“I mean—” I’m working it out as I say it, but I trust her to follow me. “Where would McKenzie have gotten that much weed? It was over four pounds, Harp. That’s not a rich girl making a call to her boyfriend’s dealer. That’s supply chain quantity.”
Harper sits up too. Something in her expression has shifted from grief into that alert, dangerous attention she gets when she’s seeing a pattern with me. “She was trying to get into the same schools you were.”
“Exactly. I knew McKenzie since second grade. She drank at parties and was a genuinely vicious bully, but she was a coward when real consequences were involved. She wouldn’t have let anyone with those kinds of connections within ten feet of her.”
“Wait.” Harper holds a hand up. “Are you saying the MC was involved all the way backthen? But who would have even known Silas would take the fall for me? He’d barely been in my life upto that point. He hadn’t given a damn about me for most of my childhood.”
I never really let myself think about all the things that led up to that catastrophic day. It was all clouded in such shame—my fault, my fault,myfault—that I never tried examining the events with a more critical, dispassionate eye.
But now that I know what I know… if I think about the way Z had inserted himself into Harper’s life with my new family right when she was pulling away from him and he could feel he was about to lose her…
The way he’d learned all of us so thoroughly in those months he lived in our basement. How precisely every detonation was timed, the string of explosions set off so that in the end Z got exactly what he wanted.
Harper separated from everyone who loved her.
Because Z learned his enemy well.
“Don’t you remember that dinner?” I ask, fury building in my belly. “When Z mentioned bikers had come into Mom and Dad’s club. He told us at the dinner table about it, like he’d just happened to spot them.”
Harper’s eyes sharpen. “I remember.”
“What if he didmorethan spot them? What if he had already been working for them by then? Or if that was even when he met them and started as a prospect. Whatever beef the MC has with Silas goes back years, right? And if someone wanted a lever to use against Silas—a way into his life,his family—they couldn’t have found a more willing tool than Z. He already had your trust. He already had access.”
The moment she gets there, I watch it happen. The color drains from her face the way it does when a truth is too large to absorb all at once.
“You’re sayingZplanted the drugs in my locker,” she says, barely above a whisper.
“He was playing us from the beginning.”
Her eyes go distant and glassy. “Iinvitedhim in.”
“Hey.” I reach for her hand before she can spiral. “This has never been about you. Whatever the MC wants with your dad—they were going to get to him one way or another. We’re talking about the Lonestar Kings. This is bigger than both of us.”
Her eyes find mine. “Bruiser.”
Our son’s name lands like a stone dropped in still water.
“We weren’t collateral damage that time,” she says, and the fear in her voice is a different creature than general anxiety. It’s specific. “But what about now? Whatever they want with Silas—they’re back for more. And they know where we are. Yeah, this place is like Fort Knox, but we can’t stay here forever.”
“If it’s just about the club,” I say, “hell, I’ll sign over any portion Silas’s given me.” I mean it, too.
I bring her hand to my cheek. “I already have all I’ve ever wanted.”
“Are you sure?” she asks, but I can see the hope in her eyes. “You’ve spent the last ten years of your life poured into that place. And all your friends?—”
“The Dungeon was just somewhere to stall out while I let myself be haunted by ghosts. You’ve brought me back. I’ve got the real thing now. I don’t give a shit if they take the club.”
I pause because there’s a part of this I haven’t said out loud yet. “But first we’ve got to find out what they want with Silas. Something tells me it’s about more than just the club. We don’t even know what happened with the paperwork and if he signed the club over to us like Z was trying to blackmail him into doing when you visited the prison. We’re done being in the dark. We have resources now. We find out what they want. And then we end this.”
Harper nods, leaning fractionally into my hand. “If it can free Bruiser from this hanging over him?—”
She doesn’t finish. Neither do I.
I’m thinking about Silas—the man who was the only real father I ever had, currently in a maximum-security prison apparently controlled by the same people hunting us outside these walls. I’m thinking about his stubbornness and his particular brand of love that’s always looked a lot like sacrifice, and I’m not willing to say aloud what I’m afraid that might add up to.
While I’m trying to do the calculations, there’s a knock at the bedroom door.
“Mom?” comes Bruiser’s impatient voice from the other side of the door. “Mom, can I come in yet?”