Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
CALEB
Today’s the day, and now we’re finally here. Here is a dive bar forty miles west of nowhere with sticky floors and bad lighting.
We’re sitting across the table from the man of the hour, Silas’s brother, the president of the notorious Lonestar Kings.
Senior sits stone-faced while his lawyer skims our documents. He’s not the theatrical monster I expected.
Early sixties, silver hair, face carved with deep lines. He looks eerily like Silas—if Silas had made different choices starting at eighteen. But maybe this man is the answer as to why Silas’s life was always so hard.
I count the seconds and scour the scene.
It’s been eleven minutes since we sat down.
Isaak’s men are positioned. Torres sits beside us at the long table, briefcase beside her chair.
Z, the motherfucker, is standing broken and vacant over by the bar. Not a threat. Moving on.
Twelve other men in MC cuts lounge around the bar, several clustered around the pool table, others at bar stools, others standing guard at the door.
All of their eyes on us.
I flatten my right hand on the tabletop.
My left hand finds Harper’s thigh under the table, and I can feel every ounce of tension she’s carrying through my palm—her quadriceps are rigid as steel cable.
She’s vibrating with that specific quality of controlled stillness that means she’s here, present, and holding it together through sheer force of will.
I’m not quite sure how my life got here, but I always said that if I ever got another chance with Harper, I’d follow her to hell and back.
Still, Bruiser’s face when we said goodbye is going to live in my chest for a long time. God, it killed me. It was like he was trying to be brave, but his eyes were still asking, are you sure you’re coming back?
I promised him we’d be back by dinnertime. Harper kissed his forehead twice, which told me everything about how scared she was under the calm.
I can’t stop running the math on whether we made the right call.
Isaak agreed it’s better to get this done now while we’re in control of the board, before the Kings can think up a way to fuck us over.
We want them malleable, not desperate. The logic is sound. The logic has been sound every time I’ve run it in my head since we left Domhnall’s house.
But logic and a nine-year-old asking if you’re coming back are two very different equations, and only one of them makes my hands shake.
I keep my hand there on Harper’s thigh. Not necessarily to soothe, but just so she knows I’m here. Fully present with her.
We ran this scenario a thousand times with Isaak’s team, but actually being in this West Texas bar is different from simulations. Another of Isaak’s men hovers at Harper’s back with instructions to cover her at all costs. A deep scar runs diagonally across his face.
It’s forty-two feet from our table to the emergency exit. The door opens outward—I confirmed when we came in.
Six strides for me, eight for Harper.
Assuming no obstacles.
The jukebox is playing Merle Haggard. Something about a man who got everything he wanted and still lost it. The irony feels deliberate, like West Texas itself has opinions about the people living on it.
Senior has been watching Harper since we sat down with the expression of a man who’s waited a long time for this moment.
“Sweet girl,” he finally says, as if he hasn’t kept us in hostage silence for almost fifteen minutes. His eyes warm with affection, a smile cracks his harsh face when he looks at Harper. “At last. I’ve waited so long to meet you.”
Harper doesn’t react.
“You’ll have to forgive me; I can’t say the same,” she says, her voice level and dry as the West Texas air. “My father never mentioned your existence.”
Senior throws his head back and laughs.
Around the bar, the Kings shift.
“Silas was always very good at protecting people from the parts of his life he thought would scare them,” Senior says, settling back. “It’s what made him so weak.”
“My father isn’t weak,” Harper says, voice still calm and measured. But I feel the tightening of her body through my palm.
Senior just keeps that easy smile. “You look like her, you know,” he says. “Your mother’s sister. Melissa.”
The name lands. I watch Harper receive it—the slight deepening of her stillness, fingers pressing harder against her thigh. I feel it.
She didn’t know that name. Senior knows she didn’t know it.
His expression doesn’t change, but something behind his eyes does—he’s recalculating.
He’s been studying Harper Tucker for years, I realize.
Through Z.
“Melissa was the most beautiful woman in three counties,” Senior continues, voice going distant like he’s recalling a memory.
“Naturally, Silas wanted her. And just as naturally, she wanted Silas back. He was the golden child, you see. Everybody loved him. Our parents, our teachers… every girl who ever looked his way. Have you heard the story of Cain and Abel?”
