CHAPTER 10
What the Club Knew
°°°
He came to her apartment the next evening, and this time there was no tea, no soft lighting, no careful pretense of an ordinary visit — he stood in her doorway with the specific stillness of a man who'd spent all day rehearsing something and had arrived without any of it feeling adequate.
"Sit down," she said, stepping back to let him in. "You look like you're about to deliver a eulogy."
"Might be, in a way." He didn't sit. He stood in the middle of her living room instead, hands in his pockets, and she recognized the posture from a hundred old memories — the way he braced himself before saying something that cost him.
She'd spent the whole day bracing too, if she was honest with herself — had gone through the motions at the shop with half her attention still snagged on last night's conversation, had snapped at Priya over nothing and apologized twice, had found herself staring at a half-finished belt for ten minutes without adding a single stitch.
Whatever he was about to tell her, some part of her had already started grieving the version of the last year she'd believed in, the one where she'd simply been unlucky rather than deliberately kept in the dark by an entire room full of people.
"Rhys. Just say it."
He nodded, once, and made himself meet her eyes.
"After you left, there were people who knew about Sasha before you did.
Not everyone. But some of the guys close to me — Ghost knew, one of the prospects who'd seen us together at a bar once and mentioned it to the wrong person.
It got around, quiet, the way things get around in a club before anyone official says anything.
" He exhaled, hard, like the words cost him physical effort to produce.
"Preacher found out about a week before you did.
And instead of telling you himself, or making me tell you, he handled it.
Made sure it didn't get back to you through anyone but me, on my own timeline.
Made sure the club's face stayed clean. Made sure nobody outside the family talked about it where it could hurt the business, hurt the President's nephew's reputation, hurt any of the things that mattered to him more than whether I deserved to keep hiding it from my own wife a little longer. "
The words landed exactly as hard as she'd braced for, and harder, in the specific way that confirmed dread always hurts more than uncertain dread, however much you've prepared yourself.
"He knew," she said slowly. "The club knew. Before I did. And nobody told me."
"Nobody told you." He said it plainly, taking the full weight of it without flinching, though she could see what it cost him to hold still under her stare.
"I'm not going to pretend that's a small thing, or explain it away as loyalty, or any of the other words people use to make ugly things sound noble.
It was wrong, Em. What Preacher did was wrong, and what I let him do was wrong, and I've spent eleven months telling myself it didn't matter because you found out anyway, in the end.
But it mattered. It mattered that for however many days that was, you were the last person in your own marriage to know the truth about it, and a whole room full of people who claimed to care about you decided that wasn't their problem to fix. "
She sat down slowly on the arm of her couch, the anger she'd expected to feel arriving strange and complicated, tangled up with something that felt more like grief than fury.
The apartment felt very small suddenly, the evening light through the windows gone thin and gray, and she found herself running back through the specific texture of that week eleven months ago — the last ordinary dinner they'd shared before everything broke, a movie they'd half-watched on the couch, a Tuesday she'd had no reason to remember as anything but unremarkable.
She'd relived the day she found out a hundred times since.
She had never once let herself wonder how many days before that the truth had already been sitting in other people's mouths, waiting.
"Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because Ghost almost told you yesterday, and I watched him catch himself, and I understood that the only reason you didn't already know was that everybody around me has spent a year protecting me from the consequences of my own choices.
" He crossed the room and sat across from her, close but not touching, giving her the space she hadn't asked for but clearly needed.
"And because you asked me, weeks ago, what it would actually take for you to trust me again.
I think this is part of the answer. Not just me being honest with you.
Me being willing to let the people who protected me stop protecting me.
Even when it costs me something with them. "
"What does that mean? Practically."
"I don't fully know yet." He held her gaze, steady despite the admission.
"But it doesn't sit right with me anymore, letting Preacher's version of loyalty stand unchallenged.
I think, eventually, I'm going to have to say something to him.
In front of people, not just quietly between us.
I don't know what that costs me yet. But I know I can't keep being the guy who let it happen and never said anything back. "
It was, she recognized, watching him say it, the first time he'd named a cost he was actually willing to pay rather than one he'd already paid and was now explaining to her after the fact.
She filed the difference away carefully, unwilling yet to call it hope, but unwilling too to dismiss it as nothing.
"I need you to actually do that," she said.
"Not just say you're thinking about it. If you want this — whatever this is, us figuring out what we are to each other now — I need to see you actually stand up and say something, at some point, not just tell me privately that you're planning to eventually. "
"I know."
"I mean it, Rhys. Private honesty with me is not the same as being willing to be honest where it costs you something with people whose opinion you actually care about. That's the difference between changing and just managing me better."
