Chapter 4 THE CROWN'S WEIGHT

POV: Jason

The memorial happened three years too late and Victor called it closure.

He'd set it up in the big room off the clubhouse, the one usually reserved for church meetings and parties, folding chairs lined in rows, a table at the front with a framed photo of Marcus on it, younger than Jason remembered him, smiling in a way Jason hadn't seen in years before the photo was taken. Attendance wasn't optional. Victor had made that clear without saying it out loud, the way he made most things clear.

Jason sat near the back. Watched the room fill in around him.

Victor stood at the front in a clean shirt, the kind of clean that takes effort, and waited for the room to settle before he started talking.

"Marcus De'Leon," Victor said, "believed one thing above all else. That the strong protect the weak. That's what this patch meant to him." He touched his own chest, where the patch sat now, Marcus's actual patch, the leather worn soft from thirty years of being worn by somebody else's father. "Not power. Not money. Protection. Everything he built, he built so the people in this room would never have to be afraid."

Jason watched him say it and felt something cold settle behind his ribs.

The patch sat on Victor's cut like it belonged there. Like it had always belonged there. Jason watched the room watch Victor wear it and understood, in a way he hadn't fully understood until that moment, that Victor hadn't just taken the club. He'd taken the man. Taken the shape of him, the symbols of him, and was wearing them now in front of everyone who'd ever loved Marcus, daring any of them to say it didn't fit.

"I was honored," Victor went on, voice catching, "to call that man my brother. My mentor. And when he was taken from us," he paused there, let the room feel the weight of it, "I made myself a promise. That I would carry what he built. That I would be the steward he deserved, even if I could never be the man he was."

Half the room was crying by then. Real tears, some of them, men who'd ridden with Marcus for years and missed him in a way that had nothing to do with Victor's performance. That was the trick of it, Jason realized. Victor didn't need everyone to believe him. He just needed the real grief in the room to cover for the fake grief at the front of it.

Victor's voice cracked again on the next line, perfectly timed, and he had to stop, had to press the back of his hand to his mouth for a second before he could go on. It looked real. It probably felt real to Victor too, in whatever twisted way a man convinces himself his own performance is sincerity.

Jason's eyes drifted to Anna.

She was sitting in the second row, and when Victor finished and stepped down from the front, he came straight to her, pulled her up out of her chair and into his arms in front of the whole room, a gesture built to look like comfort, built to look like family closing ranks around its grief.

Anna leaned into it.

Jason watched the lean happen and understood immediately that it wasn't comfort she was offering or taking. It was practiced. Her body folded into Victor's the way you'd fold into a shape you'd learned by heart, the way you'd lean into something because you'd already learned, somewhere along the way, that not leaning cost more than leaning ever would. Her face, pressed briefly against Victor's shoulder, showed nothing. Not grief, not relief, not fear. A careful, trained blank.

Jason had seen men in Ely do something similar. Learn exactly how much of themselves to show a guard who held all the power in the room. You didn't fight it. You didn't even resist it on your face. You just gave the performance that kept things calm, and you saved whatever was real for somewhere nobody was watching.

His sister had learned that skill somewhere. From someone.

He filed it. Didn't move his face. Didn't let anything show.

That's when he noticed Cutter.

Cutter sat off to the side, near the wall, a beer bottle held loose in one hand at first, the way you'd hold something you'd forgotten you were holding. Jason hadn't talked to him since the gate, since the bear hug and the back claps, since Cutter had stood at the edge of the welcome crowd and given Jason a nod that said more than most men's whole sentences could.

Cutter wasn't crying. Cutter wasn't doing anything with his face at all, just watching Victor up at the front, finishing his eulogy, talking about legacy and protection and the weight of a crown nobody had actually offered him.

And Cutter's hand, the one wrapped around the bottle, had gone white at the knuckles. Not shaking. Just gripped, hard, the kind of grip a man uses to keep his hand from doing something else.

Jason watched that hand the rest of the eulogy.

Thirty years, Cutter had ridden with Marcus. Thirty years of road and trouble and whatever men like that build between them that doesn't have a name. And now Cutter sat in a folding chair against the wall, watching the man who'd taken Marcus's patch off his actual body and put it on his own, weeping for the cameras while the real grief in the room sat quiet and white knuckled and said nothing at all.

Cutter looked like a man with something to say.

He looked like a man with absolutely nowhere safe to say it.

Jason kept his eyes forward when Victor glanced his way, kept his face arranged into the same careful nothing Anna had perfected years before he ever got the chance to learn it himself. But underneath that nothing, he was already doing the math. Cutter knew something. Cutter had known Marcus thirty years and rode beside him through everything, and a man like that didn't sit white knuckled through a eulogy unless the eulogy was lying to him in a language only he could hear.

Jason needed to know what Cutter knew.

He just needed to find a way to ask that wouldn't get either of them killed for it.