Biker’s Temptation

Griff

His full name was Griffin Hale.

Nobody said it out loud when he walked into the room. Nobody had to. I watched the realization move across Asher’s face first, then Jasper’s, and I understood that this was information Kane had been holding for longer than today, longer than this week, possibly longer than any of them wanted to count.

Griff was thirty, maybe thirty-two. Broad through the shoulders, a Saint’s patch on his cut that had clearly seen real use, the kind of man who would have looked completely at home on a road or in a fight. He looked less at home standing in the middle of the situation room with four pairs of eyes on him and no explanation yet for why he had been called.

He looked at Kane. “What’s this about?”

“Sit down, Griff.”

“I’d rather stand.”

“I’d rather you sit.”

Griff sat.

Kane placed the small tray on the table between them. The drive sat in it, tiny and inert and carrying more weight than anything that small had a right to carry. Griff looked at it for exactly one second and then looked back at Kane and his face did not change in any of the ways a guilty face changes.

It changed in a different way entirely. It went quiet in the way a face goes quiet when it recognizes something it thought it would never have to see.

“Where did you find that,” he said.

“Sewn into her jacket,” Kane said. “The one she was wearing when she came through the gate.”

Griff closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he looked older than he had thirty seconds ago. “She told me it was already handled.”

“Who told you?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Not the quiet of someone deciding whether to lie. The quiet of someone deciding how much of the truth they could stand to say.

“My mother,” he said.

The room absorbed it.

Jasper let out a slow breath. Asher didn’t move at all. Ryker, standing behind Griff, remained exactly as still as he had been before, but something in the angle of his shoulders changed.

“Eleanor Hale is your mother,” Kane said.

“Half mother. She had my father before she had Donovan.” Griff’s voice was flat in the way voices go flat when a fact has been carried so long it has worn smoothly. “I’ve been in the Saints six years, Kane. You know what I’ve done for this club. You know what I’ve put on the line.”

“I know,” Kane said. “That’s the only reason you’re sitting in a chair right now instead of somewhere considerably less comfortable.”

Griff looked at him steadily. “I didn’t send the message.”

“Then who did?”

“If Eleanor had known the drive was here she would have sent a signal to her contact inside the property the moment Mercer’s car was spotted on the road. She doesn’t wait. She never waits.” He paused. “I didn’t know I was the contact until six months ago when she called me and told me what I was. I didn’t pass anything. I didn’t move anything. But I also didn’t tell you, and that is the thing I have to answer for.”

The silence that followed that sentence was the longest one yet.

I had been standing near the back wall, close enough to see Griff’s face and far enough to feel like I wasn’t part of the architecture of this conversation. But I spoke anyway because the question had been sitting in my throat since he walked in.

“Is there anyone else,” I said. “Inside this compound. Anyone else she’s been holding as a contact without them knowing it.”

Griff looked at me for the first time since he sat down. His expression was not unkind. It was the expression of a man who had been asking himself the same question for six months and had not slept well because of it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “And that is the truest thing I’ve told anyone in this room.”

Kane stood. He walked around the table slowly, no rush, no performance, and stopped beside Griff’s chair. He put his hand on Griff’s shoulder once, a brief weight, and then removed it.

“You’re going to tell me everything she ever said to you,” Kane said. “Every call. Every instruction. Every name she used and every name she didn’t. And when you’re done, we’re going to figure out together what you owe this club and how you pay it. But right now you’re going to start talking.”

Griff nodded once.

I slipped out of the room quietly. Jasper followed me into the hall without being asked, pulling the door to behind him, and we stood in the corridor with the low sound of voices starting up on the other side of the wall.

“Six years,” I said.

“Six years,” Jasper agreed.

“Did Kane know. Before today.”

Jasper looked at the ceiling for a moment, then back at me. “Kane knows things the way he knows most things. He waits until he’s sure before he says them out loud.”

“That must be exhausting.”

Something that was almost a smile crossed his face. It was brief and dry and gone before I could properly look at it, but it was the most unguarded thing I had seen from Jasper since I arrived.

“You have no idea,” he said.

Down the hall a door opened and Donovan stepped out, looking at the two of us with an expression I was getting better at reading.

He had known about Griff.

I could see it in the way he didn’t ask what was happening.

He had known and he had said nothing and now we were all going to have to decide what that meant.