I look at the photo again.
My father’s grin.
The handwriting that feels like a door opening ten years too late.
“I believe my father was exactly the kind of bastard who could leave a daughter behind,” I say.
Sophie rests her cheek against my shoulder for one brief second.
“And Amelia?”
I pocket the photograph carefully.
Then I look toward the stairs where blood, trouble, and a sleeping child have just changed the shape of my family.
“I believe she made it to Hell,” I say. “That means she’s ours until she decides different.”
Chapter Four
Sophie
By the time I get Amelia upstairs, she is carrying three kinds of grief.
The father she came too late to find.
The husband she knows is still coming.
The little boy she believes she has failed.
I see all three in the careful way she walks down the upstairs hall, like the floor might make a decision about her if she steps too hard. August is heavy against her shoulder, half-asleep, one fist tangled in the collar of her shirt, the other clutching that tired stuffed dinosaur like it’s the last familiar thing in the world.
I open the door to the room I chose for them. It’s one of the smaller upstairs rooms, but it’s clean, warm, and farthest from the noise below. It used to be a storage room before I moved enough things around to make the old jail livable for more than patched men and club whores. The bed has a blue quilt folded at the end. There is a lamp on the nightstand, a clean towel on the chair, and a stack of clothes on the dresser. A toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, and a comb sit beside them.
It’s not fancy.
It’s not Paradise Falls. Though I have half a mind to take her there. And I would in a heartbeat if my father wasn’t hosting my brother and his wife.
But the door locks from the inside, and tonight that matters more than chandeliers.
The Kings’ clubhouse may be home to these men, but it’s still an old jail.
Bars remember.
Concrete remembers.
Children do too.
Amelia stops at the threshold.
I watch her take it in.
The clean sheets.
The lamp.
The pajamas.
The lock.