Page 130 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies
“You boys are late,” he says, a smile that looks borrowed. “I was about to leave. I have things to do. Investments to check on.”
Roman does not move closer.
He stops at a clean distance, as if the air between them is a line on a blueprint. “You will sit,” he says, voice even. “You will listen. You will answer. Then you will leave the way men like you leave when better men are tired of your noise.”
Nico rolls his eyes like a teenager sitting through a lecture on the value of earplugs. “I am not afraid of you,” he says. “You playhouse with a girl who thinks sugar is a personality. You wear leather like high school bullies. You are old.”
Deacon steps around him and checks the window. He does not look at Nico. The disrespect is so clean it makes Nico fidget.
“Why?” Roman asks, and that word is heavier than any threat I could make. “Not poetry. Not family mythology. Why the notes? Why the bounties? Why the duplicate payouts? Why the calls to the city at one in the morning? Why turn her life into a tap you think you get to open and shut?”
Nico laughs too quickly. It bounces off concrete and falls flat. “Because she walked away. Because she thinks she is better than all of us. Because women who run do not deserve to win.” He leans forward and spits blood onto the floor like punctuation. “Because where we come from, you do not embarrass your family and then post photos of yourself being…shared.”
I feel the heat crawl up my neck.
I let it pass through and out the top of my head.
Rage is a bad narrator.
I keep my voice gentle. “She made bread for a town full of strangers,” I say. “She sings to babies who are not even fully sure how to focus their eyes yet. She calls her sons little profiteroles. She sends holiday cookies to neighbors who never send anything back. That is what you call shameful.”
Nico sneers. “You are the soft one. Everyone knows. You think you can make a home out of a barn and then pretend it is a cathedral. You put a child in her and think that absolves her of what she is.”
Roman does not so much as blink. “Say anything about those boys again,” he says, tone unchanged, “and you will leave this room without the front half of your courage.”
Nico opens his mouth to test the perimeter of that sentence then chooses not to.
Somewhere inside he has a small animal that knows when to be quiet.
Deacon sets a small speaker on the desk and a burner phone beside it.
He touches one button, then another.
The audio comes out tinny. The words are not.
Nico’s voice fills the room, recorded hours before the last note appeared in our cinnamon tin.
He calls her a rotten root.
He says men like us will never claim her once she is stained.
He laughs at his own poetry, which is always a warning that a man believes he has more power than he does.
Deacon stops the playback.
He starts a second file.
It is not a voice.
It is a compressed montage.
Screen grabs from a courier forum with Kingsley’s bounties, each one more petty than the last.
A cropped image of a blurred face outside a bakery window with a timestamp and a dirty snowbank.
Payment logs that show duplicate payouts sliding into a shell LLC with C. Conte on the top line.
Three credit pulls in Marisa’s name with recovery numbers that match his vanity.
