Then he sits across from me.
Up close, the resemblance hurts.
Not because he looks exactly like the man in my mother’s old photograph. Legend is his own man, harder in some ways, more controlled in others. But there are echoes. The brow. Themouth. The way silence seems to gather around him and wait for orders.
Derby stays standing to my left, arms crossed.
I shouldn’t like that.
I do anyway.
“What do you know?” Legend asks.
I fold my hands on the table so he can’t see them shake. “My mother was Caroline Bell. She grew up near Lonerock, Oregon. She met Mike when he was wrestling some county fair circuit. This was before he got bigger. Before…” I gesture around because I don’t know how to say before all this. “She said they were together only a little bit. Not long. She got pregnant. He left before she told him. Or she told him and he didn’t believe her. The story changed depending on how much she hated him that day.”
Legend’s face gives nothing away.
I keep going because stopping would hurt worse.
“She never asked him for money. Not that I know of. She said pride was the only thing he ever left her with, and she wasn’t wasting it on begging. But she kept a picture. She kept clippings.”
My voice catches.
I hate that.
“Your mom hang around bikers in Oregon?” he asks too quick.
Chapter Three
Legend
A dead man can still make a mess.
I know that better than most.
My father has been in the ground for years, but Legendary Mike Welles still reaches up whenever he feels like it and grabs hold of my life with both fists. Sometimes it’s an old debt. Sometimes it’s an enemy with a memory longer than his common sense. Sometimes it’s some woman at a bar who remembers him as bigger, meaner, sweeter, or crueler than he ever really was, depending on what she wanted from him and what he left behind.
Tonight, it’s a woman standing in my clubhouse with his eyes.
That’s the part I don’t like.
Not the crying. Not the kid. Not the boxes in the yard or the busted truck Derby dragged in behind the gate. Not even the name Caroline Bell, though that one hits hard enough to make ghosts stir.
It’s the eyes.
A con can carry a story.
A desperate woman can carry a dead man’s name.
An enemy can carry paperwork.
But eyes are harder to fake.
Amelia Welles stands in front of me trying not to shake, and I hate how much of my father I see in the set of her jaw. Not the face he showed the crowd when he was winning matches and making fools cheer for blood. Not the face he used when he wanted a woman, a favor, or forgiveness. The older one. The private one. The look that came over him when the room was closing in and he decided he’d rather burn the walls down than admit he was trapped.
She has that.
That scares me more than it should.