a seating area—a sofa with two armchairs, a coffee table, and two end tables on either side of the sofa with a lamp. She headed out of that seating area and began to pace around it.
Around and around, like she was trying to think, trying to clear her mind to come up with her next plan of action.
The look on her face?
One of desperation.
She knew she’d been cornered.
She knew it and she kept flickering her gaze over to Ama who, for all intents and purposes, was entirely disinterested in what my sister was doing. Her focus was on her sketchpad, and call me stupid, but I could see Kenzie trying to figure out the odds.
Odds about what, I wasn’t entirely sure, because if she hurt Ama, she’d have two MCs riding her ass from here to Canada if she thought she could go on the run after that.
“Ama?”
I stiffened, waiting on my sister’s next words.
“Yeah?”
“Will you help me?”
Ama switched focus, and pinning Kenzie with her stare, asked, “Help you do what?”
“Get out of here.”
“And why would you want to do that when you’re home and a ‘girl needs to be home when she’s about to give birth?’” Ama mocked, her eyes harder than I’d ever seen.
“Because I’m in danger. L-Look, I know we’ve never gotten on well. But I’m Keys’ sister. You know it will hurt him if anything happens to me. And my daddy. I know you love him as well,” she wheedled. “It would kill them both if anything happened to me.”
“And exactly why would anything happen to you if you’ve done nothing wrong?” I inserted, striding into the room, unable to take this bullshit any longer. I wasn’t about to let Ama be manipulated. Not when there was so much at stake here.
Kenzie, upon seeing me, froze. She raised her hands into the air like I was a cop, and whispered, “Please, Keys. Just let me go.”
“Like Ama said, you worked so hard to get here, Kenz. Why the fuck do you feel the need to leave now?”
Her words were strangled when she whispered, “I had no choice.”
Everything inside me froze. “No choice to do what?”
“Help them. They needed an in.”
“Who did?”
She released a shaky breath. “W-When I left here, things didn’t go so well. I hung around at the Knights’ compound for a while, but shit didn’t work out there. I’m not made out to be a clubwhore.”
“Fuck no, you’re not. You’re a councilor’s daughter,” I growled, my hands balling into fists at my sides.
She gulped. “Well, it didn’t take me long to pick myself up and get the hell out of there. But in El Paso, things were harder.”
“Why? Because you actually had to work?” Ama sneered, but the pad was still resting on her knees, her pencil moving as she worked.
“Like you’re one to talk. You’re away with the fucking fairies most of the time, Ama,” Kenzie snarled back.
“Until this summer, I’ve been at school, you idiot. I only just fucking graduated. With a 3.9 GPA. I’m not a lazy bitch like some people. I don’t need to pay my bills on my back.”
Kenzie flinched at that but snapped, “I tried to make a go of it in El Paso, I really did. But I ended up with some bad people. Got myself into some shit, and ended up in jail with a possession charge.”
“You were dealing drugs?” I choked out.
“Yeah.” She raised her hands and covered her face. “I’m not proud of it, and I’m not proud of what I did next.”
“What?”
“They were going to throw me behind bars for eight years, Jamie. Eight. I couldn’t—” She shook her head. “I couldn’t do it. I agreed to help them.”
“You cut a deal,” I snarled.
“They wanted me to go back to the Knights, so I did. And when I told them what they were running, and with whom, then they got interested in the Rebels’ operation.”
“So you brought them here? Ain’t you heard of never shitting in your own backyard?”
She flinched at my yell. “I didn’t have a choice!”
“We always have a choice.” I scrubbed a hand over my face before I turned away from her, trying to process what the fuck was happening. “This is bad shit, Kenzie. I don’t think we can help you. If you weren’t pregnant, you’d be in The Pit for this shit.”
Kenzie gulped. “I know. That’s why I have to get out of here.”
“We can’t help you,” Ama said softly. “Not without implicating ourselves in your BS. We