Page 17 of Monk

“I want.” He smiled again, wider this time. “I definitely want.”

I nodded, unable to speak past the emotion clogging my throat.

The anger was still there. The hurt. Seven years of silence and unanswered questions. But underneath all of it, there was something else.

Love.

Complicated, bruised, imperfect love.

For now, that was enough.

CHAPTER FOUR

Monk

The church room stank of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and the kind of tension that made men stupid. The air was thick with it, pressing down on my shoulders like a hand that meant to keep me there. Even the dim overhead lights seemed to flicker with the charge in the room, throwing long shadows across the faces of my brothers as they filed in and took their seats around the scarred wooden table that had seen more confessions, confrontations, and ugly decisions than any priest’s booth ever had.

I sat at the long table with my chair tipped back on two legs and my arms crossed over my chest, watching the storm build with the same hard attention I’d give a rattlesnake coiled in my path.

Montana Stone stood at the head of the table like some wrathful god dropped into biker leather, his big frame rigid with barely leashed fury. He was all righteous anger and cold calculation, the kind of combination that got a man feared as much as respected in the MC world. His jaw was set, his dark eyes harder than I’d ever seen them, and the muscle ticking in his cheek told me he was holding himself back by nothing but brute force. Across from him, Kansas sat at the other end of the table with his jaw locked and his knuckles white against the scarred wood, like he was trying to keep himself nailed to reality. The resemblance between the brothers was obvious, but whereMontana burned hot and controlled, Kansas looked like a man being gutted from the inside.

This was going to get ugly, messier than a bar fight with broken bottles and no rules, because one of our own was on the chopping block. One of our brothers. One of our fuckingofficers.

Pence. MitchellfuckingTravers. VP of the Diamondbacks, second-in-command of the whole outfit, and Kansas’ best friend. The man who had stood beside him through firefights, turf wars, and every impossible call that came with wearing the president’s patch and carrying the weight of club blood on his shoulders. They were closer than most real brothers, tied together by loyalty, history, and enough shared scars to drown in.

And he was a goddamn child rapist.

The words tasted like battery acid in my mouth, burning all the way down and settling in my gut like poison. I’d known Pence for years—since I was a prospect clawing my way toward a patch. I’d ridden with him on more runs than I could count, bled beside him in alley fights and territorial scraps, trusted him to cover my back when bullets started flying and the whole world turned to shit. We got drunk together. Celebrated together. Buried brothers together. And the whole goddamn time, he’d been fucking a kid.

Aminor. Some girl named Alice Cavanaugh, barely out of braces, who’d given birth to his now three-year-old son while she was still years away from drinking legally, voting, or doing any of the things grown women got to do.

My stomach churned with a nausea that had nothing to do with the beer I had been nursing before church was called.

I thought about Abigail—my baby sister, with her bright smile and her terrible taste in men. She was only nine years younger than me, but to me she was still young, still carrying that last fragile piece of innocence the world hadn’t ground out of her yet. Still vulnerable in all the ways that made myprotective instincts go white-hot whenever some asshole looked at her too long. The thought of a piece of filth like Pence putting his hands on her—violating her, ruining her, twisting something that should’ve been untouched into something rotten—made rage rear up so hard I had to force myself to breathe through it. I needed my head clear for whatever was coming next.

I knew the second I saw Montana and Reaper roar into the compound an hour earlier—engines rumbling like thunder over cracked asphalt, flanked by two enforcers who looked ready to kill the first man who breathed wrong—that shit hadn’t gone the way Kansas hoped.

The set of Montana’s shoulders, the way Reaper’s hand never left his sidearm, the grim silence trailing them like a funeral procession—it all screamed disaster.

It had been court day for Pence, the sentencing hearing that was supposed to decide whether he spent the next decade or two rotting behind bars. Kansas had wanted the club there in support, wanted us to make the usual show of solidarity the way we did whenever one of our own got dragged through the system. But this time, every one of us refused.

Every patched brother looked Kansas in the eye and said no.

Not for this. Not forthis.

In the end, only Kansas, Montana, and Reaper went—a sorry little showing that said everything about how the club felt about what Pence had done. All because that motherfucker couldn’t keep his dick in his pants or manage even the bare minimum of human decency. And judging by the looks on Montana’s and Reaper’s faces when they’d stormed back into the compound, engines still hot and tempers hotter, it had gone bad in a way none of us could walk back.

Whatever happened in that courtroom had been bad, the kind of bad that changed everything. The second Kansas walked into the clubhouse, boots heavy on the wooden floor andshoulders sagging under an invisible weight, he called for church to discuss what to do next, his voice hoarse and defeated in a way I’d never heard before.

“This is my fucking clubhouse, Montana,” Kansas snarled, his voice cutting through the thick silence. “You don’t have a fucking say here.”

Montana’s expression didn’t change. Cold. Implacable.

“But I do.”

Reaper let his chair drop forward, the front legs striking the floor with a crack that snapped every eye his way. He leaned against the table, deliberate as hell, and met Kansas’ stare head-on. “You fucking Stones are going to be the death of me,” he said, shaking his head. His voice was low and rough, edged with the kind of weariness that only came from years of this shit. “I fucking know it.”

Kansas’ jaw tightened, but he didn’t look away.