Page 98 of Snake

Not among the scenarios she’d prepared for: what he actually did.

Chase jumped from his chair and backed up until he hit the window behind him. Like she’d just pulled a nest of angry cobras from behind her back and dumped them on his desk.

“No, no, we don’t have to talk about that at all. I was way out of line, I deserved getting beat up, and I am not ever going to do anything like that again, I promise. I swear. Do you want me to swear? I’ll swear. My dad has a Bible in his office. I’ll swear on that. Just ... what do you want? Nobody’s told me what you people want. Just tell me.”

By the end, he was actively pleading. What the hell was he talking about?

Far too experienced both in business and in Charlton Isley III to speak here without thinking, Autumn took a beat to consider this surprising development. Chase was visibly shaken. He was desperate, and she’d never seen anything like that before. He had perfected the disaffected cool, the affable cynicism, the vaguely hostile playfulness of the wealthy class. If he had emotions beyond urbane amusement, he drowned them in thirty-year-old scotch.

You people, he’d said. Tell me what you people want.

What people? Who was he talking about? Why did he think she had people? All she had was her dads and Ida. For a sliver of a moment there, she’d thought she’d had more, but—

Oh.

She felt foolish not to have put it together at once. But Cox’s final words to her had cleaved her so completely from his life, she’d been unable to imagine him as ‘her people.’

The answer was obvious, wasn’t it? Cox had beaten him nearly unconscious defending her honor. Cox had kept her close thereafter, and had pinned Chase with filthy, threatening glares through the whole groundbreaking ceremony. The Horde had begun to encircle her as well that day.

Chase thought the Horde had claimed her as one of their own. He likely thought that Cox had claimed her as well—and he would absolutely think of it in those terms, ‘claiming,’ as if she were a piece of property to be traded among them. It wouldn’t surprise her if every one of the men who wore ‘the Flaming Mane’ also thought of it that way.

Had they done something to him?

What had Cox said at some point? Something like He won’t fuck with you. Said like a certainty. Also something like He’s handled. Oh—now she remembered having a vague suspicion that they’d gotten Chase drunk intentionally. She’d been distracted by Cox before she could suss that out, but ... yeah.

They had done something to him. Something that had him worried—that had him cowed.

Blackmail, then. She didn’t know exactly what, but somehow, that night at the Horde clubhouse, they’d found a way to subdue Chase, something that lasted longer than a hangover.

Autumn opened her mouth, ready to ask him outright, ready to assure him she’d had no part in that. But just as the first word reached her tongue, she snapped her mouth shut.

The man standing against his office windows like he might need an escape route and a thirtieth-floor window would do had harassed her throughout her career at MWGP. The other night, Pom and Pops had forced her to see that truth. If she’d been ‘managing’ him at all, she’d only been stopping him from actually hurting her.

But he had actually hurt her in Signal Bend. Once he’d gotten her away from the business-appropriate boundaries of the office, he’d behaved like a drunken lech. Because he was a drunken lech. If not for the Horde, she might have found herself in some very bad trouble with her boss.

Autumn didn’t need to neuter Chase; the Night Horde MC had already collected his balls. She didn’t know exactly what leverage they had over him, and she did not care. She could probably construct a decent guess once she took the time to sort through what she knew, but she wasn’t sure she’d bother. She didn’t care how they’d ‘handled’ him, only that they had.

A promise Cox had delivered on.

That thought caused a quiet echo of memory, of their wager at the pool table: one small favor. Chase had interrupted the game before she could win, but the lay of the table said she would have.

There was not one single reason she could conjure for why she might nullify the power of a favor like this.

Instead, when she opened her mouth, Autumn told Chase what she wanted.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Cox sat at his place at the Horde table and watched his brothers file into the Keep. Most looked his way as they entered the room, but the only greeting any gave him was a terse nod, for which he, to the extent he was capable of feeling anything, felt relieved.

Nobody much talked to him at all these days, except to convey necessary information, and he was relieved about that as well. He avoided any kind of conversation where a nod or grunt wouldn’t do.

Badger was the last in, which wasn’t unusual for a regularly scheduled meeting like this. However, the table was unusually quiet while they waited, and Cox knew that was him, bringing down the morale of the whole damn MC. To care about that, however, would require more fucks than the few malformed relics he had left rattling around at the bottom of his soul.

A few minutes after Thumper, the last of the patches, plopped into his chair, Badger came in and shut the doors. He grabbed the gavel and knocked the meeting open as he took his seat.

“I got updates on a bunch of outstanding shit, and we need to talk about it all. Definitely shit to talk about, maybe shit to vote on, I don’t know. First, though, the good news: Tommy’s getting sprung from rehab Friday.”

All around the room, patches cheered, drummed their hands on the table, whistled, and otherwise celebrated that good news. Everyone but Cox. He was glad for Tommy, but he felt virtually nothing enough to react.

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