“Think before you answer.”
Sophie says my name softly. “Legend.”
I don’t look at her.
Amelia straightens in the chair. There it is again. That Welles pride, showing its teeth even with exhaustion wrapped around her throat. She’s half-broke, half-scared, and sitting in a room full of men who could swallow her whole, but she still lifts her chin like she’s deciding whether we’ve earned the right to speak to her.
“I’m thinking,” she says. “I don’t know anyone from a Kings chapter in Oregon. I didn’t even know there were Kings chapters until tonight. I knew the name Welles. I knew Legendary Mike. I knew he wrestled, rode, and had a reputation bad enough my mother got mad if I asked too many questions. That is it.”
Royal steps out of the shadow. “Lonerock, ain’t that close to the old clubhouse?”
“Don’t know,” Amelia says, looking at him now. “It’s not close to much.”
Royal studies her like he’s reading handwriting on a suicide note. “Who was your mother connected to there?”
“No one important.”
I lean back. “People always think that until someone important comes looking.”
Her gaze returns to me. “My mother was a waitress, a bartender sometimes, and a woman who liked men who made terrible decisions. If that counts as a criminal network, then half of America is in trouble.”
Derby coughs like he’s covering a laugh.
I don’t smile, but damn if that don’t sound like my father’s kind of woman.
Caroline Bell.
I remember the name because my father only said it once in front of me.
I was seventeen, maybe eighteen, old enough to know he had women tucked into stories all over the country and young enough to still hate him for it. He had been drinking after arun that went sideways. Not falling-down drunk. Mike rarely let himself get that loose. Just drunk enough for memory to sit beside him and start running its mouth.
“Oh, sweet sweet, Caroline Bell, she could suck chrome off a tailpipe,” he said.
That was it.
One sentence. I only registered it so deep in my soul because it wasn’t my mama’s name. And the fact he could get over her stung. Then he shut down, picked a fight with a brother twice his size, and broke the man’s nose over a pool cue.
I never heard her name again.
Now her daughter sits in my clubhouse asking for a dead man.
Maybe my father knew.
Maybe he didn’t.
Maybe he knew and buried the truth because Legendary Mike was better at making legends than taking responsibility.
That thought sits bitter on my tongue.
“You got proof?” I ask.
Amelia’s shoulders tense. “Not on me.”
“Where?”
“In a box. Maybe. My mother kept a picture and some old things. I packed what I could grab.”
“What kind of old things?”