A sound that didn’t fit. A car door, sharp. A voice, male, unfamiliar, carrying an authority that hadn’t been earned. Then Evie’s voice, muffled, cut short.
I was moving before I’d processed it. Through the bar, past Bree, who’d heard it too. Out the front door, around the side of the building to the lot.
A man had Evie by the arm. Tall, gray suit, a build that came from a gym membership and a protein shake habit. He had a black sedan idling behind him, driver still inside. His hand was wrapped around her upper arm and he was pulling her toward the car, not gently, and she was pulling back, her feet dragging in the gravel, her free hand shoving at his chest.
“Let go of me.”
“Miss Carrington, your family has asked me to escort you home. This doesn’t have to be difficult.”
“I said let go.”
He didn’t.
I was on him in a heartbeat. My hand closed around his wrist, the one gripping her arm, and I squeezed until I felt the bones grind together. He let go of Evie. His eyes snapped to my face and I watched him recalculate. I was bigger than him. I was angrier than him. And the expression on my face was one I’d learned in places where men like him didn’t survive the first day.
“Get your hands off her.”
“Sir, I’m a licensed investigator hired by the Carrington family to...”
I didn’t let him finish. I twisted his arm, spun him, slammed him chest-first into the side of his own car. His face hit the roof and his knees buckled and I held him there, his arm wrenched up behind his back, my body pinning him flat.
“Didn’t ask who hired you,” I said. My voice was calm. The rest of me wasn’t. “You put your hands on her. In my lot. In front of my bar. That’s the part you need to worry about.”
Boots on gravel behind me. Razor, Priest, two prospects. They’d come from inside, from the workshop, materialising the way they always did when something went wrong on their ground. Standing loose, ready, a wall of leather and ink and quiet violence that made the driver in the sedan put his hands where everyone could see them.
“Doc.” Evie. Her voice was shaking.
“I’ve got it.” I leaned close to the man’s ear. “You’re going to get in your car. You’re going to drive back to whoever’s paying you. And you’re going to tell them that if anyone puts hands on her again, I won’t be this polite.”
I let him go. He straightened up, his face white, his wrist cradled against his chest. He looked at me, at the brothers behind me, at the row of bikes and the compound stretching out behind the bar, and whatever math he was doing came up with an answer he didn’t like.
He got in the car. The sedan reversed out of the lot, fast, gravel spraying as they went.
I turned to Evie. She was standing three feet away, her arms rigid at her sides, her face pale underneath a mix fury and upset.
“He knew my full name. He called me Miss Carrington.”
I looked at her. The woman I’d been inside an hour ago, wearing my shirt, standing in our lot with finger marks on her arm and a family name she’d run from catching up to her.
“I know,” I said. “We need to talk.”
FIVE
EVIE
The bruises on my arm were the shape of that guys fingers.
I sat at the long table in the lodge with Doc on one side and Angel at the head, and the brothers filled the rest of the chairs, and I told them everything. They needed to hear the truth, who I was and why I left. It was the least I owed them since I was bring trouble to their door. I told them my family were the Carringtons of Cherry Hills. I even told them about the slate of suitors, the moment I walked out, the cards cut off, the cash drying up. My full name. My family’s name. The kind of money and reach that could lean on a county inspector without breaking a sweat.
I said it all flat. No tears, no drama. Just the facts laid out clean on the table like playing cards, face up, nothing hidden.
The silence when I finished was the loudest sound I’d ever heard.
Angel spoke first. “The inspections.”
“My family,” I said. “It has to be. The timing fits. The first one showed up the week after I started working here. They found me, and instead of coming themselves, they squeezed from the outside.”
“The licensing review,” Rook said. He had his phone out, scrolling through something. “The county assessor who flaggedit, Patricia Nolan. Her husband is a partner at a firm that does business with Carrington Holdings. It’s right there if you dig for thirty seconds.”