He was lucky to have people in his life like that. She wished she could say the same.
“If anything ever happens to me, you go to them. They’ll take care of you.”
She twisted back away from him so she could see his face. “Why would anything happen to you? Duke, what’s going on?”
He blew out a breath. “Didn’t want to tell you this. But there’s things in my life I’m not proud of. Many things I wouldn’t want to ever touch you. That something I’ve done could hurt you makes me feel fucking furious and ill. I also guess, well, I like when you look at me like I can do anything. Like you think I’m everything.”
“You can and you are,” she whispered. “Whatever you have to tell me won’t change that.”
He tucked some hair behind her ear. “Baby girl, I definitely don’t deserve you.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. You are not a bad person, Duke. The way you look after me so thoroughly and ferociously is proof of that. You’re loyal. Smart. Sometimes even kind.”
“Don’t go spreading that around,” he grumbled but she saw the twinkle in his eyes.
“Just tell me. I promise it won’t change how I look at you.”
He let out a breath then nodded. “Our old club President, Smiley, was a real asshole. He got us messed up in all sorts of shady shit. And he had enough supporters to make life difficult for those of us who didn’t want to get mixed up in drugs and protection.” He grimaced. “Wasn’t always able to get out of whatever shit he’d gotten the club messed up in and I did things I’ve tried to forget.”
“It’s okay, I get it.”
“I did it because I had family in the club. I couldn’t leave them and Smiley didn’t let anyone leave.” He looked slightly ill. She took his hand in hers.
“What happened?”
“Reyes joined our club, didn’t like what he saw and started to rally those of us who were tired of Smiley around him.”
“A coup?”
“Yeah. A bloody, messy one. But one Reyes won. However, Smiley left us with some of his fuck-ups. He got us mixed up with the Bartolli family, you heard of them?”
She shook her head.
“They’re a crime family in Chicago. The head of the family, Fergus Bartolli had us doing some blackmail job for them. Turns out they’d been laundering some money through the club and they threatened Reyes to get us to do their dirty work. The blackmail was to do with a US Senator. Bartolli had photos of him with a very young girl. She was tied up, naked on his bed and she looked out of it, drugged.”
“Oh God. You don’t think she was there of her own free will?”
“It didn’t look that way,” he told her grimly. “And even if she was, she looked underage. This senator is married. He obviously didn’t want these photos getting out and he paid the blackmail. To cut a story short, Bartolli is now dead and his hold on us is now gone.”
“How did he die?” she asked worriedly.
“Not by my hand.”
Relief filled her. Not that it would have changed how she felt about him and it sounded like Bartolli was a rotten man, but she didn’t want that for him.
“But that still left us with the senator. If the girl in that photo was young, if she was there unwillingly. . .”
“Then you couldn’t just leave it at that. I’m guessing you didn’t go to the cops.”
He smiled at her. “No, babe. Cops aren’t someone we want sniffing around us.”
She nodded. “So what have you been doing?”
“Watching the senator as much as we can. Trying to figure out who the girl is, if there’s any more.”
“And have you found out anything?” She thought it said a lot about them that they hadn’t just wiped their hands clean of this.
“The girl in the photo turned up dead last weekend,” he explained. “She was seventeen. A runaway.”