Something flickered across his face — the specific sting of a true thing landing exactly where it was aimed — and he nodded slowly, absorbing it rather than arguing with it.
"You're right," he said. "I'll do it. I don't know when yet, but I will."
They sat with that for a moment, the apartment quiet around them, and Emery found herself studying his face in the low evening light, looking for the old evasions and finding, instead, a man who looked genuinely, uncomfortably exposed.
Her phone buzzed on the coffee table between them, and she almost ignored it out of pure instinct, some old habit of protecting a fragile conversation from interruption, until she saw the number wasn't one she recognized.
"Emery Cade?" The voice on the other end was male, flat, unfamiliar. "You've got an interest in a property off Route 9. The Wrenhouse."
Her stomach dropped, some animal instinct recognizing danger before her mind fully caught up. "Who is this?"
"Somebody who thinks you and your husband ought to reconsider some recent decisions about that property. Financing decisions." A pause, deliberate, designed to let the threat sit. "Tell Rhys the Salazar family says congratulations on the expansion. Real shame if something happened to slow it down."
The line went dead before she could respond, and she sat frozen for a second, the phone still pressed to her ear, before she lowered it slowly and looked up to find Rhys already on his feet, alarm written plain across his face.
"What. Emery, what happened."
"Someone just called me." Her voice came out steadier than she felt, some old professional instinct kicking in even through the fear. "Said his name — said the Salazar family sends congratulations on the expansion. Said it would be a shame if something happened to slow it down."
Her hands had started shaking, she realized, looking down at them with a strange, distant clarity, the phone still loose in her grip.
She set it down carefully on the coffee table, as if it might go off again if handled roughly, and pressed her palms flat against her knees to still them, an old trick from years of steadying her hands over delicate stitching work now repurposed for something considerably more frightening.
The color drained from Rhys's face in a way she'd never seen before, not once in nine years, and she watched him cross the room in three strides and take her hands, checking her over with his eyes like he could verify her safety just by looking hard enough.
"They have your number," he said, low and furious, though the fury was clearly aimed at himself rather than her.
"They have your number, Em. That means they've been watching close enough to get it.
That means this isn't hypothetical anymore.
That means you're not just collateral on a deed anymore, you're a target, because you're standing next to me, and I did that.
I brought this to your door by not filing the divorce, by not cutting you loose from The Wrenhouse a year ago when I had the chance to protect you from exactly this. "
"Rhys." She gripped his hands back, hard, grounding both of them. "This isn't the time to spiral about what you should have done a year ago. This is the time to tell me what we do right now."
He nodded, visibly forcing himself back from the edge of panic, some old operational discipline reasserting itself over the raw fear in his face.
"I call Preacher. Tonight. I call Ghost, get eyes on this building immediately.
And I need you to stay somewhere that isn't your apartment for a few days, until we know how serious this is. "
"I have a business to run."
"I know. We'll figure that out. But tonight, right now, I need you somewhere safe while I make calls, and I need you to let me handle that part without fighting me on it.
" He caught himself instantly, hearing the shape of his own words, and something raw crossed his face.
"Not deciding for you. Asking you. Please, Em. Just for tonight."
She studied him for a long moment, the fear and the effort both plain on his face, the visible struggle of a man trying to protect her without erasing her agency in the process, and understood that this — this exact moment, this exact choice — was going to matter more than either of them yet knew.
"Okay," she said. "Tonight. But you tell me everything you're doing, as you're doing it. No handling things quietly and explaining after."
"Everything," he agreed. "I promise you, everything."
He was already reaching for his phone, already dialing, and Emery sat on the arm of her couch with her own phone still warm in her hand, the stranger's flat, threatening voice echoing in her ears, and felt, with a clarity that settled cold and absolute in her chest, that whatever fragile thing she and Rhys had been rebuilding over the past three weeks had just become something with real stakes attached to it.
Not just her heart anymore. Her safety. Possibly her life.
She listened to him on the phone with Ghost, his voice gone low and clipped and entirely professional, a version of him she rarely saw and had almost forgotten existed — the VP, not the husband, coordinating a response with the same clear-eyed efficiency he probably brought to every real crisis this club had ever faced.
It should have frightened her more than it did.
Instead, watching him work, she felt something steady settle underneath the fear, a strange and unexpected confidence that whatever came next, he at least knew how to meet it.
She packed a bag while he made his calls, moving through her bedroom on autopilot, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that she was, for the second time in her life, leaving her own home on short notice because of something Rhys Cade's world had brought to her door.