“So they’re choking the bar to push her out,” Razor said. “Rich-people bullshit.”
“And when paper didn’t work fast enough, they sent muscle.” Doc’s voice was even. Controlled. His hand was on the table, close to mine, not touching. “The fixer. Licensed PI, private security firm out of Denver. They sent someone to physically remove her.”
The room was quiet. Seven men, leather and ink and the stillness of people deciding what to do about a problem. I’d seen it before, the night Doc found me in my car, the morning after. The club processing, calculating, reaching a verdict through instinct I didn’t fully understand.
I understood the part that mattered. This was my fault.
“Everything was fine before me,” I said. “The bar, the inspections, all of it. That’s my family doing that. My mess. And if I stay, it gets worse. They don’t stop. They have lawyers, money, connections. They’ll keep squeezing until something breaks.”
I looked at Angel. Held his gaze, because if I was going to say this, I was going to say it to the man who’d ultimately agreed to putting a roof over my head. He’s the president and this was his ship I was sinking.
“I should go. If I leave, they follow me, and your bar gets left alone. Your business. Your club. I won’t be the thing that costs you any of it.”
The table went quiet. Not patience. Something harder.
“No,” Angel said.
One word. Flat, final, a no that didn’t come with a discussion attached.
“You don’t understand. My family will...”
“I understand fine.” Angel’s eyes were level, dark, the weight of every decision he’d ever made sitting behind them. “You’re under this roof. You’re one of ours. That doesn’t change because someone with money decides it should.”
“The bar...”
“Is a building,” Doc said beside me. Quiet, certain. “Buildings survive. That’s not what matters.”
“We protect our people.” Said Razor, leaning back in his chair, arms folded, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “End of conversation.”
I looked around the table. Priest, silent, gave me a nod. Rook was already typing something on his phone, working the problem. Ghost, at the far end, watched me with those pale eyes that saw everything and gave nothing back, and even he tipped his chin a fraction of an inch.
They weren’t negotiating. They weren’t weighing the cost. They’d decided, the way they decided everything, collectively, immediately, with a certainty that left no room for argument.
I’d spent my entire life being owned by people who saw me as nothing more than convenient.
These men were claiming me too. But the difference, the vast, wrenching, impossible difference, was that they were doing it because they wanted to. Not because I was useful, not because I was profitable, but because I worked for the bar and the considered me one of them.
I didn’t cry. But it was close.
The meeting broke up. The brothers scattered into their evening, their routines, the easy rhythm of men who’d handled worse than one rich family with a grudge. Angel was making calls. The machine was moving.
I found Doc in his room.
He was standing by the window, looking out at the treeline, a glass of something amber on the dresser beside him. Heturned when I came in and I watched his eyes move over my face, reading me the way he always did, fast, thorough, missing nothing. He saw the remnants of the emotion I hadn’t let out at the table. The gratitude and the fury and the fierce, burning need to prove to myself that I was here because I chose it.
I shut the door. Locked it. Walked straight to him and kissed him.
I grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands, hauled him down to my mouth, and kissed him with everything I had. No hesitation, no uncertainty. Hard, open, my tongue against his, my body pressed full against him, and the sound he made, low, involuntary, vibrating through his chest into mine, sent heat flooding through me so fast my knees nearly gave out.
“Evie...”
“Don’t talk.” I pulled his shirt over his head. Put my hands on his chest, his stomach, the hard planes of muscle underneath warm skin. I’d been careful with him last time. Letting him lead, letting him set the pace, grateful and overwhelmed and too new to this to do anything but follow. Not tonight. Tonight I knew exactly what I wanted and I was going to take it.
I undid his belt. His breath caught. I pulled him free and dropped it on the floor, then undid the button of his jeans, slid the zipper down, and wrapped my hand around him through his boxers. He was already hard, thick, straining against the fabric, and the groan that came out of him when I squeezed was rough enough to make my thighs clench.
“Fuck, Evie.”
“I want you,” I said. Looking up at him, my hand moving, slow, deliberate. “Not because you rescued me. Not because I’m grateful. Because I want you. Because you’re the first thing I’ve ever chosen for myself that felt like this.”
