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“No. All communication has been digital. That’s not like him. He’s always been hands-on. You haven’t heard anything?”

“No. We don’t use Sypher. We’ve got Nav.” King sat up and I swear I saw a literal fucking light bulb go on over his head. You know, like the cartoons we all watched as kids.

Everyone but Sypher turned to look at Nav, who sat a little lower in his chair.

“I gotta go, Steele. I’ll have Nav look into things with Sypher and let you know if we hear anything.”

“Alright, brother.”

The line went silent, and King picked his cell phone up. Walking over to the church doors, he opened one, looked around, and then threw it across the main room until it shattered against the wall.

Closing the doors, he walked back to his seat. No one uttered a word. He closed his eyes and steepled his hands in front of him.

We had seen this before. King was counting. I began to silently count, wondering how high he would get before he spoke. That was our meter. How we measured his anger.

When I hit fifty and he finally opened his eyes, I knew we were fucked. He looked at Nav and with a deceptive calm even tone, he said, “Something you need to tell me, brother?”

“Uh, um,” Nav stuttered over his words, looking to Sypher for help.

“It was my idea.” Sypher said quietly.

“Enough with this shit. What the fuck is going on?” Cash demanded.

“It’s time to come clean, Sypher.”

King sat back in his chair, and Sypher took a deep breath.

“What I am going to tell you stays in this room. Dante knows some of this. But he doesn’t know all of it. He can’t. Not yet.”

Sypher told us about contacting Nav and asking him to keep tabs on the underworld. Pretending to be him for all his clients so they wouldn’t know anything was going on.

He told us what happened in New York. How he ended up chained to a pipe in a building he owned that was blown to pieces by a sadistic fucking bitch whose only motivation was to torture and maim as many people as she could. As I watched him tell his story, I knew he was leaving some of the more gruesome details out.

When he was done, Gunner was, let’s just say, less than pleased. He sat quietly in his seat, listening to Sypher’s story until he got to the part where he said he had been seeing Haizley prior to coming to the clubhouse.

“Let me get this fucking straight,” Gunner said in a low voice. “First you pull my sister into this bullshit, then my old lady?”

“In my defense, I didn’t hire Haizley, and she wasn’t actually your old lady when I started meeting with her.”

“I had fucking claimed her!” he bellowed.

“Did she know that? Because the first day I met her she was adamant that she was not your old lady.”

I had quickly learned something about Sypher in the limited interactions I’d had with him. He was an antagonistic son of a bitch.

“And my fucking sister?” Gunner snarled.

Sypher sat up in his seat and looked Gunner in the eye. “She was the best. And my daughter deserved the best.”

Sypher wasn’t wrong. I had spent some time looking up Melissa the first night she showed up here, when Amber wouldn’t let me talk to her. She was one of the leading child psychologists in the country.

My woman was fucking smart.

“What about Amber?” Cash asked.

The secrets surrounding Amber had been a sore spot between Cash and King since we heard about the explosion in New York when King put Amber on lockdown in the club.

“Amber’s real name is...”