Page 4 of Echo’s Secret

My phone rings. I answer.

"Wesley." Her trembling voice. "I'm at your gate. There's... I need to talk to you. It's important. It's—" She stops. Takes a shaky breath. "Please. I wouldn't be here if I had any other choice."

"I'm five minutes out," I tell her. "Stay there."

"Okay." Relief floods her voice. "Okay. Thank you. I'll wait."

She hangs up.

Brick is looking at me now, really looking. "That sounds serious."

"It is," I say, though I have no idea what it actually is yet.

The clubhouse appears ahead. Two-story converted warehouse surrounded by a fence with automatic gates. Home for the last few years. The longest I've stayed anywhere since aging out of Sacred Heart.

There's a car parked outside the gate. Old sedan, rust around the wheel wells. The driver's side door is opening as we pull into the lot.

Hannah steps out.

Long light brown hair pulled back messily. Hazel eyes that used to be brighter. She's curvier than I remember, tired in a way that speaks to more than just lack of sleep.

And she's holding a baby.

Small boy. Maybe eight, nine months old. Dark hair. Serious little face.

She turns toward us and the morning light catches the baby's features clearly.

Gray eyes.

My gray eyes.

The truck comes to a stop. I sit there, staring through the windshield while my brain tries to process what I'm seeing.

"Holy shit," Brick says quietly beside me. "Is that—"

"I don't know," I say. But I do know. Deep in my gut where I can't lie to myself, I already know.

She left. She was pregnant. She had my son and never told me.

The other truck is pulling in now. Brothers climbing out, bloody and exhausted and victorious. Phoenix sees Hannah at the gate and stops walking. Sees the baby and looks at me through Brick's windshield with a question in his eyes.

I open the door and climb out.

Hannah takes a few steps toward the gate, the baby fusses and she adjusts him on her hip with ease. She looks at me, and I see everything in her face: fear, exhaustion, desperation, and underneath it all, the same girl I knew at Sacred Heart who learned the hard way that asking for help is dangerous.

"Wesley," she says. Her voice breaks on my name. "I need your help. Please. I know I have no right to ask, but I'm out of options and you're the only person I could think of who might..." She trails off, looking at the men gathering behind me. "Can we talk? Somewhere private?"

Behind me, I hear Phoenix walking closer. Judge's boots on gravel. The whole club is watching now, waiting to see what I do.

I look at the boy with my eyes. At Hannah who left without telling me why. At the life I thought I knew rearranging itself into something completely different in the span of thirty seconds.

"Open the gate," I say to Phoenix.

He doesn't argue. Doesn't question. Just walks to the control panel and triggers the release. The gates swing open with a mechanical hum.

Hannah hesitates on the threshold. She's scared, I realize. Scared of this place, these men, the world she's walking into.

Maybe scared of me.