off. Too many bad memories in this place for her. Which begs the question, why she’d plot to come back, don’t you think?”
My heart stuttered in my chest. “She wants to hurt her daddy?”
Ink pinched the bridge of his nose. “I think so, but she hasn’t done anything to indicate she’s helping out any LEOs. But that shit with the bruises was just plain weird.”
“If you’d seen her at the clubhouse, you’d think it was even weirder. She was scared, man. Petrified.”
“Of who, though?”
Saint sighed. “I don’t know. We thought Hex, but if something else is at play?”
Ink’s expression turned pensive, and I squeezed Saint’s hand again before I got to my feet and murmured, “We need to get on the road. The parlor opens up soon.”
As we trudged on out, and I climbed onto the back of Saint’s hog, I pressed my cheek to that spot between his shoulders that was made for me, and looked out onto the side of the road as we drove over to Jonsson.
My mind was awhirl. Not because I was frightened, like my guys seemed to think I’d be, but because I was tense.
Revenge.
I’d already been burned by it once. My family had been paying the price of someone else’s vengeance for a long ass time.
I wasn’t going to let that happen again. By hook or by goddamn crook, I wasn’t about to let Kenzie burn my family, my MC family, just because her daddy had gone off the rails before her momma had died.
❖
Keys
As I listened to the conversation going down in the next room, I had to admit, it was hard.
Fucking hard.
In fact, no, that sounded too easy. This made me feel like I was going nuts. Listening to Kenzie being a bitch to Ama? Yeah, it made me want to ram my fist into her throat, and I wasn’t the kind of guy who was okay with violence against women, but sometimes, I wished to fuck that Ama would stand up for herself so I didn’t have to feel this goddamn way.
I rested my elbows on my knees and bowed my head as I tried to calm myself down.
It was a shitty time when a man had to sneak around so that his sister and girl could talk without his kin thinking he was eavesdropping. But that was exactly what I was doing. Listening in and making sure I heard every piece of shit my sister uttered with that filthy mouth of hers.
“I can’t believe you got accepted.”
“To every school I applied for,” Ama replied, and from her tone of voice, I could tell she wasn’t stressed at all. It boggled my mind how she acted unaffected around bullies, and there was no denying the fact that my sister was one.
A hundred percent.
From the scratching sounds, I knew she was drawing, and I knew Kenzie had agreed to it for some reason that wasn’t known to me. Ever since the council had taken to believing that she was a lying snake in the grass, her movements had been monitored, her phone taken away from her, and she had someone with her—even at night.
Did it piss me off that the person pulling the night duty was Long John? Didn’t take a fucking genius to figure out what they were doing.
But LJ was loyal to the MC. To his core. No pussy was about to sway him away from that, even one as devious as my sister.
“What I don’t understand is why you bothered applying if you had no intention of going,” Kenzie mused.
“Because I have no need to go,” Ama responded, absentmindedly.
“So, my question still stands. Why even bother? Why waste money on the applications?”
“Just because I didn’t need validation doesn’t mean others don’t.”
Kenzie snorted. “Manipulator. You’re just like me.”
Ama’s laugh was short, but it dripped with genuine amusement. “I’m nothing like you, Kenzie. Nothing at all. Except for the fact we both have great tits and an ass made for a bikini, nope, we’ve got nothing in common.”
“You always did think you were so high and mighty. Just because you were kidnapped. Wah, wah, wah,” Kenzie mocked, her teasing making me grit my teeth. But I’d promised. I’d fucking promised Ama that I wouldn’t interfere.
I wasn’t sure what was going down with her, but this morning, she’d told me that she wanted to not only sit with Kenzie for a while, but also, she’d wanted me there to listen in.
It was good timing, all told. I was supposed to watch