Page 121 of Deacon

Lila looked exhausted when she opened her apartment door. Not wrecked. Worn thin. Her hair was half loose, and the tiredness around her eyes made me want to take whatever had done it apart with my bare hands.

She saw me and let out a slow breath. “I am too tired for your games, Jackson.”

I stayed in the doorway, hands empty. “Ain’t here to play games, Princess.”

Her brow lifted, unimpressed. “Blue and Evan and I have been dealing with suppliers for the emergency department all afternoon,” she said. “If one more man says projected turnaround time to me, I may actually commit a felony.”

Usually that would have gotten something smart out of me. Today I only said, “I just wanna talk.”

Her expression sharpened in a different way, and I knew exactly what she was telling me: whatever I had come to say, Jade wasn’t here to soften it. “Jade’s still at school,”

“I know.” I had come because she was alone, because this truth belonged to Lila before it belonged to anyone else.

That gave her pause. She stepped aside, and without Jade there, the apartment felt too quiet, all the space between Lila and me suddenly exposed. She shut the door and faced me. “If you’re planning to tell me half of something and then shut down again, I don’t have the energy.”

I held her gaze. “I’m gonna tell you.”

That got her attention. After a long second, she nodded toward the couch. “Sit.”

I did, and she took the other end, leaving enough space between us to hurt.

I leaned forward and started where everything had gone wrong. “After I dropped you off that night,” I said, “I went back to the clubhouse to help the prospect that called me. Said he needed somethin’. But I ended up hearin’ a conversation I shouldn’t have heard.”

She went still, so I told her about the office, the prez and VP, and what they were moving. Women. Kids. Guns. Drugs. Then the cops.

The word cops changed her face. She sucked in a breath, alarm cutting through the exhaustion. “Cops?”

I nodded once, already hating what came next. Her mind went exactly where I knew it would.

“Cops from my dad’s department were involved in that kind of stuff?”

I lifted my eyes to hers. The truth sat one breath away when pounding struck the door, hard enough to sound less like a knock than a demand.

Lila’s face tightened the second she opened it. Matty stormed past her without waiting for permission, anger filling the apartment before the door shut behind him.

“You’ve avoided us long enough,” he snapped. “It’s time you started talking and stopped acting like—”

Then he saw me. The accusation meant for Lila vanished beneath something hotter.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” The question came at Lila more than me.

Lila slammed the door and turned on him. “Could you not come storming into my apartment yelling and asserting yourself like you can control my life?” She sounded exhausted enough to be done with the argument before it started.

Matty barked out a laugh. “Control your life? Lila, you skipped Sunday family dinner to go to his biker clubhouse, and now I walk in here and find him in your living room like he lives here?”

I got to my feet before he could wind himself tighter. “You wanna lower your voice?”

Matty snapped toward me, all that old resentment finding an easier target. “No, I don’t.”

Lila muttered, exhausted rather than surprised. “Excellent,” she said. “This is exactly how I wanted my day to go.”

Matty barely heard her. His anger swung right back. “You don’t get to do this,” Matty said. “You don’t get to act like we’re the problem when you’re the one dragging this mess back into our lives.”

Lila’s face hardened. She had spent too many years raising Jade alone to let Matty erase what this meant now. “He is Jade’s father.”

“And he left you.” Matty threw the words like they settled everything, and they hit because there was truth in them.

I stepped forward, but Lila lifted a hand without even looking at me. “Don’t.” The single word stopped me faster than anything Matty could have said.