, got your degrees, carved out a world where Dominic didn’t decide your morning. That was the point. We didn’t touch it. We let you run.”
“You didn’t let me do anything.” She turns on him. “I ran because I had to. Because staying meant living under every pair of eyes in this room. You three weren’t my friends. You were my wardens with smiles.”
Silas laughs then, a short, broken sound that isn’t humor. “We were Charles’s friends, sure. Sons of your father’s men. We took the same oath you hate. We took it because not taking it gets people killed.” He steps closer, voice low. “You left for six years, Parker. Six years and not a word.”
“You would have stopped me.” She swallows. “You always stop me.”
“Because we cared,” he says, and it lands like something torn free.
She shakes her head. “No. Because you were ordered to keep me in line.”
It’s not true, not like that, and it’s not false, not entirely.
The line between protection and power is razor-thin in our world, and we walked it with our jaws clenched and our hands empty.
I think of Charles at Duke, learning how to inherit without bleeding.
I think of Parker in Los Angeles, learning who she is without the Carter name cutting a notch in every doorframe. We stayed. She left. The oath held.
Cal’s smile is gone now. “You were more than Charles’s sister, angel,” he says, and for once, there’s no play in it. “More than our responsibility.”
Color rises along her throat. “Don’t.”
She has no idea how much each of us wanted her.
How much we want her, even now.
The suite goes quiet enough to hear the gulls outside. Parker’s breath hitches, anger, and something else moving through her face like weather. She looks down, and the red-black costume is still in Silas’s hand, the glitter catching on a thread of sun.
“If you go out there in that,” I say, steadier, “It won’t be about Sienna’s joy. It’ll be about Carter’s daughter on a stage, and every man with a grudge will have a new angle. You want agency? Keep it. But protect yourself at the same time.”
“So I should hide?” she asks quietly. “Because men can’t be trusted to behave.”
“No,” Cal says, coming off the window at last. “You should pick your battlefield.”
Silas holds the costume out, palm open. “Dance,” he says, not smiling now. “But do it where we control the room. Do it for us.”
Her eyes flash. “I’m sorry?”
I take the costume from Silas and feel the obscene lightness of it slip over my knuckles. I picture the party room full of Charles’s college friends and colleagues. And I picture three chairs on stage in front of her instead of one.
“You keep saying we don’t see you as a woman,” I say. “Prove us wrong or prove yourself right. But don’t do it for a room full of strangers.”
She looks between us, chin lifted, eyes bright. Pride wrestles caution, anger wrestles some small, traitorous part of her that has always loved a dare. Then she reaches and curls her fingers around the fabric, knuckles white against red.
“Fine,” she says.
“Good.” The word scrapes out of me.
“But if one of you tries to stop me, if one of you pulls a graduation stunt in the middle of it, I’m done.” She points to each of us, sharp as a blade tip. “With all of it. For good.”
The threat plants itself like a stake between us. I step close enough to see the small pulse beat at her throat, close enough to smell sweat and lemon and the ocean caught in her hair.
“We won’t stop you,” I tell her.
Her pupils flare. “That’s not reassuring.”
I let the corner of my mouth lift. “See you tonight, princess.”
I turn before I say too much and walk out into the cooler hall. Silas follows, hands shoved deep in his pockets, the fight still lit behind his eyes. Cal lingers, his gaze on Parker like he’s memorizing a page he tore out years ago.
“Wear your hair down,” he says, and then he’s beside us and the door clicks shut.
The three of us stand in the quiet for a beat that feels like the edge of a storm. Silas huffs a laugh that has no humor in it. “Well,” Silas says finally. “That was—”
“Don’t.” I cut him off.
“I was just going to say that went better than expected.”
“It didn’t.” Cal runs a hand over his face. “It really didn’t.”
“She’s going to dance for us,” Silas points out. “In that. How is that not a win?”
“Because,” I say, already walking toward the elevator, “we just asked Charles’s little sister to give us a lap dance in front of half the wedding party.”
“She’s not Charles’s little sister anymore,” Cal says quietly. “She made that very clear.”
He’s right.
Tonight, when the lights hit her on stage, she won’t be the boss’s little girl anymore. She won’t be our best friend’s sister.
She’ll be ours.