Chapter 27 #2
“What if he did more than spot them? What if he had already been working for them by then? Or if that was even when he met them and started as a prospect. Whatever beef the MC has with Silas goes back years, right? And if someone wanted a lever to use against Silas—a way into his life, his family—they couldn’t have found a more willing tool than Z.
He already had your trust. He already had access. ”
The moment she gets there, I watch it happen. The color drains from her face the way it does when a truth is too large to absorb all at once.
“You’re saying Z planted the drugs in my locker,” she says, barely above a whisper.
“He was playing us from the beginning.”
Her eyes go distant and glassy. “I invited him in.”
“Hey.” I reach for her hand before she can spiral. “This has never been about you. Whatever the MC wants with your dad—they were going to get to him one way or another. We’re talking about the Lonestar Kings. This is bigger than both of us.”
Her eyes find mine. “Bruiser.”
Our son’s name lands like a stone dropped in still water.
“We weren’t collateral damage that time,” she says, and the fear in her voice is a different creature than general anxiety.
It’s specific. “But what about now? Whatever they want with Silas—they’re back for more.
And they know where we are. Yeah, this place is like Fort Knox, but we can’t stay here forever. ”
“If it’s just about the club,” I say, “hell, I’ll sign over any portion Silas’s given me.” I mean it, too.
I bring her hand to my cheek. “I already have all I’ve ever wanted.”
“Are you sure?” she asks, but I can see the hope in her eyes. “You’ve spent the last ten years of your life poured into that place. And all your friends—”
“The Dungeon was just somewhere to stall out while I let myself be haunted by ghosts. You’ve brought me back. I’ve got the real thing now. I don’t give a shit if they take the club.”
I pause because there’s a part of this I haven’t said out loud yet.
“But first we’ve got to find out what they want with Silas.
Something tells me it’s about more than just the club.
We don’t even know what happened with the paperwork and if he signed the club over to us like Z was trying to blackmail him into doing when you visited the prison.
We’re done being in the dark. We have resources now.
We find out what they want. And then we end this. ”
Harper nods, leaning fractionally into my hand. “If it can free Bruiser from this hanging over him—”
She doesn’t finish. Neither do I.
I’m thinking about Silas—the man who was the only real father I ever had, currently in a maximum-security prison apparently controlled by the same people hunting us outside these walls.
I’m thinking about his stubbornness and his particular brand of love that’s always looked a lot like sacrifice, and I’m not willing to say aloud what I’m afraid that might add up to.
While I’m trying to do the calculations, there’s a knock at the bedroom door.
“Mom?” comes Bruiser’s impatient voice from the other side of the door. “Mom, can I come in yet?”
I’m off the other side of the bed before I’ve consciously decided anything, grabbing for my clothes from the bathroom floor. Except they’re still cold and damp from the hot tub—so I snatch the white robe from the hook instead and drag it on, knotting it twice and leaving it at that.
Harper has already pulled on fresh pajama bottoms and a camisole in the fast, efficient way she does everything.
Still, she’s barely gotten her hair pushed back from her face before Bruiser hits the door, shoving it open with the particular impatience of a nine-year-old.
And then he’s airborne, launching himself across the room at his mother with the total physical commitment of someone who has not yet learned self-preservation.
Harper goes back into the pillows with a laugh, both arms coming up to catch his full weight.
After I grab some fresh boxers and an undershirt from the guest dresser Domhnall keeps stocked with the basics and disappear into the bathroom to clothe myself, I come back and pause for half a second. I just stand in the bathroom doorway and watch them together.
Yes, Bruiser looks like me, in ways that still send a small electric shock through my chest every time I catch one—the jaw, the way his brow furrows, the ears. But right now he’s all Harper. The same laugh, the same quick energy, same refusal to do anything in half measures.
Then Harper gets her hands on his ribs, and the giggling starts.
It’s not a dignified sound. It’s all-out, helpless, almost-crying giggling, with the occasional snort.
He screeches when she finds the best spot, and tries to get her back, but she is absolutely merciless. He’s laughing too hard to mount any real defense, and it is possibly the best thing I have ever witnessed with my own two eyes.
I pick up the pillow from the floor.
Take careful aim.
Then I swat Harper on the back with it.
Bruiser’s head swings toward me, eyes going wide. Then they go absolutely feral.
“PILLOW FIGHT!” he screeches.
He lunges for the pillow at the top of the bed, gets both hands on it, and hits me directly in the face with the focused energy of someone who has been waiting his whole life for a sanctioned opportunity to do exactly this.
The impact is genuinely impressive. I make a mental note to tell him that later.
I let the force of it carry me dramatically off my feet, going down in slow motion. I add sound effects on the way—a long, theatrical groan, a final wheeze, and then I hit the end of the mattress and slide to the floor in a heap.
Dead silence.
Then: “Mom.” His voice is reverent. “I got him.”
“You really got him,” Harper confirms gravely.
“I got Calb.”
The nickname hits me somewhere below the sternum. Calb. Not Caleb, not Mr. Graham, not the careful politeness of someone who doesn’t know what to call the man who suddenly appeared in his life. Just Calb, worn down by familiarity to something easier that fits in a kid’s mouth.
I grab a pillow from the floor.
