Good. She’s going to need it.
The cell door clangs shut behind me an hour later.
Concrete bench. Bars. Thin mattress that smells like old sweat and urine. I sit down and lean my head back against cold cinderblock.
Royal will handle that evidence. Legend will manage optics. And Pearly Gates will think they won this round.
But if they framed her, they just made a mistake.
Because I can take a charge. I can take cuffs. I can take whispers. What I won’t take is Brittany going down for something she didn’t do.
The only thing that bothers me as the lights buzz overhead ain’t the cell. It ain’t the arrest.
It’s the look on her face when I said it was me.
Fear. Anger. And something deeper, like she finally understood exactly how far I’m willing to go.
If Pearly Gates staged this, they’re about to escalate. My brothers will handle it.
Let them lock me up. Let them whisper. Let them think I finally snapped.
I can live with that.
As long as she doesn’t have to.
Chapter 35
Brittany
Two weeks feels like two years when the man you love is sitting in a cell for something he didn’t do.
Hell, Kentucky has a way of stretching time when it wants to watch you suffer. It drags the minutes out like taffy, slow and sticky. Every sunrise feels like a dare. Every night feels like punishment.
Oaks refuses my calls, and that hurts worse than the arrest.
The first day I try to reach him, they tell me he ain’t taking visitors. The second day, Royal pulls me aside behind the clubhouse and tells me, in that smooth, careful voice of his, that Oaks doesn’t want me tangled in the legal side of this.
“He made a choice,” Royal says. “Let him carry it.”
“I didn’t ask him to,” I snap, because my anger has nowhere else to go.
Royal studies me like I’m something fragile he doesn’t want to break, which is insulting in its own way. “Doesn’t matter,” he says.
Legend says the same thing, only quieter.
I corner him outside the Lockup one afternoon while Sophie is inside helping with paperwork. He looks tired, older than I’ve ever seen him. Leadership does that to men. It dragsweight into their eyes and carves lines into their face like worry has a knife and plenty of time.
“I didn’t push her,” I tell him again, because if I don’t keep saying it out loud I’m afraid it’ll stop being true. I’ve already told him the whole story that Oaks refused to. The whole truth.
“I know,” Legend says simply.
The certainty in his voice makes my chest ache.
“Then why is he in there?” I demand.
Legend’s dismissive. “Because he decided that’s where he needed to be.”
“For me?”
