“No, she didn’t,” Lottie snaps, sharp enough to cut. “No. She’s with me. Yes, I know what folks are saying. Folks can say whatever the hell they want.”
There’s a pause, and her voice goes colder, the way it does when she’s about to turn into a problem no one wants.
“Tell them if they come to my house running their mouths, they better bring a toothbrush, because they’ll be picking teeth up off my porch.”
I stand in the doorway in an old T-shirt and socks, hair a mess, stomach hollow like I forgot how to eat. Lottie turns when she sees me and her expression softens, but it’s the kind of soft that packs a gun.
“You want coffee?” she asks, like offering caffeine can fix the fact that I swung a board at the Vice President’s wife and now nobody can find her.
My throat tightens. “What are they saying?”
Lottie turns her head away. She pours coffee into a mug with hands that don’t shake, because Lottie is the kind of woman who can hold steady in a hurricane.
“They’re saying she ran,” she replies. “They’re saying she fell in. They’re saying the lake did what lakes do.”
“And?” I push, because my chest is squeezing like it’s trying to crush my heart into something smaller.
Lottie meets my eyes. “And they’re saying you did it.”
The words don’t hit like a slap. They hit like a hand around my throat. My vision blurs for a second, not from tears, just from the pressure of it. The weight of a whole town deciding you’re guilty because it’s easier than admitting something else might be stalking them.
I set my palm on the counter to steady myself. “I didn’t.”
“I know,” Lottie says immediately, fierce. “I know you didn’t.”
But the world doesn’t care what’s true. Hell cares what’s easy.
I take the mug even though I don’t want it. My hands tremble around the heat. “Are the cops coming?”
“Not here,” she says, then her mouth twists like she hates that she can’t promise it. “Not yet. They’re sniffing around the lake. Taking statements. Asking questions. They’ll circle this way eventually.”
I stare into the coffee like maybe the dark can swallow me whole and I won’t have to answer anything. “Oaks said…”
Lottie’s eyebrows lift. “He said what.”
“He told me not to talk,” I whisper. “He said it like he was buying time.”
Lottie’s eyes flick toward the living room window, toward the road like she expects a cruiser to roll by. “He is,” she says. “That’s what he does. He moves pieces around so the board doesn’t light on fire.”
The mention of him makes my chest ache in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with bruises. Oaks brought me back to Hell on the back of his bike like I weighed nothing and mattered too much, and he didn’t touch me when we got here. No kiss. No hand on my lower back. No quiet word that meant anything. He dropped me off like an errand he couldn’t afford to do wrong.
I can’t decide if that was restraint or rejection.
I lift my gaze. “Where is he?”
Lottie’s mouth pulls tight. “At the lake. With Legend. With Royal. With whatever mess this is turning into.”
Of course he is.
Because even when the world is swallowing me, Oaks is still a man with a patch and responsibilities and a club that comes before anyone’s feelings. That’s what everyone keeps trying to tell me, like if they say it enough I’ll stop wanting him.
I shouldn’t want him at all.
I didn’t ask to want a married biker who swears like a sin and looks at me like I’m trouble he can’t stop walking toward. I didn’t ask for the way he warned me, the way he watched the road behind me, the way he made my name sound like a promise and a threat all at once.
But my body doesn’t care what I asked for. My heart doesn’t either.
In a week, I hear the bikers are back from the clubhouse. I can’t sit still. I fold laundry I don’t own. I wipe counters that are already clean. I play blocks with Mason until my throat burns from forcing my voice to sound normal. Every time a car slows outside, my stomach drops like it’s trying to leave my body.
