What I heard

Chapter 15:

"How much did you hear," he says.

I could lie. I'm good at lying. Two years in that house made me fluent.

"Fifty mil," I say.

He doesn't move.

"Wire the fifty mil," I say. "Not the first account, the one on the paper. Tonight after close. Don't put my name on it." I set my glass down on the bar. "That's how much I heard."

Kael's jaw works once.

Then he says, "You went through the back hall."

"Yeah."

"To listen at a door."

"Yeah."

"That's not —" He stops himself. Starts again. "That's not how this works. In this club, in this town, when a man takes a call in the back, that's his call."

"You wired fifty million dollars."

"Elara—"

"You wired fifty million dollars while I sat on a stool and thought you were a guy who owned a bar." My voice is going up and I can't stop it. "You're not a biker. You're not a guy who owns dirt. You're — what are you? What are you?"

He's quiet for a second.

"I'm the guy who owns the ground your husband's standing on," he says. "Or he will be, by morning."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer there is."

"Kael." I stand up off the stool. "Look at me. Look at me and tell me what I'm standing in the middle of. Because three days ago I was barefoot on your floor and you were wrapping my feet with a plastic bag from the gas station. And now you're on a phone moving more money than my mama's house was ever worth, and I want to know why."

He looks at me.

"I bought the county," he says.

The words don't land right away. They just sit there in the air like a brick somebody threw.

"I'm sorry?"

"Not all of it. I bought every parcel of land within a mile of the Sterling property. Every road that leads to it, every pipeline easement, every plot of raw ground anybody's ever going to want to build on." He picks up his glass. "I've been buying for six weeks. Tonight's the last piece."

"Six weeks."

"Yeah."

"Before you met me."

"Before I met you."

I put my hand on the bar.

"Why?"

"Because I don't fight with lawyers," he says. "A lawyer fights with paper. So I fight with dirt. You can't get an easement on land I own. You can't build a road across it. You can't run power through it. And when Marcus Sterling's family wants to expand, or build, or sell, or do a single thing on their land that needs one inch of my land to work?" He drinks. "They come talk to me."

"That's insane."

"It's business."

"That's not business, that's a siege." I'm almost yelling now. "You bought a whole county because I showed up bleeding!"

And Kael says, quiet: "No."

"What?"

"No, I didn't." He sets the glass down. "I started buying this county six weeks before you came through my door. Because six weeks ago a man on a phone told me that Sterling Holdings had filed for a permit to build on a plot of land in this county. And I don't sell. And I don't lose. So I got there first."

I stare at him.

"That's why you were awake at midnight," I say.

"That's why I was awake at midnight."

"And then I showed up."

"And then you showed up." He tips his head. "So now a county I bought for business has got a woman in it with four fingerprints on her throat and a husband who wants her back. And I got about four days before somebody in a county office starts asking why the Sterling family's got a file with my name on it."

"You said that on the phone."

"I did."

"What happens in four days?"

"Nothing I can't handle," he says. "Go to bed."

"Kael."

"Elara." He turns to me. "You asked me a question and I answered it. Now I'm telling you something else, and I want you to listen real close. This is my war. Not yours. You didn't start it and you don't get to fight it. What you get to do is stay in this building and wear my cut and let me do what I do."

"I didn't start it?"

"You didn't start it. I been fighting these people since before I ever knew your name."

"Then why won't you look at me?"

He stops.

"You've been talking to the window this whole time," I say. "You haven't looked at me once since you came out of that back room."

He turns around.

And then I see it.

"Kael." My voice goes small. "What happened to your hand?"

He looks down at it.

His left hand. Across the knuckles. Split open, blood dried black, and the whole hand swollen up fat and wrong-looking, the way a hand looks when a man's hit something hard enough to break skin.

"Hendricks's face was harder than I thought," he says.

"That's not a face injury, that's your hand."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine, you can't even make a fist—"

And then he does make a fist, to prove it, and something in his face goes white and he says a word I've never heard him say before.

"You sit down," I say.

"Elara—"

"Sit down, Kael."

He sits down.

I go behind the bar. I don't know where anything is, but I find it in about forty seconds — the red plastic box, in the same place Jax keeps it. I bring it over. I open it up.

"Give me your hand."

"It's nothing."

"Give me your hand or I'll get Jax."

He gives me his hand.

I clean it. I clean it slow. There's grit in it, gravel and something worse, and I pick it out with a pair of tweezers and he doesn't make a sound the whole time. Not once. Even when I know it hurts, even when I feel him want to pull away, he doesn't.

I wrap it.

And while I'm wrapping it, I say, without looking up:

"You did that for me."

"I did that because he was taking pictures of you from a church roof."

"Same thing."

"It's not the same thing."

"Kael." I look up. "It's the same thing."

He's close. He's been close this whole time and I didn't notice until I looked up. His face is about a foot from mine and the lamp's behind him and his eyes are so dark and so tired.

"Why'd you have a red first-aid kit behind the bar?" I say.

"Because Jax is a paranoid son of a—"

"No. Really."

He's quiet.

"Because I keep one in every building I own," he says. "The bar. The storage. The truck. Because I've been in this town sixteen years and I've pulled nine people off the road and two out of houses, and one time I had to hold a boy's arm together with a torn-up t-shirt while we waited on an ambulance that took forty minutes to come." He looks at his wrapped hand. "That was my little brother."

I don't say anything.

"He was seventeen," Kael says. "He got himself into something he couldn't get out of. And then he was dead on a road in the rain and I was holding his arm together with a t-shirt."

I put my hand over his wrapped one.

I don't even think about it. I just do it.

He goes still.

"Kael," I say. "The pictures. On Hendricks's phone. My mama's house."

"Yeah."

"Marcus had someone watching that house. Six months ago." My voice is doing something strange. "Why would a man put a photographer on his wife's dead mother's house?"

Kael's eyes come up.

"Because he was looking for something," he says.

"What?"

"I don't know. But he was already looking before you ran." He turns his wrapped hand over under mine so his fingers are laced with mine. "Which means he's got a reason to want you back that ain't got nothing to do with love."

And the door bangs open.

Both of us turn.

It's Jax. Out of breath. Rain on his shoulders, hair flat to his head, and he's holding his phone up in one hand.

"Prez." He's breathing hard. "Prez, you gotta see this."

"Jax—"

"It's on the news. The county news. It just went up." He holds the phone out. "It's about her."

I take the phone.

There's a photo of me on the screen. Not the garden photo. An older one — from the wedding. I'm in the white dress with the pearls and Marcus's hand is on my waist and I'm smiling that smile.

And under it, a headline:

"MISSING HEIRESS: STERLING FAMILY OFFERS $250,000 REWARD FOR WIFE'S SAFE RETURN. POLICE SAY SHE MAY BE IN DANGER."

I read it three times.

"Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars," Jax says. "Anybody in the state sees that, they're gonna be looking at every woman in every town."

Kael's hand closes over mine.

Chapter 15 Ends.