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“Randall has something to gain in all of this that we don’t know about,” I say.
“Or something to lose,” Savage adds. “Like his freedom when we prove he killed Hunter.” He picks up his coffee cup. “My money is on Randall. He killed Hunter. Now, did your brother know about it, Emma? I don’t know. Is Jill in on it, too? I don’t know. But I’m going to take all of this speculation and get my team turning it into facts.”
Emma frowns, sets down her mug, and rounds the island, walking toward the living room with purpose in her steps. “Where are you going and what are you doing?” Savage asks.
She ignores him.
“Emma,” I call after her.
She ignores me.
I set my own mug down, and in a few quick steps, I catch her arm and turn her to face me. “What are you doing?”
“What I should have already done. I need my phone. And I need to call my brother.”
“And say what?” I challenge.
“I told you. Randall doesn’t operate without my brother’s approval. I need to know if my brother threatened us through him tonight. If that’s where we’re at, if we’re so deep in this that my own brother is sending his second-in-command to threaten me, I need to know. Ineedto know.”
“And if he did, Emma? Then what?”
“Then I’d say Randall’s statement is true. You might not know it, but you have the ability to destroy my family, and he believes you’ll do it. That’s a game-changer.”
“I wouldn’t do that to you. You know that.”
“It’s one thing to say that now,” she says, “it’s quite another to look the person in the eyes who took someone you love. You don’t know how you’ll react the day that happens. And it will. That day is coming, sooner than later.”
Chapter eighty-eight
Emma
Jax and I stand there in the kitchen with Savage at his back, the room shrinking around us, the floor all but falling from beneath our feet. “I need to call Chance, Jax,” I repeat. “I need to hear his voice.”
“Wait,” he urges.
I shake my head in rejection. “No,” I say. “Not this time.”
His hands settle on my waist, possessive and firm, and he walks me backward, into the center bar area, walls encasing us, shielding us from Savage’s view. “I’m trying to protect you,” he says, his voice low, rough, his face close, like his body. “I’m trying to protectus.”
Us.
That word gets me like no other.
I’ve never been an “us,” not the way I am with Jax. I was never connected to York, never a part of him, and him me, the way Jax and I are connected to each other.
“I know you are,” I say, catching his shirt and holding on tightly, the way I feel like I’m holding on to him and Chance, but, somehow, I know it won’t be enough. I’m going to lose one ofthem, maybe both of them, and the very idea claws at me. “I’m doing the same.Think about it, Jax. This conversation started with you declaring it time to play the game, not get played. To do that, I need to hear my brother’s voice. I need to know what is really going on here. We need to know.”
He cups my face and tilts my gaze to his. “You’re not going to lose your brother. I’m not going to let that happen. I’m not ever going to do anything to make that happen.”
My heart squeezes because we both know that while he means that now, and I know that he really does, he might not feel the same later, not if my brother is connected to Hunter’s death. I catch his hand. “Thank you for saying that.”
“Don’t say that like I’m just talking. I’m not just talking, Emma. I told you, woman.Youare what matters to me.”
“Hunter—”
“Is gone,” he supplies decisively. “And no, his murder can’t go unanswered, but Hunter wouldn’t want innocent people to pay for my revenge, either. You will not pay for my revenge. You will not lose your brother.”
“If he hurt Hunter, I already lost him. Because he was never the man I believed him to be. But I don’t think he’d do that. He’s always been my best friend, and I just—I need to know where he and I stand. I need to know who he really is. I need him to be the person I think he is. And I’ll know. I’ll know when I talk to him and thenwe’llknow.”