“Zombie attack,” I announce to the carpet, and reach up and drag him down with me.
He goes over the edge of the mattress shrieking, flailing, completely unable to stop giggling long enough to fight back.
I gum at his forehead—not quite biting, just the idea of it—and he absolutely loses his mind.
“MOM. MOM, HE’S EATING MY brAIN.”
“Tragic,” Harper says from the bed, pillow ready.
“I’m saving no one,” she adds, and hits me in the back of the head.
This sends Bruiser into a fresh spiral. He’s laughing so hard he’s almost silent, just shaking, his face gone red, tears at the corners of his eyes.
I’ve never seen anything funnier to anyone in my entire life and I want to remember exactly what that looks like—the completely defenseless, full-body hilarity of a kid who has forgotten, for this stretch of time, that there’s anything in the world to be careful about.
He declares himself officially turned approximately thirty seconds later, because of course he does. He’s been waiting for this.
He hauls himself up from the carpet with both arms stretched out in front of him, and when he says “braiiiiins,” he says it with real commitment. He’s had practice. Those Dave the Villager zombie novels are all dog-eared to hell after all. This is not his first zombie rodeo.
He advances on his mother.
She braces herself against the headboard with two pillows stacked like shields and a very serious expression that doesn’t last long.
I sit on the floor and watch my son do zombie groans at his mother, who is now laughing too hard to maintain any defense whatsoever.
His arms wobble with the theatrical undead drama of it.
He cuts his eyes at me once—checking that I’m watching, wanting me to see—and I give him a solemn thumbs-up. That’s all the endorsement he needs.
This kid.
I don’t know what I expected when Harper told me. The terror was there first, and the disbelief, and underneath all of it the particular vertigo of realizing holy shit, I’m a dad.
But I didn’t expect this.
His specific gravity and humor and intelligence and charm—
And just how fucking amazing he is. I didn’t expect to love him this much this quickly.
I will never, ever let anything hurt him.
It’s a solemn vow I know is just as ridiculous as thinking I could protect my mother completely from harm, but I don’t fucking care. I mean it. I don’t care. I’ll take care of him until my dying breath and even then.
I pick up the pillow again. I don’t have a plan. I just know I want to keep playing zombie pillow fight with these two people for as long as the world will let me.
Which is naturally when the doorbell rings.
It rolls through the house once, clear and carrying, and the three of us freeze exactly where we are—Harper against the headboard, Bruiser mid-zombie-lurch, me on the floor with a decorative lace-edged pillow.
Bruiser tries to keep the groans going. He manages about three seconds before the silence in the room reaches him.
He looks at his mother. Then over at me, and I hate the way his body straightens up with tension.
“Are the bad men back?” he whispers.
There it is—the thing living underneath all the giggling, underneath the zombie commitment and the pillow fight physics—the thing this kid has been carrying around too, quietly. He shouldn’t know how to ask that question. He shouldn’t have a reason to.
My jaw locks.
“I’ll go check,” I say.
“No,” Harper says calmly, giving me a serious look that says, I-mean-business. I think it’s her Mom Look. I’ve just never had it aimed at me before now. “I’ll go. You boys keep trying to eat each other’s brains.”
She smiles at Bruiser and ruffles his hair.
Then she’s moving, efficient and calm the way she gets when she’s managing something frightening—pulling it inward, taking it off the table so nobody else has to carry it.
She looks at me over Bruiser’s head, and it’s the same look from the car: I need you to do what I ask without me having to say any more words.
I get off the floor and hop on the bed with Bruiser. “Hey. You and me, okay? We stay.”
Bruiser looks between us. His arms are still out from the zombie bit, and he hasn’t quite lowered them yet, like his body isn’t sure what register it’s in. Then slowly, reluctantly, he lets them drop.
“You’re not gonna leave without me?” he asks his mother.
She’s already kissing his forehead. “I’m not going anywhere, baby. I’m just seeing who’s at the door.”
Then she’s out the door, footsteps quiet down the hall, and I’m alone with my son.
The doorbell rings again.
Bruiser stares at the door his mom just walked out of.
I pick up the fallen pillow from the foot of the bed and set it back, just to give my hands something to do. So I don’t show him that jaw-clenching thing I haven’t fully learned to hide yet. Then I sit down on the edge of the mattress where his mom just was.
“Okay,” I say. “Tell me your best zombie evasion strategy. Because if we’re going to be a team, I need to know what I’m working with.”
He blinks. The fear hasn’t left his face entirely, but something else is moving in alongside it. “For real?”
“Dead serious. Pun intended.”
He almost smiles.
“You gotta go for the knees,” he says after a second, with the certainty of someone who has given this genuine thought. “Everybody goes for the head. But if you take out the knees, they can’t follow you.”
“Solid tactic.” I nod. “Mobility denial.”
“I learned it from Dave.”
“Dave sounds like a strategist.”
“He’s a villager,” Bruiser says, like this is information I should have already had. “But he figured it out.”
“Good man,” I say. “Dave sounds like my kind of people.”
Bruiser looks at me. That checking look. The one that takes me apart.
Then he sits down on the mattress beside me, close enough that his shoulder is almost touching mine, and we both listen to the sound of Harper’s footsteps and then the closing of the outer suite door.
Then we wait.
Together.