Claimed Hard by My Best Friend novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Not Without Her

Malachi's POV

I didn't sleep.

I lay on Kate's twin bed with her back against my chest and listened to her breathe until the window turned gray.

At six she woke and sat up and said it plainly.

"I'm going in alone at noon."

"No."

"I'm not asking you to like it. I'm telling you the plan."

I sat up too, and my hands were already closed.

"He has your father in a chair," I said. "He'll have six men on that floor."

"He'll have six men and no audience," Kate said. "He talks when he thinks he's alone with someone he's already beaten. I've poured for men like him for four years."

"Kate."

"Be in the lobby by twelve thirty. Bring everybody you can find. Before that, you stay out."

"If he touches you, I'll kill him."

"If he touches me, I'll hit him with whatever's closest, and then you can."

She took my face in both hands.

"Nothing about me without me. That includes the part where I don't need to be saved."

I said yes.

It was the hardest word I have ever said out loud.

The old floor men met every morning at seven in a room behind a bakery on Pacific Avenue.

There were eleven of them.

They had dealt cards, run the pit and counted the cage for my father for thirty years.

They were playing gin when I walked in.

Every chair scraped back.

The oldest one, a pit boss with a broken nose, took off his hat.

"Mr. Fitch," he said.

"It's Malachi. It was always Malachi."

"Your father's boy." He looked at me hard.

"We heard what you did on Saturday. A man who signs away his own house for a girl gets a hearing in this room."

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