CHAPTER 21
Curtis
°°°
Curtis called her three days later, his voice thin and unsteady in a way that was almost unrecognizable from the careless, casual texts that had started this whole nightmare months ago, and Lexie stood in the clubhouse kitchen with the phone pressed to her ear, feeling something complicated move through her that wasn't quite anger and wasn't quite pity but sat somewhere uncomfortably between the two.
"I need to see you," Curtis said, before she'd said more than hello. "In person. Please, Lex. I know I don't have the right to ask, but there's things you need to know, and I can't say them over the phone."
She told Tank that evening, watching his face go carefully still in the way that told her he was working hard to keep his first reaction from being his only reaction.
"No," he said, flat, immediate. "Absolutely not. The man sold information that nearly got you hurt, and now he wants a private meeting? That's not a coincidence I'm comfortable with."
"I know how it sounds."
"It doesn't just sound dangerous, Lexie. It might actually be dangerous. Ortiz already showed he's willing to use people to get to you directly. What's stopping this from being exactly that, dressed up as Curtis having a guilty conscience?"
"Nothing's stopping it from being that." She met his gaze steadily, understanding his fear even as she held her ground against it.
"But I need to see for myself. I need to hear whatever he has to say directly, not filtered through what the club thinks is safest for me to know.
This is still my life he dragged into danger, Tank. I get a say in how I respond to it."
He was quiet for a long moment, and she watched him do something she recognized now as costing him considerable effort — setting aside the immediate protective instinct to simply forbid it, and instead working through the harder, more deliberate calculation of how to keep the boundary he'd promised her while still keeping her safe.
"Public place," he said finally. "Daylight.
I'm fifty feet away the entire time, close enough to reach you in seconds if anything goes wrong, far enough that he doesn't clam up thinking it's an ambush.
You wear a phone that's live-connected to mine the whole conversation.
And if anything about it feels wrong, anything at all, you say the word and I'm there before he finishes his sentence. "
"That's fair."
"It's not fair. It's the closest I can get to fair while still doing my job, which is keeping you alive.
" Something in his voice cracked slightly at the edges, the fear underneath the tactical calm finally showing through.
"I don't like this, Lexie. I want you to know that clearly, even though I'm not going to stop you. "
"I know you don't like it. I love you for not stopping me anyway."
The words left her before she'd fully registered saying them, the first time either of them had used that word between them, and she watched it land on his face with a visible weight, something raw and unguarded crossing his features before he pulled her into him, holding her like the words had cost him his careful composure entirely.
"Say that again," he said, low, against her hair.
"I love you." Steadier the second time, more certain. "I didn't plan on saying it in the middle of an argument about Curtis, for the record. But it's true, and I'm not taking it back just because the timing's inconvenient."
"I love you too." He said it plainly, the same directness he brought to everything, no hesitation in it despite six years of never once saying those words to anyone. "Wasn't planning on saying it for the first time in this kitchen either. But there it is."
They met Curtis two days later at a diner on the edge of town, not the same one where Tank had first told her his age plainly and asked if that bothered her, but similar enough in its unglamorous vinyl-booth ordinariness that she found the familiarity almost steadying.
Tank took a booth near the door, visible but not close enough to loom, and Lexie slid into a booth across from Curtis with her phone live in her pocket and her pulse noticeably steadier than she'd expected it to be.
Curtis looked worse than she remembered him looking, hollowed out in a way that spoke to weeks of genuine fear rather than performance, his hands wrapped tight around a coffee cup he didn't seem to actually want.
"Thank you for coming," he said. "I know I don't deserve it."
"You don't. Say what you need to say."
He flinched at the flatness of it, and something in his face suggested he'd expected gentler treatment, some residue of the man who believed he'd once been kind to her simply by staying eighteen months instead of leaving sooner.
"I sold information about you to the Vultures.
Your clinic setup, your connection to the Saints, a copy of your apartment key.
I was scared and I owed people money I couldn't pay, and I told myself it wasn't really hurting anyone, that information wasn't the same as violence. "
"It got my apartment broken into. It got my clinic cased.
It got a man walking into my exam room threatening me with a business card and a smile.
" Her voice stayed level, clinical, the same composure she'd used on Ortiz's man weeks ago.
"So don't tell me it wasn't hurting anyone. I lived the version where it was."
"I know. God, I know, and I've spent weeks feeling sick about it, which doesn't undo any of it, I understand that.
" He wrapped both hands tighter around the cup, something genuinely broken moving across his face that she hadn't expected to see, hadn't necessarily wanted to see, because it made the whole situation more complicated than simple anger would have allowed it to stay.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me. I called because you need to know what I know, and it felt like the one useful thing I still had to offer after everything else I've taken from you. "
"Then tell me."
"The Vultures aren't just running territory disputes or usual MC business.
Ortiz has a bigger operation than anybody local realizes — a pill mill running through a clinic two towns over, the one you noticed the prescription patterns from months ago, except it's bigger than a few suspicious refills.
It's organized, it's been running over a year, and it moves through at least three counties that I know about.
I only know because the debt collectors who came after me let slip more than they meant to, bragging about how untouchable Ortiz thinks he is.
" Curtis's voice had gone urgent, the fear underneath it finally breaking through the careful, guilty composure he'd been holding.
"He doesn't like being ignored. That's the other thing.
Whatever his man offered you at the clinic, if you turned it down — and I'm guessing you did, because you're the most stubborn person I've ever known — he's not going to just let that sit.
He's going to escalate until he gets a yes, or until he decides you're more useful as a lesson than an asset. "
The words landed heavy, confirming a fear she'd been carrying since Ortiz's man walked out of her exam room, and she felt her hands go cold around her own coffee cup despite the diner's ordinary warmth.
"You're telling me this because you're scared, not because you actually care what happens to me. "
"Both." He met her eyes, and for one unguarded moment she saw the man she'd actually dated once, underneath the fear and the failure and the choices that had led them both here.
"I am scared. I'm scared of what Ortiz does to people who stop being useful to him, and I'm scared of what happens to you if nobody takes this seriously enough.
But I also — I did care about you, Lex. Badly, in ways that hurt you more than helped, but I did.
That much was real, even if everything I did with it afterward wasn't."
She didn't have room, in that moment, to fully process the complicated grief of hearing an old wound named honestly rather than defended, and she filed it away instead, the way she'd learned to file difficult things until there was space to actually feel them.
"Thank you for telling me. About the operation.
That matters, whatever else is true about why you're telling me. "
"Ortiz doesn't make empty offers." Curtis's voice had gone quieter, more urgent, as she started to rise from the booth. "And he really doesn't like being ignored twice. Whatever you're planning to do next, Lex — be careful. I mean that as much as I've ever meant anything."
She left him there, hollowed out and frightened and carrying a guilt she suspected would follow him markedly longer than his debt to the Vultures would, and crossed to Tank's booth with the weight of information that mattered more than her own complicated feelings about the man who'd delivered it.
"We need to talk to the club," she said, sliding in across from him, her voice steady despite everything churning underneath it. "Right now. Curtis just handed us something substantially bigger than either of us realized we were dealing with."