His Chubby Obsession

Chapter Eight: Vouching

(Enzo's POV)

Sofia caught me in the back hallway before I'd even gotten the door to my office shut.

"We need to talk," she said, which from Sofia was never a request.

I let her in and closed the door behind us, muting out the noise of the clubhouse — the pool table, the television still running its muted loop of Emma's wedding photo, the low murmur of guys pretending they weren't all thinking about the same thing. I'd bought maybe an hour of peace by shutting it down in the main room. An hour wasn't going to be enough.

"You know what you just did out there," Sofia said. It wasn't a question either.

"I vouched for her."

"You vouched for a woman who's on the local news. Whose husband apparently has private investigators already looking for her. In front of the whole club, half of whom have priors, some of whom are on paper right now." She crossed her arms. "You know what that means if this goes sideways."

"I know what it means."

"Do you?" Her voice cracked, just slightly, the way it did when she stopped being second-in-command and started being my little sister instead. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you're doing exactly what you swore you'd never do again. Getting this club tangled up in somebody else's domestic situation because it reminds you of Mom."

That landed exactly where she meant it to.

"This isn't about Mom."

"Isn't it?" Sofia's jaw was tight. "Enzo. I love that you want to help her. I do. But you didn't even hesitate. You put us all on the line for a stranger in about four seconds flat, and I don't think that was a decision. I think that was a reflex."

I sat down heavy in the chair behind my desk, because she wasn't wrong, and there wasn't much use pretending otherwise with her. Sofia had been there. She'd watched our mother try to leave three times. She'd watched him drag her back three times. She'd been twelve the last time, old enough to remember every detail, young enough that it had carved something permanent into her that never quite closed over.

"You think I don't know the risk," I said.

"I think you know the risk and you don't care, because some part of you has been waiting fifteen years for a version of this where you get to be the one who shows up in time." Sofia's voice gentled, just a little, which somehow hurt worse than the sharpness had. "That's not nothing, Enzo. But it's not nothing for her either. She's not a chance for you to fix the past. She's a person, with a kid, who's scared out of her mind. If you're doing this to prove something to a version of Mom that isn't here anymore, that's not fair to Emma. And it's not fair to the club."

I didn't have a clean answer for that. I still don't, if I'm honest with myself, which I try to be more than most people bother to be.

"I saw her wrist," I said finally. "Before I ever knew her name. Bruise like a bracelet, going yellow at the edges, the kind that takes a couple days to look that bad. And she flinched when I raised my voice at her, even a little, even just to tell her to hold on tight on the bike. You don't fake a flinch like that."

Sofia was quiet.

"I'm not doing this because of Mom," I said. "I'm doing it because I know what it costs to not help somebody who needed it. I watched that cost play out for nineteen years before it killed her. I'm not doing that again. Not when it's in my power not to."

"And if her husband comes here? With lawyers, or worse, with people who don't care about lawyers?"

"Then we deal with it." I met her eyes. "Same as we'd deal with it for anybody wearing our patch. She's not wearing it. But she's under our roof, and that's supposed to mean something, or none of this — " I gestured at the walls around us, at the whole life we'd built out of our mother's death and our father's absence and every hard choice in between — "none of it means anything at all."

Sofia held my gaze a long moment, searching for something. Whatever she found, it settled something in her, because the fight went out of her shoulders.

"Fine," she said. "But if we're doing this, we're doing it smart, not sentimental. I want everything on this Bruce Smith before we're three days deeper into this. Who he is, what he's actually capable of, what kind of money and lawyers we're up against. I'm not vouching blind just because you did."

"That's fair."

"It's not about fair. It's about not getting blindsided." She was already pulling out her phone, thumbs moving, the soldier in her taking over from the sister. "Give me tonight. I'll have a real picture of what we're dealing with by morning."

She left without waiting for me to argue, which was smart of her, because I didn't have an argument left in me anyway.

—

I found her again a few hours later, in the small back office we used for the club's books, laptop glow lighting up her face in the dark. She hadn't touched the sandwich somebody had left beside her.

"You should sleep," I said from the doorway.

"You should see this first."

I came around behind her chair. She had three windows open — public records, some kind of business registry, a grainy screenshot of an old local news article with a headshot of a younger, harder-edged version of the man I'd only seen once, from a distance, in an article online.

"Spears International isn't just money," Sofia said, not looking away from the screen. "It's old money, connected money. The grandfather — Papa Niel Spears — has his hands in half the city's zoning boards, two judges' campaign funds, a state senator's reelection committee. This isn't a guy we can out-lawyer or out-wait. This is a guy who can make problems disappear before they ever become problems."

"And Bruce?"

"Bruce is worse in a different way." She finally turned to look at me, and there was something in her face I didn't like at all — not fear, exactly. Sofia didn't scare easy. Something closer to grim. "There was a business partner, four years back. Guy named Aiden Cole. Small tech firm, decent reputation, got into some kind of dispute with Bruce over a deal gone sideways. Within six months, Cole's firm was bankrupt, his name was mud in every boardroom in the state, and he'd lost custody of his own kids in a divorce that came out of absolutely nowhere, timed almost perfectly with the business collapse."

The room felt colder than it had a second ago.

"You think Bruce did that."

"I think it's an awfully specific pattern to be a coincidence." Sofia's mouth was a thin line. "Ruin somebody publicly and privately, all at once, in a way that looks accidental if you're not looking close. And Enzo — " she turned the laptop so I could see the timeline she'd built, dates lined up neat and damning, "— that was before he married Emma. Before there was ever a kid, a five-year clock, an inheritance on the line. This isn't a man under pressure who snapped once. This is just what he does."

I stared at the screen a long moment, at the ruined life of a stranger I'd never met, laid out in dates and headlines, and thought about a woman two rooms away sleeping with her daughter curled against her because she had nowhere else in the world that felt safe.

"She wasn't just his wife," I said quietly. "She was a strategy."

"Yeah." Sofia closed the laptop, finally, and looked up at me with something that had shifted, sometime in the last hour, from reluctant permission into something closer to resolve. "Which means whatever's coming for her isn't going to be loud and stupid like Vincent chasing a car down a back road. It's going to be quiet, and legal, and patient, and by the time she sees it coming, it'll already be too late to stop."

"So we don't let it get quiet."

Sofia almost smiled, the way she did when she was proud of me and didn't want to say so out loud.

"Now you're thinking like club, not like a man with a savior complex," she said. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow we start building her a wall he can't buy his way through."