Page 15 of Doc's Obsession
“Genevieve.” My mother’s voice. Carrying across the lot like it was designed for an auditorium. “This has gone on long enough.”
The words hit me in a place I thought I’d sealed off. The sound of my full name in her mouth, the tone she used when she was performing disappointment for an audience. She wasn’t angry. Anger would have meant I was worth the energy. She was inconvenienced. Her daughter had caused a scene, and now she’d had to come and clean it up.
I felt Doc’s hand find the small of my back. Warm, steady, there.
“We’ve taken a suite at the Lodge at Big Sky,” my father said. Measured, reasonable, the voice he used in boardrooms when he wanted someone to feel like they were making a choice while he made it for them. “Just over an hour from here. We thought we’d give you the evening to get your things together, have a proper think, and we’ll come back in the morning to collect you.”
Collect me. Like a package. Like I was nothing more than dry cleaning.
My mother’s eyes moved from me to Doc, to the hand on my back, to the bar behind us, to the row of bikes. I watched her take in every detail with the precision of a woman who had spent her entire life deciding what was acceptable and what wasn’t. The verdict was visible on her face before she finished looking.This place, these people, the grease and leather and gravel. Unacceptable. All of it.
“We’ll be back at nine tomorrow morning,” she said. “Sharp. And Genevieve, do think about what you’re doing. Your father and I only want what’s best.”
What’s best. The phrase that had governed my entire childhood. What’s best was the right school, the right friends, the right clothes, the right smile. What’s best was a slate of men chosen for their portfolios and a daughter who said thank you and picked one.
They got back in the car. My mother arranged her coat before she sat down, the way she always did, fabric smoothed flat, nothing creased. The Mercedes reversed out of the lot, slow, careful, tires crunching on gravel that had never seen anything so polished.
The brothers were behind us. I hadn’t heard them come out, but they were there. Razor, Priest, Rook. Angel in the doorway of the bar, his arms folded, watching the road.
I stood in the lot with Doc’s hand on my back and my parents’ words hanging in the air, and I waited for the crumble. The old version of me, the compliant one, the good daughter who’d been trained to fold at the first sign of disapproval.
She didn’t come.
I turned to Doc. “They’ll be back at nine. They mean it.”
“I know.” His eyes were steady. That calm, certain expression I’d learned to read as the one he wore when he already had a plan. “Let them come.”
SIX
DOC
I’d been reading people my whole life.
In the field, it was survival. The way a man held his hands told you whether he was reaching for a weapon or a surrender. The pitch of someone’s breathing told you how much pain they were hiding. You learned to read the space between what people showed you and what was actually happening underneath, and if you got it wrong, someone died.
In the years since, the skill hadn’t dulled. It just found new targets. I could call out the brothers when they were bullshitting me about something. I could figure out when the prospects were in over their heads. I could even read the people who showed up at the compound needing help, sorted the liars from the genuine in the first thirty seconds.
Last night, standing in the lot watching Valentina and Richard Carrington reverse their rental Mercedes, I’d read them in a glance.
They weren’t afraid of losing Evie. They were afraid of what it looked like. A Carrington daughter, their carefully maintained investment, pouring beers in a biker bar. Living in a compound. Sleeping with a man who had tattoos on his arms and engine grease under his nails. Every piece of it was a stain on the imagethey’d spent decades building, and image was the only currency they understood.
Their weapon was respectability. Mine was going to be the opposite.
I’d madecalls that morning. Early, before Evie woke up, sitting in the kitchen with coffee and my phone and a plan that was either brilliant or insane. Rook helped. He was good at finding things, and what he found gave me everything I needed. The Carrington Foundation’s annual gala, chaired by Valentina for the last twelve years. Richard’s board memberships, three of them, all with people whose opinions lived in the same postcode as their money. The family’s social footprint, carefully curated across two decades of charity events, country club memberships, alumni networks. A life built on being seen in the right places with the right people.
That was the pressure point. Not money, not lawyers, not county inspectors. Reputation. The fear of what people would think. Take that away and the whole structure came down.
By eight-thirty the Angel’s Rest lot was ready. Not by accident. Every brother who wasn’t on the road had parked out front, bikes lined up in a row of chrome and black leather, gleaming in the morning sun. Razor was leaning against his, Priest sat on a chair outside the bar. Ghost was somewhere, which meant everywhere. Angel stood in the bar doorway with his arms folded, coffee in hand, looking like the man who owned everything the eye could see, and like nothing bothered him.
Evie came through from the lodge at ten to nine, dressed, nervous, her jaw set in the way I’d learned meant she was bracing for a fight. She looked at the lot. At the bikes. At thebrothers arranged like the world’s most deliberate welcoming committee.
“What is this?”
“Trust me,” I said. “I’ve got a plan.”
She looked at my face. Read something there that made her expression shift from nervous to curious, and then to something warmer. “Okay.”
The Mercedes turned off the private road at three minutes past nine. Punctual. Of course they were. People like the Carringtons treated a schedule the way they treated everything else, as a way of proving they were in charge.
