Savage Saints Mc : Claimed By Four Monsters

Chapter 6

Isolde

Marcus's voice was still in my head.

‘Tell her who really killed her father.’

I stood in the middle of Kael's room and I didn't move. The words just kept going around and around like something stuck in a drain. Kael had his back to me. He was standing at the window, arms at his sides, looking out at the empty yard where Marcus's vehicles had just pulled away. The gate was still swinging. I watched the back of his head and I thought: ask him. Just ask him.

"Did you have something to do with my father's death?"

He didn't move, not even his shoulders, he just stood there, looking out that window, and the silence stretched so long I started counting in my head. One.. Two.. Three.. Four.. Five..

Then he turned around. His face was the same as it always was. Closed. Controlled. The kind of face that had learned a long time ago not to give anything away for free. He looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us blinked.

"We need to talk about Petra first."

Something hot moved through my chest. I knew what he was doing. I knew it the second the words left his mouth. He wasn't answering because answering meant something he wasn't ready to hand me yet, and he was pointing me toward my sister because he knew I would follow that direction. Because she was more urgent. Because she was real and immediate and in danger right now.

Because he was right.

"Don't do that," I said.

"Do what?"

"Use my sister to change the subject."

Something shifted in his jaw. "I'm not changing anything. Your sister is the problem in front of us. That's where we start."

"And my father?"

"Comes after."

I stared at him. My hands were shaking at my sides. I pushed them flat against my thighs and made myself breathe through it because he was right. I hated that he was right, and I was also terrified of what his answer would actually be. Part of me didn't want to know. Part of me wanted to stay in the version of tonight where that question was still unanswered, where it was still possible that Marcus was just trying to hurt me, just throwing words like knives to see what stuck.

"Fine," I said. "Petra."

He pulled the wooden chair from the corner and set it in the middle of the room and sat down. Not behind the desk, not across a table. Just in the open, like he was deliberately removing anything I could read as a barrier. I didn't sit.

"My people can locate where the Voss family is holding her," he said. "We have contacts inside several of their operations. Not direct. Nothing that would flag. But enough."

"How long?"

"Days. Maybe less."

"That's not fast enough."

"It has to be." His voice stayed even. "You go in blind and panicked and you don't just lose her, you lose any chance of ever getting her out. The Voss estate has armed security on three rotations. If we move wrong, they move her somewhere we can't reach."

I pressed my hand against my mouth and looked at the ceiling. The plaster was cracked in one corner, a thin line running toward the light fixture, I stared at it.

"She's been in there for days already," I said, my voice coming out thinner than I wanted.

"I know."

"She's twenty-two. She has nothing to do with any of this."

"I know that too."

"Then why isn't fast enough good enough?" I dropped my hand. I looked at him straight. "Give me one real reason."

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and he looked back at me without flinching. "Because if we spook them and they move her, we lose the trail. Because the people I'm sending in are good but they need the floor plan, the rotations, the timing. Because one wrong step gets your sister killed and I am not putting her in the ground trying to make you feel better tonight."

The room went quiet, l sat down on the edge of the bed. Not because I wanted to. Because my legs decided they were done.

"I want to be part of every step," I said.

"You will be."

"I mean it, Kael. Every decision. Every piece of information. You don't plan around me."

He looked at me for a long moment and something moved behind his eyes, something careful and calculating and already working three steps ahead of the conversation. "Agreed," he said.

The word came too easily. Too clean. I filed that away.

"And when she's out?" I asked.

"Then we deal with everything else."

He meant my father. He meant the question I had asked that he had not answered. The question was still sitting between us like a stone neither of us had picked up yet. I nodded once. He stood, pushed the chair back to the corner, and walked to the door. His hand was on the frame when I spoke again.

"Kael."

He stopped.

"You didn't say no."

He didn't turn around. He stood there with his back to me, one hand on the door frame, and the silence did that thing it always did with him where it got heavy and took up space.

Then he left, I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after the door closed. The room smelled like leather and something colder underneath it, the same way it had the first night he brought me here. The night he turned the lock and said from tonight onward you belong to me and I had been too frightened and too wired with adrenaline to feel the full weight of what that meant.

I felt it now. My father's face came to me the way it always did when I was in trouble. Not any specific memory. Just him. The shape of him in a doorway. The smell of his coat in winter. The way he used to put his hand on top of my head when I was small like I was something he was checking was still there.

He died two years ago. That was what everyone said. Heart attack, no warning, nothing suspicious. I had grieved him exactly the way you grieve someone who died from the inside out, quietly and without anyone to blame.

Except Marcus had stood in the yard tonight and pointed at the man on the other side of that door like the blame had a name and an address and a leather cut.

I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling. I didn't sleep. I just lay there in the dark listening to the clubhouse settle around me, the distant sound of voices, boots on concrete, a door somewhere closing. The normal sounds of a place that had learned to exist after violence.

He didn't say no. The thought sat in my chest like a splinter. Small. Precise. Working deeper the more I tried to ignore it.

The room was dark and still when I heard it. A small sound. The soft scratch of paper moving against the floor.

I sat up. A folded piece of paper lay just inside the door. Someone had slipped it through the gap at the bottom. I stared at it for a second, then crossed the room and picked it up.

Four words. Clean handwriting. Careful and deliberate like everything he did.

‘Your father came to us first.’