And Sophie might have been exhausted and emotional, but she knew one thing: that wasn’t her world. Her father had kept her as removed from it as he could and now he was dead, whether she could get her head around it or not, and Ajax was nothing more than a fossil. Archaeological remains of a life she’d always hated and didn’t want any part of now that she could choose for herself.

The old king of the Deacons was dead. Sophie wanted to bury his kingdom along with him, because she didn’t want it infecting her life any longer, and she’d spent many hours wide awake last night with her head full of all these details. Because details were a whole lot better than imagining what her father had gone through. If it had hurt. If he’d known. If he’d been scared, alone—

No. Better to plot out the small things she could control. What to do with the wrecked motorcycle, when she could formally identify him and have him taken to a funeral home. What bills she’d need to pay now that this was all her responsibility. What, if anything, would change without her father around—since he’d surrendered the running of the Priory to Sophie right about the time she’d made noises about moving out after college. Better to immerse herself in the overwhelming little details of the complicated life he’d left behind him and hide from the reality of his death.

But it hadn’t occurred to her that the four club brothers Priest had loved above all others, despite the fact they’d wandered off after the storm ten years ago, might come back. Sophie hadn’t planned to rally the remains of the Deacons of Bourbon Street. She’d figured the brothers who were still in the city would do whatever it was they did when a club with declining membership and no real club officers lost one of their own, and it wouldn’t affect her at all. Because that was all over now. Surely that was over. She hadn’t heard her father mention “club business” in years.

Except Ajax appeared to have other ideas.

“Pucker up, princess,” he was saying into the phone. “You either have a skull on your back or you don’t. Which is it?” He listened with obvious impatience. “Then I better see your ass tomorrow. The end.”

He finished the call and set the phone down on the tabletop, never shifting his gaze from Sophie, who swallowed hard. She needed her bravado back, clearly. She’d washed it down the drain, or maybe he’d dry-fucked it out of her against that damned wall, and—

“You okay?”

Ajax’s voice was a rough caress, as edgy as it was oddly soothing. Sophie felt wide open again. Vulnerable. She frowned at him, then down at her bare feet. She didn’t understand why her toes were curling into the polished wood floor of this comfortable apartment she’d grown up in and should have felt at ease in, no matter who else was here.

It had always been perfectly comfortable before. Her father’s matter-of-fact, masculine approach to furnishing was in evidence everywhere, from the big, solid furniture to the vintage motorcycle posters on the wall. When it had become clear that her dad wasn’t down with his little girl getting her own place, Sophie had tried to pretty this one up a little bit. She’d contributed the frames around the posters, the plants in the window boxes, the brightly patterned area rug on the floor that Priest had always laughed at and called fucking girly as shit. She knew the history of every single item in the big living room that fed into the long, open kitchen. She knew the squeak in the door that led outside and the sound different feet made on the external metal stairs leading down to the Priory in the courtyard or up to the converted attic space that made up the apartment’s sprawling second level. She could wander this place in the dark, blindfolded, and never so much as trip.

But it wasn’t comfortable now.

“What are you doing up here?” she asked Ajax.

He tapped the back of his phone with one long finger and confirmed her fears.

“Calling the brothers back for the funeral. The ones I can find, anyway. Not that most of them answer their goddamn phones.”

Her father would have considered any follow-up questions crossing that line over into his sacred “club business,” which meant it was none of hers. Yet one more rule of a world she hated and wanted nowhere near hers. But Ajax wasn’t her father.

“That’s how you talk to the brothers? I thought you were the VP. I’d have thought that required more politics than profanity.”

His mouth curved slightly at that, like he thought she was funny. “Anyone step up and take my position?”

“I wasn’t aware I was supposed to take notes on club hierarchy.” He only stared at her. Sophie sighed. “I don’t think so, no.”

“Then I’m still VP.” He nodded at his phone. “And that’s not how I talk to everyone. I left a couple of friendly fucking messages. That’s how I talk to a whiny little bitch who has convenient memory loss about where his loyalties lie.” A pause. “You probably know him as Prince.”

She did know Prince—or she had. He and Ajax were two of the four Deacons who had disappeared around the time of Katrina, and her father’s beloved club had never been the same since. She shouldn’t care either way. The club was her life and not her life at the same time. The club was all around her and she’d been raised to respect it if not accept it, and yet none of it was hers.

Except the bar. The Priory, where she’d been working since before she turned eighteen. She’d been running it since she was twenty-three. And the buildings arranged around this courtyard, which were, taken altogether, her childhood home. Priest had always told her she belonged right here, with him. Right where she started and right where he’d raised her himself.

Gotta be Lombards in the Quarter, Sophie, he’d said. Always have been, always will be.

She’d believed him. It was why she was still here, despite the wispy little dreams she’d entertained while she’d been in college. She hadn’t gone off to a distant city and lived one of those glossy sitcom lives she’d imagined from time to time. She hadn’t pretended she was someone else for a few years like a lot of her high school friends had, before tucking their tails in and coming right back to New Orleans. She’d always stayed true to her blood and her family and her home.

Sophie couldn’t do anything for the gruff, taciturn man who’d raised her. She didn’t know if he’d suffered last night. She couldn’t fix his relationship with the family he’d claimed he didn’t have and that he’d always adamantly refused to discuss with her anyway. She couldn’t change the fact that she’d been the unplanned result of his extremely casual liaison with a junkie stripper who’d decided she preferred meth to childrearing and was only heard from every once in a messed-up while. She couldn’t even be the innocent little girl Priest had claimed he’d wanted, sending her off to Catholic school and then monitoring her far too closely through her college years, and still trying his best to keep her close after that, too.

But she could take care of the bar he’d poured his life into once the club fell apart in the wake of the storm. The bar he’d always told her was as much her birthright as the green eyes they shared. She could make sure it stayed on Bourbon Street forever, even if Priest couldn’t.

“I knew Prince,” she said now, but she was thinking of her dad. “But that was a long time ago. Things change. People move on, have different priorities. That’s life.”

“That’s bullshit.” Ajax’s voice was hard. Uncompromising. Like a gauntlet thrown down from across the living room. “I wear my priorities on my back. That doesn’t change, Sophie. The club itself might shift direction. The world might change. But the brotherhood never does.”

God, she hated that.

All of that. Everything he stood for, that her father had stood for, too. All those grandiose and epic things they thought they were. The rousing speeches, the unearned intensity, all for a bunch of dirtbags to sit around in matching jackets playing badass together on their way to one or another criminal activity. What was the point of any of it? Priest had loved that club more than he’d loved anything in his life, including his only child. Sophie had watched him wither away as the club’s influence had waned over the past ten years. She’d watched him take each new defection of one of the club members as a personal insult, and then an injury, too. He never would have called it heartbreaking, but that’s what it had been. Bit by bit. Like water torture.