Chapter 4

Reagan told him everything. The message on the locked screen. The second phone hidden in his jacket. The messages that read less like a business deal and more like a confession she wasn't supposed to see, all of it spilling out of her faster than she could organize it into something that made sense.

Silas didn't interrupt once. He sat across from her with his forearms braced on the table, listening the way he used to listen to her a decade ago, like nothing else in the room existed while she was talking.

"Read me the exact words again," he said when she finished. "The last one. Word for word."

"Handle it before Cole gets involved further. My father wants this finished before the vote." Her voice wavered on the last part. "What vote, Silas? What is he talking about?"

Something moved across his face, fast and hard, gone before she could name it. He sat back in the booth and dragged a hand down his jaw, and for a moment he looked less like the man who'd carried her mother out of a fire and more like someone doing math he desperately didn't want to solve.

"There's a vote coming up in the club," he said slowly. "Whether to expand our territory north, take over a stretch that's been contested for years. It's been quiet, mostly internal, but if someone outside the club knew about it, knew the timing, that's not public information. That's the kind of thing you'd only know if you had someone feeding it to you."

"You think Grant has someone inside your club."

"I think Grant's signing his messages with an initial instead of a name, and I think whoever M is, he's got enough pull that Grant answers to him instead of the other way around." Silas's jaw tightened. "Grant didn't come up with a plan like this on his own. He's not smart enough, and he's not connected enough. Someone above him is running this."

"His father." The words left her mouth before she'd fully thought them through, but the second she said them, something cold slid down her spine, because they felt true in a way she couldn't explain yet. "Marcus. Grant barely talks about him, but every time his name comes up, Grant gets strange. Careful. Like he's choosing every word."

Silas went very still. "Marcus Ellery."

"You know him?"

"Everyone in this town who's been around long enough knows Marcus Ellery." His voice had gone flat, controlled in a way that told her he was working hard to keep it that way. "He tried to move on Vulture territory almost fifteen years ago. My father dealt with it. I always thought that was the end of it."

"Fifteen years ago. Silas, that's before you and I—"

"I know." He cut her off, not unkindly, but firm, like he needed a second to hold the thought together before it slipped away from him. He pulled out his phone and typed something fast, thumb moving with the same urgency she'd seen in the hospital waiting room, except this time she was close enough to read part of it before he angled the screen away.

Need to talk. Tonight. It's about Dad and Ellery.

"Who are you texting?"

"My brother." He set the phone face down on the table, but his hand didn't leave it, like he was waiting for it to buzz. "Wade's been president since our father passed. If there's history between the Ellerys and our family that I don't know about, he'll know. He was old enough to remember things I wasn't."

Reagan wrapped both hands around her cooling tea, more to have something to hold onto than because she wanted it. "You think this goes back further than the fire. Further than Grant."

"I think it's starting to look like this didn't start with you and Grant at all." He looked up at her, and there was something in his expression she hadn't seen from him before, not anger exactly, more like the slow, sick realization of a man watching a picture rearrange itself into something he didn't recognize. "I think it might have started before either of us knew what was happening to us."

The words settled over her like a weight she wasn't ready to carry. "What are you saying?"

"I don't know yet." He said it honestly, without trying to soften it for her. "But I'm not going to sit here and guess when I can ask someone who actually knows."

His phone buzzed against the table, and he flipped it over fast enough that she caught the flicker of tension pulling across his shoulders before he even read the message.

Come to the clubhouse. Now. Alone.

"Alone," Reagan repeated, watching his face change as he read it a second time. "Why alone?"

"I don't know." He was already sliding out of the booth, already reaching for his jacket, his movements sharper now, more urgent, all the careful calm from a minute ago burned away. "But Wade doesn't send messages like that unless it's something he doesn't want in writing."

"Then I'm coming with you."

"No." The word came out fast, immediate, and he must have heard how it landed because his expression softened almost as quickly as it had hardened. "Not because I don't trust you. Because I don't know what I'm walking into yet, and until I do, I need to know you're somewhere safe."

"I just found out my fiance might be part of a plan to hurt my family, and you want me to go home and wait by the phone?"

"I want you to go somewhere that isn't your apartment, and isn't anywhere Grant knows to look for you." His eyes held hers, steady, serious, the same look he'd given her across the hospital waiting room the night before. "Call your mother. Tell her to keep her guard up. I'll come find you the second I know something. I promise you that."

She wanted to argue. She wanted to tell him she was done being handled, done being moved out of harm's way by men who thought they knew what was best for her without asking first. But something in the set of his jaw told her this wasn't the moment to fight that particular battle, not with whatever waited for him at the clubhouse hanging over both their heads.

"Fine," she said. "But you call me the second you know anything. Anything, Silas. I mean it."

"I will." He was already halfway to the door, then he stopped and turned back, for one brief second he looked at her the way he used to look at her ten years ago, like she was the only steady thing in a world that kept trying to knock him down. "Reagan. Whatever this turns out to be, I'm not walking away again. Not this time."

He was gone before she could ask him what he meant by this time, before she could ask if there had been a version of events ten years ago that she'd never been told the truth about.

She sat alone in the booth long after the bell above the door stopped ringing, her tea gone cold, her hands finally steady, and a single question circling louder and louder in her mind.

What exactly had happened between their families before she and Silas had even met.