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"Bellamy Adeline Steele. I'm fifteen."
Jake's eyes shift from Bellamy to me. I swallow hard. Steele is my dead father's last name. He looks back at my sister. "Where do you live?"
She fidgets with a small mood ring, twisting it on her finger. "Just outside San Bernardino, with my mom and her sleazy boyfriend." She tenses at the mention of her mother's boyfriend, and I don't like it.
"You mentioned not being allowed to speak about club members. Who are you referring to?"
"The club my dad belonged to, Satan's Hounds."
Jake continues his questioning. "What was your dad's name?
"Hudson Steele, but everyone called him Grim," Bellamy says, and I go numb. I haven't heard my father's name in a long time. I don't carry his name;Birth fatheris blank on my birth certificate. I'm thankful to carry my mother's last name Mancini.
Jake keeps his facial expression neutral and crosses his arms over his chest. "You know anything about his death?"
I wasn't expecting him to ask that question. I feel the heavy weight of everyone's stares as he waits for Bellamy's reply. Every man in this room knows the answer to that question.
"Um, just that someone killed him." She shakes her head. "But I have no idea how." Then she mumbles, "Not that I care either way." My sister bows her head, places her hands in her lap, and draws deep breaths. "My father wasn't a good man. None of the Satan's Hounds men are."
I sense her shutting down. By the concerned looks on the other men's faces, so do they. I step to her side and kneel. "Bellamy." I wait for her to look at me. She slowly lifts her face. "Has anyone put their filthy hands on you?" I swear to all that is holy; I will kill any motherfucker who dared. Bellamy's eyes glisten with held-back emotions, yet she manages to keep the tears at bay.
"Not yet."
It takes a hell of a lot of willpower to maintain my composure, because all I want to do right now is put my fist through a wall. I won't lose control of my emotions, though. Not in front of my younger sister. The look in her eyes speaks volumes about the shit she's been through, and from personal experience with Satan's Hounds, I fucking hate knowing the possibilities. "You're never going back, understand?" I'll be damned. Life may have failed her until now, but she has me now. I won't let anything happen to her.
Bellamy nods. "Yeah," she says softly.
"Not going to sugar coat it, but you're a minor with a mother who is bound to be lookin' for ya, sweetheart. And as bad as we all don't want to see you go back, chances are, it will happen."
I rise. "Over my dead body."
Jake cuts his eyes to me. "Rein it in." His voice is stern, letting me know he's addressing me as Prez, not Jake. "You may be her brother, but that holds no weight in the eyes of the law, should her mother come after her." Jake gives me a second to absorb his words before continuing. He shifts his attention back to my sister. "Sweetheart, I don't like what I said any more than you do, but we have a real problem on our hands should your mother come looking for you. Does she know where you've gone?"
Bellamy moves in her seat. "She probably has no idea I'm even gone." The sadness in her voice further proves that the people in her life who are supposed to care don't.
"How'd you even know where to find Blake?" Logan chimes in, and she looks across the table at him.
"My mom's boyfriend, who is the club's enforcer, tends to have loose lips when he's drinking and talks about club business around my mom. Most of the time, she's too wasted to understand what he's talking about." Bellamy casts her eyes to the table and shrugs. "The walls in our house are thin, so I tend to hear a lot, whether I want to or not." She falls silent.
"Go on." I encourage her to continue.
She sighs. "Boner, that's my mom's boyfriend's name…" My sister pauses when Quinn chuckles, which causes Jake to cut his eyes at my brother with a glare.
Quinn clears his throat. "Sorry."
It's barely audible, but Bellamy giggles at Quinn's amusement. "His real name is Trevor Peterson. Anyway, he, my mom, and a couple of other club members were partying a couple of nights ago, all hitting the whiskey and smoking weed pretty hard for hours. As usual, I stayed locked in my bedroom, avoiding the creepy stares I get from most of the men in the club." Bellamy hugs herself and takes another cleansing breath. "Boner started rambling on about the good old days when my dad was alive, which eventually led to him going on about…" Her voice wavers, apprehensive about continuing. She looks back at me. "I'm sorry," she whispers, then faces Jake. "He started talking about how my dad was a stone-cold badass. That my dad was the only man he knew who could kill his kid's mother for stealing five hundred bucks and leaving his ass in the dead of night." Bellamy sniffles then her emotions get the better of her, and tears stream down her face.
Heat spreads through my chest, and I fist my hands at my sides. Pent-up rage and grief are brewing as I think about the day my father took my life away. I find myself battling the overwhelming need to hurt someone, destroy something, or run. Bellamy shoots out of her chair and wraps her arms around my waist.
"I'm sorry he took so much from you." She's straight-up crying now.
I pull myself together, because none of this is about just me anymore. It's about us. "He paid the price for his sins." I pull back and look down at her tear-stained face. "Don't ever apologize for that motherfucker. And please don't cry for me, Bellamy. I've lost a lot in my life, but I've gained a hell of a lot too. You standing in front of me right now proves that, despite the hell we go through, good things happen too."
Bellamy smiles at me. "Are you always this optimistic?"
"No," the men answer in unison with me. It's true that I'm more of a glass-half-empty man. The men fall silent, waiting. "You okay to continue?" I ask her.
"Yeah." She dries her face with the backs of her hands, then turns around and returns her attention to my brothers. "The other members there that night told him to shut the fuck up, which he did, but only for a little while. Boner started talking again. He went on about how Hellhound, the club's president, told him he found out Grim's son was living in Polson, Montana, and was associated with the local MC, and that he'd been keeping tabs on him."