The biblical reference makes my skin crawl. My eyes immediately dart toward the exits again. Forty-two feet. If I throw Harper over my shoulder, it might take seven long strides—
“What’s with the speech?” Harper cuts him off, voice hard. “We’re here to sign some papers and make a deal. Not listen to your life story.”
Senior bellows another laugh. Several of his men shift again. One of Isaak’s bodyguards steps closer to our table.
“Melissa had a sharp tongue too,” Senior says, still grinning.
“It was one of the things I loved most about her. That fiery refusal to bow down. It was an even greater delight, you know,” he shifts an elbow forward on the table, “to break the bitch until there was nothing left of her for your father.”
The words land hard, and my stomach lurches.
“That was just the first of many things of his that I broke,” he continues, leaning forward the slightest bit more.
His cologne is overpowering. My teeth clench with the need to shove him backward, but I force myself to take my cues from Harper, who relaxes in the seat beside me even as his voice lowers and becomes more menacing.
“Breaking the things my brother loves has given my life its true meaning. Its purpose. Every time I see that look in his eyes—that devastation—it feeds something in me that nothing else can touch.”
This time it’s Harper who smiles at him. Jesus. This isn’t the first monster she’s sat across a table from, is it?
This is the part of her world that Z always understood better than I could. The part of Harper that can face off eye to eye with a monster without flinching, because she expects a world full of monsters.
He’s not finished. “Because it wasn’t fair that everyone loved him more.
From the time we were children—our mother would send us to weed the garden, and I yanked out the flowers while Silas obeyed and kept to the weeds.
He studied at school and was kind, while I pulled little girls’ hair and knocked them down on the playground.
Everyone thought he would make great things of himself, and I was just the delinquent the teachers always sent to the principal’s office. ”
Senior leans in, and I can see something broken and twisted in his eyes—a childhood wound that only festered with time.
“When our father looked at us, I knew he loved one son and not the other. Just like his father before him.
“That’s why our father introduced the anti-fratricide clause in his will in the first place. Because he’d killed his own brother for his inheritance, you see, and was afraid I’d do the same to Silas.
“Because he saw himself in me and hated me for it. We were just children, Harper. It’s unnatural not to love your own child.”
One side of his mouth quirks up—the only real smile we’ve seen all afternoon, I realize now, because this smile is cruel.
“So I made sure to try to make you feel what I felt,” he says, almost gently.
Almost kindly, like he’s explaining a favor he did for Harper.
“Since I couldn’t kill him, all I could do was visit the sins of the father upon the children, and the children’s children.
My mother taught us the Bible, you see. And I always did like the poetry of it. ”
I feel the rage burst through Harper’s tight control a second before she explodes, “You will not touch a hair on my son’s head! I’ll kill you first.”
Again comes Senior’s big laugh. He looks to his lieutenants, who smirk on cue even as they yet again shift uneasily.
“So it was you,” I say, wanting to offer Harper a moment of distraction so she can plan her next move. “You who pulled all those jobs and then blamed it on Silas when Harper was a kid? The robberies, and the deals that went bad? You’re the reason he kept landing in jail over and over?”
“Well, if you mean, did I commit the crimes with my own two hands,” he says, laughing and making eye-contact with his soldiers stationed all around the room, “then no. But I’ve always been aiming soldiers like arrows with my bow.
So after I took Melissa, slitting her throat when the bitch was no more use—”
I feel the shockwave through Harper’s body at his casual admission of murdering her aunt.
And he’s clearly still on a roll. “—I pushed your mother into Silas’s arms instead. What better revenge than to give him the broken, bitter sister and then set him loose in the world with the false confidence of believing he was finally free of me and the mountain?
“Let him build a little life for himself, I thought. Let him believe he’s fallen in love, and start making plans for a life.”
His eyes glow. “And then, just when he thought he’d managed himself a life in suburbia right after you were born, I struck again to remind him he’s never free of his debt of being born my brother.”
His smile is a knife. He’s clearly waited a long time to tell this tale, and he’s savoring it.