“Listen,” Cash said, frowning, once it was only the four of them again, “there’s nothing we can do about whatever relationship Priest did or didn’t have with his own daughter—”

“Sophie is mine,” Ajax said.

Or maybe he shouted it. The stunned looks coming back at him suggested he might have roared the whole fucking bar down around them, then leveled the goddamned French Quarter. Good. Message fucking received.

“She’s mine,” he said again, and he knew exactly what he was saying. What he was doing. What it meant to stake this claim, here before his brothers in as close to a sacred spot as he knew, right here where Priest had spent so much of his life. He eyed Cash. “My responsibility, my problem. Her relationship with her father is none of your business.”

Nothing but more of that silence. Then Blue stood up. He nodded at Ajax, then angled himself so he faced the other dickheads. Silently throwing his support and considerable brawn in with Ajax.

Because Blue, at least, wasn’t confused about who he was. About who they were. Like everybody else around here seemed to be—but that was all about to change, goddamn it. Ajax was done with this shit.

And just so there could be absolutely no mistake, Ajax gritted it out a third time. “She’s my property, assholes. Don’t throw her name around unless you want my boot up your ass.”

“Never a dull fucking moment in the city by the swamp,” Prince drawled, his tone as lazy as his gaze was hard. “Funerals and dramatic wills and Ajax taking an old lady. I’d cry a little bit if I cared, I really would.”

“You going to come over here and suck my dick?” Ajax asked softly.

“Tempting, as ever, but I’ll pass.”

“Because if not, shut the fuck up.” He shifted and crossed his arms, glaring indiscriminately around the room. “I have shit to tell all of you and it can’t wait for church tomorrow.”

Cash shook his head. “I don’t see why—”

“I don’t think Priest’s death was an accident,” Ajax said abruptly. He didn’t have time to cajole these fuckers into line. There was the matter of figuring out what had happened to Priest, but he also needed to get his hands on his goddamned woman before that cracked rib sensation inside of him put him in the fucking hospital. His old lady might not know she’d been claimed, but she would. And maybe then they could discuss knives in the back and the way to behave in public. “I think he was murdered.”

He looked each of his brothers in the eye. He let that sink in.

“Now,” he said, when he finally had their undivided attention. “I want to know one thing and one thing only from each one of you. Are you a Deacon, committed by the vows you took and the ink on your back to avenge our fallen brother no matter who it is that took him out?”

He looked at each of them in turn. Blue. Prince. Cash. His brothers or his enemies. Their choice.

Then he lowered his voice. “Or are you a fucking traitor I’ll have the distinct pleasure of putting down like a dog?”

—

Sophie had no idea what she was doing.

She only knew she had to get the hell away.

That had been the problem for years, in a nutshell. She’d stayed. She should have gone to college out of state. She should have taken a job—any job—somewhere else. She’d chosen her blood, her family, her home when she should have severed her ties to this fucked-up place and these terrible people who had never, ever loved her, no matter what lies she’d told herself over the years to convince herself otherwise.

Maybe that was what she was addicted to, she thought then, just like her junkie mother. Not junk. Not a man, even if that man was Ajax. But this shitty life of loving limited, violent, careless men who could never love anything but their stupid fucking club.

You have to get out of here.

She blinked and realized she’d stopped dead out in the middle of the courtyard. The beating heart of her childhood home that was no longer hers. That had never been hers, if she was honest with herself at last. She looked around wildly, her eyes alarmingly full and that heaviness in her chest that she knew meant wracking, horrible sobs might very well take her to her knees at any second. She balled her hands into fists and jabbed them at her eyes, but it didn’t help. Nothing helped.

She knew every inch of this courtyard. She’d learned how to walk on these cracked stones. She’d spied on the men coming and going, first to make them grin and play with her when they saw her hiding there in her pigtails. Later to try to parse out the secret lives they led right there in plain sight. Old Jez had taught her how to dance right here on a sultry bayou night. Her father had smoked his cigarettes on the stairs to their apartment while the brothers had catcalled and then applauded from the rolled-back doors of the clubhouse, and she’d learned what to do at her first high school dance. Right here. She knew the vines that crawled up the trellis and when they would burst into bloom in the spring. She could tell the time of day by the way the shadows moved over the far building. She knew what the stones felt like beneath her bare feet, and how they sang when she strode over them in heels.

She’d never lived anywhere but here. This was her father’s club, but it was her home. And the club won.

The club always won.

Or, more to the point, she always lost.

And it was there, in the center of that courtyard, that Sophie wrapped her arms around herself and, finally, cried.

The sobs rolled up from that raw hollow scraped out inside of her. She made a raw, awful sound and she found herself squatting down on the ground like she needed to hold on to the hard earth with her own fingers or she’d fall off. Like a good grip could save her when she knew, she just knew, there was nothing and no one that could. Not even herself.

She sobbed until her eyes were on fire and felt like sandpaper when she wiped at them with her palms. She sobbed until her hands were wet and her nose was stuffed and her face felt misshapen. She sobbed until she couldn’t any longer, and then she squatted there for a moment, bent over and broken in two, until she could breathe.

Sophie jolted herself back into the present then. She wiped her swollen eyes and then she stood, and found she wobbled on her feet. She needed to leave. She glared up the metal stairs and tried to catalogue what she’d take if she decided to go—and then she shook her head. What did it matter? Nothing up there was real. It was all the leftover junk of the sad life of one more woman who’d thought she mattered, but didn’t.

She didn’t go up those stairs. She lurched forward and walked out of the alley and into the noisy embrace of Bourbon Street instead. It was midday on a Saturday, and the street was far from its shining best. And Sophie saw none of the magic she usually did, here in her favorite place on earth. Just a tired old party street in the full glare of a hot fall day, with a little too much of last night’s hangover clinging to her face and a long, long way to go before the blurry night came down and made it all feel all right again.

Maybe it was finally time to find herself another home. A real home.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

Sophie didn’t have to turn around to identify that flat growl from behind her. She knew it. She would always know it. It lit her up from the inside out, a harsh and encompassing fire, making every nerve she had prickle with anticipation and her pussy melt. Instantly.

Damn him.

“I can’t imagine why you’d care,” she said, not concerned that her voice was shredded and he’d likely hear it. Or that he’d see that she’d been crying when she turned to face him. “Of course, I can’t imagine why you do anything you do, so this is not a big surprise.”

Ajax stood in the mouth of the alley that led back into the courtyard, one hand gripping the stones so hard she thought he might tear the building down. Or maybe he was keeping himself from wrapping that hand around her throat.