18. Cassie
Cassie
I hear the pipes before dawn fully breaks, and I'm at the door before I've even found my slippers. Ethan climbs off his bike slower than usual, and something in the set of his shoulders makes my chest go tight before he's said a single word.
"Hey." I reach for him, and he pulls me in hard, his face buried in my hair, holding on longer than a normal hello ever calls for.
"Hey yourself." His voice comes out rough, scraped thin.
"You okay?" I pull back enough to look at him, and there's something behind his eyes I haven't seen there before, not fear exactly, something heavier.
"Long night." He doesn't elaborate, and I don't push.
I get him inside, get him out of his cut and his boots, and he sits on the edge of our bed staring at nothing for a minute before I climb into his lap the way he usually pulls me onto his lap.
"Talk to me." I brush his hair back off his forehead. "Whatever it was, you don't have to carry it alone."
He tells me some of it, not all of it, enough that I understand the shape of what he did last night, even without every detail.
I don't flinch away from what he says, and something in him seems to loosen when I don't. I trace slow circles against the back of his neck while he talks, the way my own mother never once did for me, the way I've decided I want to do for him every single time this life asks something hard of him.
"I keep thinking about what Brax said." He rests his forehead against mine. "That the only thing separating us from the people we took that town from is where we draw the line. I want to believe that. I do believe it. It just costs more to believe it than I thought it would."
"You're still you." I kiss him slowly, trying to pour something steadier into him than words can carry on their own. "Whatever you did last night, you did it so a whole town doesn't get eaten alive by people who don't care who they hurt. That matters. You matter, doing it the way you did."
He exhales as if he's been holding his breath since he left. "Yeah. Okay." He kisses my temple. "Tell me about the finances. You said something before I left."
Right. The reason I've been half sick with worry since yesterday afternoon, half buried under my worry for him.
"Abby and I found something. A shipment that hit Spring Vale two weeks ago, paperwork under Del Torro colors, but the account that funded it traces back to the Estrada side.
They're not supposed to share money, not since Pablo died.
And my brother's hijacked shipment, the one that had Dante losing his mind at dinner, I think that's connected too. "
Ethan goes very still beneath me. "You think the Estrada’s hit your brother's shipment?"
"I think somebody's playing both families against each other, and I think whoever it is has been feeding information to people who shouldn't have it.
The wedding. The officiant. Maybe even Spring Vale.
" My voice shakes saying it out loud for the first time to someone other than Abby.
"I think it might be somebody close. Somebody who knew things only the club would know. "
He doesn't say anything for a long moment, and I can see him running back through every conversation, every face, looking for a crack he might have missed.
"We need to take this to Prez." He stands, pulling me up with him. "Now. Before anybody else gets hurt because we sat on it."
Church convenes within the hour, bleary-eyed brothers filing in on almost no sleep, phones dropped into the box without complaint.
I'm not allowed in, obviously, and rather than pace the hallway alone I find Rosie, Meg, and Cam already gathered in the kitchen, coffee going cold in front of all three of them, none of them pretending this is an ordinary morning.
"They'll figure it out." Rosie pulls out a chair for me without being asked. "This club's been through worse and come out the other side every time."
"Has it, though?" I sit, hands wrapped around a mug I don't actually want. "I keep thinking, if it's true, if somebody here really has been feeding information out, that's on me. All of it. None of this touches this club if I never walked through that door."
"Don't you dare." Cam's voice comes out sharper than I expect, though not unkind. "You didn't ask to be born into that family any more than any of us asked for the things we were born into. Whatever somebody chose to do with that, that's on them, not you."
"She's right." Meg reaches over and squeezes my hand. "This club doesn't keep score on who brought the trouble through the door. Only on who stands and fights it once it's here."
I want to believe that as easily as they say it, and some small, stubborn part of me starts to, sitting there with three women who've all had their own reasons to walk out that gate at some point and chose to stay instead.
Abby enters the room and she doesn’t close the door fully. I take a seat in the corridor and listen to what is happening inside.
Prez's voice, grim. "Walk us through it, Abby."
Abby lays it out clean and clinical: the crossed accounts, the timeline, the pattern that only makes sense if somebody's been talking.
"Whoever it is had to know three things nobody outside this club should've known.
Wedding time and location. The officiant's schedule.
And now the Spring Vale timing. They need to be close enough that the Estradas could move on that shipment before we even finished the operation. "
It’s silent, thick enough I can feel it through the wall.
"That's a short list of who had access to all three." Shadow’s voice is flat, final. "Prospects who were around for the wedding prep. Brothers on the ride to Harte of Steele. Whoever had eyes on Abby's system."
"You're saying it's one of us." Cash, quieter than I've ever heard him.
"I'm saying the information didn't walk itself out that door." Shadow again. "Somebody carried it."
"Not a single one of us wants this to be true." Pops says, looking around the room. "But wanting it untrue doesn't make it untrue. We look at this clear-eyed, or we don't look at it at all."
"Agreed." Ramsay is as quiet as ever, though there's an edge under it tonight I don't usually hear from him. "Whoever it is, they've been sitting at our table this whole time. Eating our food. Standing next to us in Church. That's the part I can't get past."
I press my hand flat against the wall, like I can feel the weight of what just got said settling over that whole room.
Nobody wants to hear it. I don't either.
But somewhere in this club I've started to love like it was mine from the beginning, somebody's been letting the wolves in through the back gate.
Prez's voice again, lower now, dangerous in a way I haven't heard from him before.
"We find out who. Quietly and we don’t approach anyone until we know for sure who it is.
Nobody outside this room knows we're looking, not until we're sure.
I won't have this club tearing itself apart over a suspicion that turns out wrong. "
"And if it turns out right?" Knuckles says, blunt as always.
The pause before Prez answers stretches long enough that I stop breathing, waiting on it.
"Then Church deals with it the way Church has always dealt with betrayal."
Nobody asks him to explain what that means. I don't think anybody needs to.
I sit in that hallway a long while after the meeting breaks, Rosie's hand resting on my shoulder the whole time, watching brothers file out one by one, faces unreadable. I find myself studying each one a little too closely, hating myself for it, but unable to stop. Pops nods at me when he passes. Brick touches my shoulder, I think that’s his thing.
Cash and Ramsay nod as they pass before walking to the kitchen to find Meg.
Spook and Nerd pass last, both smile at me as they walk past me.
I smile back on instinct.
It's only after they’ve gone that I realize my smile didn't quite reach anywhere real, and I can't work out if that's about them, or about the fact that I don't trust anyone with that kind of ease anymore, not even people who've done nothing to earn my suspicion.
I hate what this is turning me into. I hate it, and I can't stop doing it, anyway.