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Tension crackled between them like lightning. I gripped Caroline’s fingers tightly, avoiding looking at my brothers.
“Please,” Caroline said, firm but not unkind. “Call me Caroline. I no longer want to be associated with Walter Bates from here on out.”
Jackson and Mason looked ready to lash out, but Sam held up a hand, silencing them. I blinked in surprise. Since when did she hold all the power? Not that I was complaining at all. I’d follow her into battle any day.
“Caroline,” Sam corrected warmly. Then her hospitality smile faded. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do and not a lot of time to do it. Or patience. You know men, they think with their fists and dicks before common sense.”
The guys all bristled, but the women smirked.
Caroline nodded. “You don’t have to trust me. I came to offer you leverage—against the man I used to call my father.”
She paused, making the room hold its breath like a badass bitch, looked each Devil in the face, and said, “I know the monster you’re up against—because he made me. That’s why I’m the best weapon you’ve got to wipe him off the face of the planet.”
The silence that followed was intense as all fuck.
Grant, surprisingly, was the first to speak. He looked like hell; grief was taking its toll on him the worst.
“Why should we believe you?”
Caroline looked at him sharply, but I knew it wasn’t because she thought it was an offensive question. No, it was a trigger to conjure all the shitty things that Bates had done to her just recently—and over the course of her life.
“I’m not asking you to,” she said flatly. “I’m not asking you to blindly follow me, either.”
She glanced around the table at each club member, lingering on Sam, Suzie, and Carrie. She’d done the worst damage to them. Like the badasses they were, the three women met her gaze unflinchingly.
“Walter Bates made me a monster,” Caroline continued. “Every order I followed, every threat I delivered, every scar I created… All of it was blind loyalty to a man who saw me as a disposable tool, not a daughter.”
Caroline paused to let the words sink in, then said, “The last thing you all want to hear is apologies. Nothing I can do or say will atone for Walter’s crimes. But I want to help you put an end to them. I want him dead just as much as the rest of you, and if I have to burn with him, then so be it.”
That wasn’t part of the plan we decided on. “Caroline,” I barked.
She ignored me coolly.
Jackson opened his mouth to speak, bristling even more than usual, but Sam spoke first again. “I think she’s right.”
Jackson recoiled. “You think fucking what?”
Sam calmly rested one hand on Jackson’s knee with the other still on her belly. “We are all dealing with grief. We are weak now. But we can’t afford that. We have to put aside our ego and pride. Vengeance. Justice. We’ll get it if we’re smart. Jackson,” she pleaded. “This is our best chance to bring our baby into a world that doesn’t have Walter Bates in it.”
Jackson’s jaw clenched. The wheels were turning in his head a million miles per second. Was his love and trust in Sam stronger than his mistrust of the daughter of his greatest enemy?
After what seemed like forever, Jackson said, low and dangerous, “I’ll hear your plan. But if you betray us, Caroline, I will end you personally.”
Caroline was unfazed. She nodded once.
Then he turned to me. “You’re responsible for her. Her betrayal will also be yours.”
CHAPTER 28
CAROLINE
Knox and I pitched the plan to the Devil’s Luck.
None of them took to it immediately. Other ideas were tossed around, some dumb enough to know they were just taking the chance to ridicule me. I was vulnerable on their turf and didn’t blame them for even this petty chatter as a form of revenge. I took each sneer with grace. My heartlessness hadn’t gone away entirely. I didn’t think it ever would, so I just let that shit bounce off my armor and waited until it was my turn to speak.
It was two hours later when the meeting—if you could call it that; war council might fit, but so did interrogation—finally concluded with Sam and Elle complaining about their backs aching.
Jackson and Abel turned into goo for their women, helping them out of their seats and guiding their waddling steps out of the room.