Page 13

I was on my feet before I realized it. Behind me, the club had gone silent. I felt their attention on my back like a searing brand.
But I didn’t see or hear Jackson come up and pluck the photo from my hand. I whirled defensively, but he had already looked at both sides. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck?—
Jackson’s gaze darkened and pinned me to the spot with such murder in them that I wanted to reach for the knife in the burger basket. “Why the hell,” he growled, “did Bates send you this?”
Sam sucked in a sharp breath, her hand resting protectively over her belly. Her eyes flicked between me, Jackson, and Hanna. But when neither Jackson nor I spoke, she addressed Hanna in a voice trembling between fear and harshness. “Who gave that to you, Hanna?”
“I—some guy,” the server said nervously. “I was on my break eating the wings Chef made, and he came up out of nowhere and shoved it at me, saying if Royal didn’t get it, he’d…” Hanna swallowed hard, then whispered, “I don’t want to repeat it.”
Sam clucked her tongue in sympathy, but Jackson wasn’t focused on a teenager’s feelings when his club was now in danger. “What did he look like?” he barked at Hanna. “Did he look like a Wolverine?”
“N-no. I mean, maybe. He was just wearing a black jacket and pants. Brown hair, scruffy?—”
Jackson grunted. That was all he needed to confirm he knew who she was talking about. “Wolverine, all right. Knox, you got five seconds to spit it out before I make you spit out a tooth.”
“Jackson,” Sam warned sharply. “I won’t have loose teeth on my bar floor.”
“What’s going on?” Mason reached for the photo. Jackson handed it over to his VP, still glaring daggers at me. “Fuck. Is that Bates’s spawn? How could he do that to his own daughter?”
As he passed it around to the rest of the club, my gut twisted tighter and tighter, like they were seeing something private that was meant for my eyes only. That was fucked up, too.
There was no avoiding the truth. There was no lying to my president. I couldn’t lie. I didn’t want to, as much as I did want to, if just to selfishly spare myself from having a tooth punched out of my skull.
I steeled myself and relayed the full story—with a few spared details—about the poker incident.
Jackson, to say the least, was fucking livid. “Incident?!” he roared. “You call knocking out a Wolverine in front of Caroline Bates an incident?”
My jaw clenched. “Yeah?—”
“‘Yeah,’” Jackson interrupted, snatching the Polaroid from Mason before he could show it to Sam. “You fucked up, and now look, you got the princess locked up by the villain. Nice going.”
Then he took the photo and ripped it down the center.
My jaw clenched tighter.
Jackson wasn’t fazed. “Caroline Bates is finally getting what’s coming to her. One less Wolverine out there is a good thing.”
I wanted to ram my knuckles in his throat.
And just like that, Black Jack turned his back on me and returned to the club’s table as if a woman half-beat to death didn’t bother him at all.
Mason’s hand felt heavy on my shoulder. It was meant to be a grounding gesture, but it only made me angrier. “Settle down, Knox,” he muttered. “She may be a woman, but Caroline Bates isn’t our problem. I mean, she is, but not in this case. Her life isn’t ours to care about. We take care of our own, not a soul more.”
After a moment of staring me down, hoping his warning would get through my thick skull, Mason joined the others, too.
I immediately locked eyes with Sam. Her brows had knitted deeply. She’d had more than her fair share of run-ins with Caroline. But to my immense surprise, I didn’t see the same hatred in her eyes as Jackson’s. There was only something that made me think she might feel the same way I did.
She knew just as well as I that this was all sorts of wrong—and someone needed to do something about it.
CHAPTER 6
CAROLINE
I was locked up in a cage like a misbehaving puppy.
The difference was that it wasn’t a little crate in the corner of a living room. No, I was handcuffed to a chair in one of the warehouse offices gutted to be only an empty box for me—and for Heel, who was sloppily digging into a greasy cheeseburger from the joint down the street.
My stomach growled, which was a betrayal of my own body, considering Heel scarfing the junk food was the most disgusting thing I had ever seen. And I had seen a lot of nasty shit in my life as an MC boss’s daughter and righthand man.