The Bull Riders' Lost Princess

The President's Daughter

Nobody in the room pretended not to listen.

Hannah felt it on the back of her neck, forty pairs of eyes and not one of them blinking. Graham had kept his voice low, but this was a clubhouse. Quiet carried.

“Not here,” he said. “My office.”

“Graham—”

“Please.”

It was the please that moved her. The boy she remembered never asked for anything twice, and he had never said a word as though it cost him.

She followed. The crowd opened ahead of them and closed behind. Dee, the bartender, whose hair had been auburn when Hannah left and was now a fierce silver, reached over the counter and squeezed her hand hard enough to hurt. “Your daddy kept your chair, baby. Nobody’s sat in it since.” Hannah could not answer.

“Six years,” a voice called from the pool table. “Funeral’s in three days, and she turns up like a late package.”

The man leaning on his cue was lean and red-bearded, young enough that Hannah half remembered him as a prospect who used to fetch her father’s coffee. Cole Brandt. He had not been smiling then, either.

“Maybe she’s here for the keys,” someone else muttered. “Heir has paperwork to collect.”

The murmur turned ugly. Where was she when we buried him? Where was she when everything went to hell?

Hannah stopped walking.

She felt Graham move to speak, and she lifted two fingers to stop him. If you let someone else answer for you, you have already lost the room.

“You have questions, Cole. I would too.”

“Damn right.”

“Ask me when you have earned the answer. I won’t lay my family’s business on a pool table in front of forty people. My father is dead. I just got here.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.”

The silence creaked.

“Cole,” Raymond said, strolling up with a clean towel he had apparently produced from thin air, “she has been in the building ninety seconds. Even the Inquisition let people take their coats off first.”

Someone laughed. Then someone else, relief rattling through the room like loose change. Even Cole’s mouth twitched before he scowled it away.

“Anyone who wants to ask Hannah something,” Graham said, and the room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with courtesy, “asks me first.”

No one argued. No one even shifted their weight.

So that is what it looks like, Hannah thought. A man people obey.

The office door shut behind them, and Raymond’s voice carried through it: “I’ll keep the wolves off.”

The room was plainer than she remembered. A battered steel desk, a map of Love Valley and against the far wall, her father’s old oak desk, polished and completely empty.

“You don’t use it,” she said.

“It isn’t mine.”

She dried her face with the towel and studied the map. Red pins north and east. Green pins south. A thin band of blue in the middle, shrunk almost to nothing.

“That’s us,” Graham said. “That’s what’s left.”

“Left of what?”

“Everything.” He leaned on the desk. “After your father died, the club needed a president. Nobody could agree. It should have been a fight over votes. Instead it became a fight over your mother.”

“My mother?”

“Some of the old guard believed whoever Mariam stood beside would carry the club. They treated her like the deed to the building.” His mouth flattened. “Arguments. Threats. Then they killed one another, man by man, until there was no old guard left. Their sons inherited the grudges.”

“Which sons?”

“Romeo Ferdinand. Jackson Bolton.” He nodded at the red pins, then the green. “Kings Riders. Dragon Riders. Each took a piece of the territory and half the membership. Each swears Mariam is the reason his father is in the ground.”

“Is she?”

“No.” Flat. Certain. “They need someone to blame, and she’s the one still breathing. Romeo mails her black roses. Jackson’s men park outside the house at night with their engines running, so she can hear. The only reason nobody has touched her is that I have riders on every door.”

An engine turned over outside, and Hannah flinched before she could stop herself.

She had pictured grief, and quarrels over a will. She had never pictured her mother lying awake, listening to engines in the dark.

“Why?” she asked. “Half your club probably wishes you’d hand her over. She has cost you men.”

“She has.”

“Then why?”

A shadow crossed his face, quick and old, and Hannah had the sense of standing at a door he had no intention of opening.

“Because I won’t punish her for what dead men did,” he said. “Their crimes aren’t hers. If I hand her over, I become the thing I’m trying to stop.”

The engine outside revved. Once. Twice. Then it held, a long, deliberate snarl, as if someone wanted them to know exactly how close he was.

Graham was at the window before she had finished turning. “Walt. Gate.”

A radio crackled somewhere. Boots pounded in the corridor. Hannah crossed to stand behind his shoulder and saw headlights through the rain, a single rider idling at the end of the lot, red-and-green colors black in the dark.

“Dragon Rider,” Graham said. “He wants us watching.”

“Then why is he here?”

“To deliver something.”

The rider tossed an envelope onto the gravel, thumbed his throttle until the engine screamed, and was gone.

“Take me to my mother,” Hannah said.

“Not tonight.”

“Graham.”

“Romeo has men on the north road. Jackson watches the south. If you leave in the dark, in a car they’ve never seen—” He stopped, then started again, quieter. “She’s safe. I’ll take you myself at first light. I’m not telling you when you can see your mother. I’m asking you to still be alive when you do.”

The old anger flared and died just as fast. He was right. She hated that he was right.

“First light,” she said.

A rider brought in the envelope, soaked, holding it at arm’s length as though it might bite. The paper was heavy and cream-colored. His name was not on it.

Hers was.

Miss Hannah Montague.

She opened it herself. The handwriting was neat, deliberate, almost elegant, and the message beneath was only two lines.

The Montague heiress is home. Tell her the debt her father left behind has finally come due.

Below it, a single signature in red ink: J. Bolton.